September 27, 2003- Getting Tough
Now that we are fast approaching election time, the Presidential administration is starting to do what it thinks that it has to in order for George W. Bush to be elected President ( he really cannot be re-elected, since he never was really elected President in 2000, just appointed President by his dad's pals) in 2004. Since they tend to think rather simplistically about things, they are starting to go what they feel is a tried-and-true method of winning over voters, that is to get tough on crime. Americans love to hear that shit from their leaders, that they are going to get tough on crime and crack down on it and stamp it out and make America a safer place for "law-abiding" citizens. Bush has the perfect dude on his team to preach this mantra, one John Ashcroft, you remember him, he is the Attorney General Of the United States, America's Top Pig. He got that job simply because he is a zealous law-and-order fanatic that believes that the Pigs need to crack down on crime all the time, and fuck trampling all over civil liberties to accomplish that. So he is chomping at the bit to help the White House preach this to the masses. However, Bush feels that they have to do a lot more than just preach that to the people, that surrounding yourselves with as many Pigs as you can find at some campaign rally and emphatically saying that you have every intent to get more Pigs on the streets and crack down on crime just will not cut it anymore, since every candidate in the last two decades has done that trip to death, and things have not gotten any better in America because of it. So Bush has decided that he is going to do tangible things in order to convince the people that he is getting tough on crime. So what he has done is to instruct Ashcroft to tell the lawyers and prosecutors that work for him that the Federal Pigs are no longer going to accept plea bargains except in rare cases, that they are going to prosecute everything to the fullest extent of the law, and go for maximum sentences every time. They have been instructed to only plea-bargain in a very limited set of circumstances, like if the accused agrees to cooperate with the Pigs and work for them and help then in an ongoing investigation, essentially becoming a squealer, a stool pigeon, a traitor on his partners and what have you. Or else when the Feds have a less than airtight case against someone, and want to make them agree to something before their weaknesses are exposed in court. Other tan that, fuck it, they are going to go for the maximum with everyone every time, and damn the consequences, because they forsee those consequences as George W. Bush finally legitamately getting elected President. This policy is going to be a cornerstone of Bush's "re"-election campaign. This has already begun, and Ashcroft has zeroed in on his first victims. Since the dude is hysterically anti-drugs, and subscribes to the theory that they are at the root of each and every problem that American society faces, he has decided to once again use drugs as the issue to crank up his Pig machine, and show everyone how they now have no mercy. Normally, something like this would be aimed at stuff like marijuana and the people that are involved in that, but although Ashcroft went and made an example arrest of Tommy Chong, and got the dude railroaded into a prison sentence, even though he has no previous criminal record and is 65 years old, Ashcroft has not gone down that well-worn path to show the strength of his Pigs. Rather, he has targeted a different portion of the drug scene, the world of what are commonly known as "prescription drugs", essentially pills, uppers and downers and the like. He has used the excuse of people abusing these things with the help of physicians to go after many doctors and accuse them of essentially being drug dealers by prescribing too many pills to too many people in their judgement. So now we have the Pigs going blasting around into doctor's practices and looking into their patient's records and determining that these patients and those patients have been prescribed too much of a certain medication, and that the doctor needs to answer to the Pigs now, and defend himself (or herself) in court against the Federal government, and no matter how educated a doctor may be, or how lucrative that their practice may be, going into court against the federal government is no easy task, for they have the unlimited resources and powers that defendants do not. And just like they said, the Feds are throwing the proverbial book at these doctors and prosecuting them to the fullest extent that they can. Some of these doctors are being convicted, and just like Tommy Chong, they are being sentenced to prison terms, whether or not their case really warranted that. These are not minor prison terms either, these are those long stretches in the penitentiary that automatically come with any tough on crime campaign. The doctors that are targeted here are generally not the primary care physicians that people go see for checkups and shit. No, they are usually doctors that specialize in pain management, and as such, have many patients with chronic, intractable pain as their main problem. Patients such as these have already been prescribed all kinds of pills and shit by other doctors before they came to the specialist anyway, so it is not like they never popped a pill before in their lives. These are extreme cases of people being in constant, severe pain, pain that runs their lives and pain that everything has to be worked around in their lives. These people come to these specialists looking for relief and a manageable situation, not to party or get high. Nevertheless, the Feds act as if these doctors are just drug dealers looking to make some fast cash off of these patients. That is the picture that they are painting of these doctors in court, they are saying that these doctors are just dealers, not trained medical personnel. Since the Federal courts are little more than compliant lackeys that provide the Feds with avenues to implement their crime policies, they buy this argument and are convicting these doctors in unheard of numbers. Bush and Ashcxroft are trumpeting this as part of the way that they are getting tough on crime and making America safer. They claim that they are serious about cracking down on crime, no matter who commits it, and thus being good public servants to the people, The very same people that they are locking up in this current frenzy. This policy is one of the ways that George W. Bush is going to go about campaigning for himself, making himself out to be that fuckin' warrior king that is the savior of all civilization that he sees himself as. He will tell one and all about how getting tough on crime like this is going to make America a better and safer place. As always with this fucked-up dude, the reality is something altogether different.
