Arianna Huffington On Drugs
The ultimate limousine liberal's new column asks why the Democrats are such narcs despite their obvious understanding of how the War on Drugs is unwinnable:
Obama has written eloquently about his own struggle with drugs, but has not addressed the tragic effect the war on drugs is having on African American communities.
As for Clinton, she flew into Selma to reinforce her image as the wife of "the first black president," and has made much of her plan to attract female voters, but has ignored the suffering of poor, black women right in her own backyard.
Located down the road from her Chappaqua home are two prisons housing female inmates, Taconic and Bedford. Forty-eight percent of the women in Taconic are there for nonviolent drug offenses; 78% of those in the prison are African-American or Hispanic. And Bedford, the state's only maximum security prison for women, is home to some of the worst victims of New York's draconian Rockefeller drug laws -- mothers and grandmothers whose first brush with the law resulted in their being locked away for 15 years or more on nonviolent drug charges.
Yet even though these prisons are so nearby, Clinton has turned a blind eye to the plight of the women locked away there, notably refusing to speak out on their behalf.
Let's furrow our brows at Eliot Spitzer, too, the Democrat who took the governor's chair in Clinton's state with the biggest majority in history, but who's still not touching the issue. The party's been beaten up too badly on the crime issue to ever seriously confront the drug war, although the occasional gadfly like Kucinich will propose something bold. As Huffington suggests, it's fed-up Republicans (like Jeff Sessions) who can make reform viable.
