I post a lot about the drug war because it is a subject that no one else wants to talk about. My feeling is that this is due in large measure to shame, shame that we have allowed our government to perpetrate this immense, decades long injustice in our name.

I also post because I see the relationship between the drug war and many other subjects that are brought up here.

No one else wants to talk about, eh? Not!

While writing under a pseudonym (Hypatia) at Glenn's pre-Salon blog he solicited me to author these posts:

http://glenngreenwald.blogspot.com/2006/03/prison-war-on-drugs-just-say-no.html

http://glenngreenwald.blogspot.com/2006/04/using-drug-war-to-expand-government.html

You simply hold no monopoly here regarding your horror at the war on (some) people who use (some) drugs, and its attendant prison-industrial complex. Glenn Greenwald loathes it as much as anyone, including you.

But you see, Bush and the GOP are now expanding evil, Draconian govt well beyond the WoD (tho they continue that abomination with a fervor).

That is awful about the no-knock obscenity that killed your sister's fiancé. But as a dedicated anti-prohibionist for decades --and much as it pains me to agree with Aych -- the militarization of our police and the no-knock warrant boom are a direct product of the WoD.

But -- Aych is one of the last anti-prohibitionists I'd want on my team to persuade people that drug policy reform is urgently required. It is a top priority issue, but not the only one, and not one that THIS BLOG primarily focuses on, tho Glenn has treated the subject several times, and will again, both here and more formally elsewhere.

Aych has no business dictating what Glenn should post most often about, or what the comments discussion "should" concern. There are plenty of blogs where the drug war is up-front and center. At this one, it is an issue, but not the primary one. And if Aych doesn't like that, he should read and comment elsewhere.

Reagan, despite the more recent canonization of him by the right was loathed for his efforts to reduce nuclear stockpiles. I have a copy of a NATO magazine called "THREAT" which included an editorial cartoon depicting a Communist vixen cooing over all the conventional arms the Soviets would be able to build with the money they saved not maintaining the nuclear arsenal. Reagan was constantly accused of being a dupe to Gorbachev.

Quite right. In fact, at the time Norman Podhoretz angrily reviled Reagan as being the new Neville Chamberlain. (The accusation that never loses its usefulness, regardless of who the latest Unstoppable Enemy may be.)

Superb post, Glenn.

Donahue sees anti-Catholic bigotry everywhere.

Yes, in everything from the instructions to assemble your kids' jungle gym, to a bowl of corn flakes. Nevertheless, there has long been a deep and virulent strain of actual anti-Catholicism in the U.S, especially among fundamentalists. The Klan used to be almost as happy beating the crap out of a Roman Catholic priest as lynching a black man. (At some point rather recently, tho, the KKK became "enlightened" and now permits Catholics to join. Jeebus.)

Bill Donohue and his Catholic League are generally blowhard, authoritarian grievance-mongers and idjits. But in this particular instance, he/they are objecting to a genuine and revolting anti-Catholic fundamentalist bigotry that has a long American pedigree. Let's see McCain become yoked to that. Bravo Glenn for using even the likes of Donohue to make that happen.

That wiki entry is essentially accurate. In the mid-19th century a Know-Nothing mob burned a convent, and public schools were founded in part to avoid what in some states had been equal opportunity funding of denominational schools. Funding "papist" schools was simply intolerable to many WASPs.

Klan agitation in Oregon in the 1920s led to a law requiring Catholics to send their children to public schools, but SCOTUS struck it down.

Anti-Catholicism has been grotesquely real, and still is among some fundamentalists. If Donohue limited himself to objecting to the actual thing (such as Hagee's bigoted and deranged views), he wouldn't be the repugnant blowhard he generally is.