Michael Ryan Makes a Really Stupid Analogy About the War on Drugs

Re: "Casualties of the drug war," from the May 25th edition of the Augusta Chronicle editorial page.

Michael Ryan thinks the argument that laws against drugs cause violence is preposterous because that's like saying laws against rape cause rape.

This is one of the stupidest analogies I've ever read or heard. The illegality of rape doesn't cause rape. Rapists don't commit rape because it's against the law. They commit rape in spite of the law. But it is the illegality of drugs that causes violence. Drug dealers, the people responsible for a large share of the violence caused by the illegality of drugs, wouldn't even exist, if drugs were legalized. If rape was made legal, the incidence of rape would likely increase. If drugs were made legal, violence would greatly decline. Of this there is no doubt.

Like I pointed out last week, Mr. Ryan needs a lesson in common sense.

I still can't get over his editorial last week when he refused to make sense of an opinion opposite his own. He just wrote, "blah, blah, blah." That's like someone starting an argument, and when the other person states their point of view, he puts his fingers in his ears and sings, "la, la, la," so he doesn't have to hear it.

How immature.

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Re: "Two disasters, two responses," from the May 24th edition of the Augusta Chronicle editorial page.

Mr. Ryan claims that the oil spill disaster was caused by people not doing their jobs. He wrote, "no amount of regulations would have changed that."

How ridiculous and ignorant to boot?

There were certain safety devices that would have prevented this disaster. The Bush administration allowed oil companies to write the government regulations. They wrote these regulations so that they were allowed to use inferior equipment, thus saving them money. It was the failure of this inferior equipment that caused the disaster.

Better regulations would have prevented this disaster. But we have the fox watching the chicken coop here.

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Re: "Everything, all the time: The era of unlimited government arrives," by Deroy Murdock.

This writer is a fellow of the Hoover Institution--a right wing think tank. Or as I prefer to call it, industry-funded shitheads.

How twisted is this?: He thinks the government spending money to save teacher's jobs is a bad thing.

Why do conservatives hate education? Why do they want poor people to starve to death.

All of the items he mentions as supposedly bad, I think are good.

He whines that regulations forcing an increase in gas mileage will make cars on average $926 more expensive. Yeah, but they will more than make up for that in gas savings. This is a good regulation that will save consumers money and it's good for the environment and the economy.

Sheesh, what a perverse idiot. And so is Mr. Ryan for running this garbage on his editorial page.