Chris Powell: Of nullification in stoned America; don't fish for immigrants from the Middle East

Under legislation proposed by  Connecticut state Senate Majority Leader Martin Looney, the Nutmeg State would legalize and tax marijuana.

Of course, marijuana is barelyillegal in the state now, possession of a half ounce or less having been reducedin 2011 to a mere infraction liable to a small fine, while charges of possessinglarger amounts are eligible for resolution through probation. Indeed, marijuanause in Connecticut has become so common that police, prosecutors, and courtsreally don't want to bother with it anymore, though sale and cultivation of thedrug remain felonies, at least technically.   

Looney, a Democrat from New Haven, is a big-government liberal and his mainobjective with the marijuana bill seems to be taxation, as he advocates themarijuana-business system recently adopted in Colorado, which is raising morethan $100 million a year for state and local government there. That kind ofmoney could finance golden parachutes for a few more failed football coaches atthe University of Connecticut.   

But legal marijuana is giving Colorado more than tax money. It is also producinga huge increase in students coming to school stoned, since, as with liquor andcigarettes, limiting sales to adults doesn't keep young adults from procuringstuff for those under 18.   

With legal marijuana Colorado also has built a state-sanctioned and closelyregulated industry on the violation of federal drug law, which still classifiesmarijuana with the most powerful of the illegal drugs.

While President Obama,  violating his constitutional obligation to execute the law faithfully, has toldhis Justice Department to suspend marijuana-law enforcement in states that don'twant it, a different president could take his obligations more seriously.   

Nothing obliges Connecticut to criminalize any drugs; the state is free todecriminalize marijuana and anything else and leave the issue to the federalgovernment, which maybe someday will wise up and simply medicalize the wholedrug problem, the "war on drugs" having long been only a fantastically costlyemployment program for police, prosecutors, criminal-defense lawyers, prisonguards, parole and probation officers, and social workers.   

But basing a retail industry and tax system on the violation of federal law goesfar beyond mere decriminalization and becomes nullification -- the sort of thing that New Haven has been doing for years by issuing identification cards to illegalaliens to facilitate their violation of federal immigration law --"state'srights" stuff that impairs national unity, stuff  that liberals used to deplore whenconservatives did it to thwart the Constitution and federal civil-rights laws. 

In coming months states governed by conservatives may note the success ofliberal nullification in Colorado, Connecticut and elsewhere and implore thenew president, who is suspected of having conservative if not reactionaryinstincts, to ignore laws that he doesn't like, starting with abortionrights.    The next step will be secession, though in light of how much liberals andconservatives have come to hate each other lately, maybe this time the country willagree to divide peacefully.

xxx

FISH ELSEWHERE FOR IMMIGRANTS: The mass murder committed at the Christmas marketin Berlin by a Tunisian immigrant is not quite the vindication claimed byPresident-elect Trump for banning immigration by Muslims per se.

For government to restrict people according to their religion isplainly unconstitutional.    But the atrocity in Berlin is a reminder of the civil war raging in Islambetween modernity and medievalism, a cultural war as much as a religious war,  and a reminder that immigration law must protect the United States againstcountries with benighted cultures.   

The United States can fish for immigrants in ponds with or without alligators.  It can have all the Latin Americans and Asians it wants, or lots of MiddleEastern religious crazies, fascists, and terrorists. The country needn't repeatEurope's deadly mistake.

Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester,  Conn., and an essayist.

Don Pesci: Senator Murphy's bizarre climate-Mideast brutality link

Only a few years ago a politician might have been laughed out of Congress for postulating that the troubles in the Middle East – Islamic irredentism; the emergence of Iran, still considered a terrorist state, as a regional Middle East power; the attempt by Shiites, rebuffed during the Iraq war, to establish a caliphate in northern Iraq and Syria; the threats against the United States and other Western nations that pour like a flood of mighty waters from the throats of its former enemies; the scurrying of foreign states once friendly to the United States from a U.S to a Russian protectorate; the sea of women, children and young men murdered, homeless and enslaved Christians, immigrant hordes persecuted by Islamic terrorists now flooding Europe’s shores, largely owing to the recession of U.S. power and influence in the Middle East; all this and more --  were traceable to global warming, the tocsin of a boisterous environmental movement.
 

The civil wars in Syria and Mali, U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy, of Connecticut, noted in a New Haven Register interview “… were preceded by a ‘massive multi-year drought,’ which were consequences of global warming. ‘The instability that we are seeing in the Middle East and in Africa is today the result of climate change,’ with more challenges coming, Murphy said.”