The reality of all of this is something that is going to further erode American society. Getting tough on crim eand cracking down on it sounds all well and good, but when you have such a broad-based definition of "crime" as the American government does,then it becomes a different issue. The Federal government has jurisdiction over all sorts of shit that one would not think that they had it. Stupid little crimes like bootlegging liquor and placing a letter in someone's mailbox at their home fall under Federal jurisdiction. Same with drinking a beer if you are operating a radio control board at a radio station or the equivalent at a TV station. Having the Federal government go for maximum sentences in cases such as these serve no purpose at all. To prosecute some lady for the "crime" of putting a letter in her friend's house's mailbox herself instead of sending it through the US mail, who are the only ones with authority to put anything in your mailbox, will only serve to make that lady fuckin' hate the Federal government, and you would think that there are enough of these type of people around already, and that the government would not want to cultivate any more. If the American people knew just how mush jurisdiction that the Feds have over their everyday lives. They would not be so accepting of this crackdown. For this crackdown will not net ant real serious criminals, these types of things never do, instead, it will net ordinary citizens that did shit that they did not even know was a crime, and now they have the government showing no mercy and throwing the book at them for this and ruining their lives in the process. Like what they are doing with the doctors. All this is doing is turning the medical profession against the government big-time. Many doctors have virtually thrown away their prescription pads, and only write them for harmless shit. Some of the pain specialists are hanging up their shingle and calling it quits, because they do not want the Pigs investigating them, they just feel that it is all not worth it. This makes Ashcroft and Bush feel real good, but it fucks the people over a lot. What it does is to make doctors so apprehensive about prescribing medicine to patients, that many patients are now unable to get their conditions properly cared for. As a result, their lives are misery. They cannot get adequate care for their affliction from the doctor, so many of them cease to have any sort of functional life at all. So if they are working Americans, they can no longer keep their job, since their chronic pain is making sure that they cannot. So they become unemployed, thereby increasing that statistic that Bush claims that he is actually decreasing. Americans are being denied proper health care because doctors are afraid that the Pigs will ruin their lives if they do. The Pigs have no interest in listening to what the medical profession has to say about this all, they just see people that they can make examples of and show everyone that they are indeed tough on crime. But when they go so far with this idea, they only serve to further alienate the people. If the people feel that the government is watching them in everything that they do, like going to the doctor, they are going to turn against the government. For even the most law-abiding citizen has medical problems somewhere in life, and for them to be told that the doctor cannot adequately treat their condition because he is afraid that the Pigs might bust him will show that citizen that no matter how he lives his life, whether it is the life of an outlaw, or one that abides by every rule and regulation that there is, that the Federal government will fuck with your life in one way or another. Then ,that citizen will realize that this government that he sup;ports so is not interested in keeping him safe, but rather with just abusing its power and making examples out of everyone that they can. For rest assured that when the Congressmen or Presidents have medical problems, that their doctors will be able to treat them in the way that they need to be treated, no matter what that is. If it would take prescribing something that would get another doctor busted, then be sure that they would get it, and that their doctor would not be harassed by the Feds for doing it like other doctors are. So these laws would not apply to them and their doctors, but the ordinary American and his doctor has no such assurances. The ordinary citizens will just become fodder for the latest tough on crime campaign. That is all that ever happens with them. The people end up getting caught up in it and they are the ones that are sent to the prisons that America will not stop building, while Mr. Businessman and Mr. Politician keep right on committing real crimes that affect all of society and get to do it with total impunity. All the Bush wants to do is to further the image of the American government as an invincible force that devours those that get in its way and thusly should be feared like no other. He just wants to instill more fear into the American people, from the ordinary working ones, all the way to the educated ones like the doctors. He wants them all to fear the government, and toe the line so they will not run afoul of it. Then the government will take these inflated and inaccurate arrest and conviction statistics and parade them in the media and say that their getting tough approach has been successful, and must continue. All that will have been accomplished is that more Americans than ever will be locked up in the prisons of the country and the government will be feeding its insatiable addiction for power and money like it has for centuries now. Getting tough on crime is just an excuse to feed addictions, proving that the Feds are just addicts, just like they say that the people that they are cracking down on are, and that they are not worthy of any respect or loyalty at all when they revolve around such a hypocritical attitude as this one.