Wednesday, March 21, 2018

There is something sad and viscerally pathetic

About the spectacle of President Trump returning to Manchester NH to tell an audience of five hundred that he favors resolving the "opioid crisis" by hanging the drug dealers.
All that'll do, its create new drug dealers or impell the cornered to shoot it out with the rollers and die in a blaze of pretended glory. As policy it comes down to "shoot the small fry and the big boys will back off fer sherr".
The death penalty does make for some leverage over the accused by proescutors, in that sense its useful but otherwise it's the usual gory nasty nonsense from our addled and berserk President.
Cutting prescriptions is legitimately a good idea, so is spending more on treatment, but even the six billion Trump proposes is likely not enough, the thrust of boldness is needed in other areas, but this is Trump and he likes to make hollow threats.
Moreover its ironic that he chose Manchester NH as his platform, a municipality that is pretty much classed as "The Walking Dead", it rises from its' grave, gets prettied up and apes vitality for a few months during the New Hampshire Primary and then returns to it's torpid undead status.
I went to college in Manchester NH a full generation ago, and it had drug problems even then, urban poverty as far as the eye could see, completely deindustrialized and a virtual poster boy for a abandoned mostly white underclass ill served by dozens of politicians on both sides of the aisles.
So along came Trump who promised to "hang the dealers" which got a lot of press attention, but then again Manchester has heard it before from Sam Yorty, Pat Buchanan & Pat Robertson....
I say fixing Manchester NH starts with not promising them something that'll never do them a damn bit of good...

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