I have had several relatives and friends who have suffered in this society from the stigma of illegal drug use and addiction. The last thirty years of living in this country as an adult I have documented a long list of heinous hypocrisies, from a brutal foreign policy toward weaker smaller countries to cruelty towards its indigent and working poor. Nothing has so influenced my perception as the sheer waste of humans by this system's massive incarceration for non - violent illegal drug use.
I find it horrifying that an untreated drug addict, who may in fact have organic brain damage from his long multi-chemical addictions, has so much unbridled power. A power that has become so insular and militant to be feared by most of the world's people.
It should not be too surprising considering that so many, an estimated one in eight Americans, to cause one of the largest best sellers in fiction to be a series of books financed and written by religious fundamentalists - about Armageddeon.
Yet now, as the tape recordings made by Bush's friend, Douglas Wead in 1999 are surfacing where in the master's voice sordid puny excuses are offered for non - disclosure I find new depths of hypocrisy and duplicity in his regime. The tapes were made during Bush's second term as the governor of Texas when he was assembling his crime family minions from the energy, banking and intelligence industries.
Wead's reasoning for releasing some of the tapes to the public I am sure is that most people don't need professional medical rehabilitation, just a regular visit to the confounded "Old Rugged Cross" and the threat of eternal damnation to get cured. Why not, little else is offered to those rotting in jail - become a Christian and receive favorable treatment.
I have had people rot in jail for years while this man and his other rich religious buddies plea bargain their way into drug rehabilitation centers, avoid jail sentencing and emerge intact undamaged in reputation and profession. Even by his own wife's admission, all George Bush did was wake up one morning and told her and the girls that they were going to church and that he had quit drinking.
The common inequities of a most unbecoming country. What an empire, or as Gore Vidal's blind grand father said once while listening to his grandson's descriptions of the construction of the then new government buildings being built in the early 1900s of Washington D. C., "what wonderful ruins they will make."
"Certainly that was how the justice system worked when Bush and Wead had their candid chats. The Texas politician couldn't reassure his friend that he hadn't used cocaine, let alone marijuana, but as governor he was imprisoning young people unlucky enough to be arrested in possession of those narcotics, often for draconian mandatory-minimum sentences. He always cherished his image as a tough, swaggering, law-and-order politician who didn't hesitate to imprison teenagers. But that isn't what happens to people from good families.
His niece Noelle Bush went through a drug-rehab program and was released two years ago. His friend Rush Limbaugh went through rehab and has returned to berating the less fortunate on the radio, without doing one day of time. "
The full impact of this decision by Bush to withhold the truth of his drug usage (most surely in the national security interests, he mentally wraps everything in) is elaborated by a better writer, Joe Conanson at: Bush Dodges as Addicts Rot in Jail .
No comments:
Post a Comment