The connection between global warming and world-altering disturbances in the Middle East, remote at best, is one of the CliffsNotes taken from the current Democratic Party campaign playbook. The global warming bell will be sounded ad nauseam during the coming political campaigns. Socialist presidential candidate Bernie Sanders has already warmly embraced the queer notion. Surprisingly, Mr. Murphy has thrown his support to Hillary Clinton, not Sanders.

Mr. Murphy’s current term in office ends January 2019, and so he can well afford to flourish ideological banners on behalf of movement progressives, which includes the environmental lobby. Nothing Mr. Murphy says, however absurd, will cost him a vote in the near future. Mr. Murphy’s present assertion entails no immediate political cost to him; it is a form of cheap grace. Mr. Murphy’s comrade in the Senate, Dick Blumenthal, is up for re-election in the current cycle, and the remote prospect of losing an election has made the always cautious Mr. Blumenthal wary. Off-election year senators are usually able to find their spines.  

Mr. Murphy’s assertion – Middle East instability is caused by climate change -- is a near-perfect example of the post hoc fallacy, which may be stated as follows: A occurred, then B occurred; therefore, A caused B. The rooster Chanticleer crowed, then the sun rose; therefore, the crowing caused the sun to rise.

Messy thinking is the principal cause of a messy foreign policy, and the Obama administration is full of threadbare thoughts. Dangerous errors in foreign policy are the product of political procrusteanism, which occurs when politicians seek to fit the wide and various world into their narrow ideological beds: Feet are lopped off, fingers are sheered away, and one ends up with a dead and useless mutilated corpse, an apt description of U.S. foreign policy in the Age of Obama. Far-fetched claims such as those made by Mr. Sanders and seconded by Mr. Murphy obscure the wreckage. But these bizarre notions can be exploded by an application of “Occam’s Razor,” which holds that the most economical explanation of a phenomenon that accounts for all the important facts is usually the right one.

Here is an economical explanation that embraces real-world data in the Middle East:

Syria is ruled by Bashar Assad whose father, Hafez al-Assad, was only slightly more bloodthirsty than his son. In 2012, President Obama drew his famous “red line in the sand” in Syria. He said that the use of chemical weapons by Assad would cross “a red line” that would entail “enormous consequences” and “change my calculus” on American military intervention in Syria’s civil war. A year later, In August 2013, a rebel-held suburb of Damascus was attacked with sarin gas, and Mr. Obama’s red line inauspiciously disappeared.

Concurrent with Mr. Obama’s red line doctrine, American troops that had ousted Saddam Hussein in Iraq were withdrawn from that country, fulfilling an Obama campaign pledge. The improvident withdrawal of troops created a vacuum in northern Iraq and Syria that soon was filled with the soldiers of Allah, peace be upon him, whose ambition it was to recreate a caliphate. They expressed their fidelity to the Koran by capturing territory from the infidel, killing men who might oppose them, enslaving their children and making concubines of their wives. They also drew the sword of Allah, peace be upon him, across the throats of infidel Christians, which caused Mr. Obama to claim that the ruffians were not behaving in a manner that was faithful to Islam, the Koran or the prescriptions of Mohammed, peace be upon him.

Islamic scholars who are more faithful interpreters of the Koran would heartily disagree. 

With the supposed failure of President George W. Bush’s policy towards Iraq before her and the imprecations of Democratic politicians ringing in her ears, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, now the leading Democratic candidate for president, simply repeated the so-called “policy errors” of Mr. Bush and persuaded Mr. Obama to oust Libyan strongman Muammar Gaddafi from power. The ouster was a success: “We came, we saw, he died,” boasted Mrs. Clinton. Libya descended into chaos, and the Obama administration – refusing steadfastly to let a crisis go to waste – began shipping war material from a Libyan compound to American-supported, anti-Assad forces in northern Syria. The American compound in Benghazi, Libya, soon was destroyed by Islamic terrorists. It is no exaggeration to say that the terrorists who murdered Christians, among others, in the newly established caliphate and in Paris and Brussels and the United States and Canada and London and the Netherlands were, all of them, faithful followers of Mohammed, peace be upon him. 

This is only a thimble full of real-world data that should be included in any assessment of the origin and causes of the bloody mess in the Middle East, a good part of it attributable to Mr. Obama’s failed foreign policy. Mr. Murphy’s fanciful theory that Middle East instability is the result of climate change is little more than a head-fake designed in an election year to draw public attention from inconvenient truths. Mr. Murphy, who certainly is no Joe Lieberman, has until 2019 to get it straight before he comes up for re-election, plenty of time for visions and revisions that time will soon erase.

Don Pesci is a political writer based in Vernon, Conn.