Someday people will look back at the current War on Drugs and wonder how it could have happened in America. The urine tests are very similar to the loyalty oaths of the early Fifties, only even more insidious. Yes, it really did happen here.

McCarthyism offered no program to insure security. Instead, its approach, almost wholly negative, involved an emotional reaction to Cold War problems, chiefly an explanation of "conspiracy" for complex issues, that was attractive because it was simplistic. McCarthy's charges of communist influence in fact paralleled, in an exaggerated way, the popular obsession with national security that arose after World War II. The Truman administration committed itself to victory over communism and to safeguarding the nation from external and internal threats; the rhetoric of McCarthyism was in this sense well within the framework of Cold War politics. The Senator and the administration differed not so much over ends as over means and emphasis.

McCarthyism perceived subversives in Washington, not Soviet power or strategic realities, as the major obstacle to achieving "victory over communism."

...congressional conservatives had sought to discredit FDR's policies by charging communist influence was behind them....With the postwar confrontation between Russia and the West as backdrop, they assailed the administration's loyalty program as well as its foreign policy. The administration's security measures, they charged, were inadequate because the administration itself was sympathetic toward communism or ignorant of its threat. Foreign policy was a failure because pro-Soviet or disloyal employees in the State Department and elsewhere had helped to formulate and execute it.

McCarthyism, then was no aberration. It was a political movement in touch with the major concerns of Cold War politics....The intensification of the Cold War, both because of the U.S.-Soviet conflict and Truman's rhetoric, changed national priorities and values, and in so doing created a distinctly conservative mood whose primary commitment was to absolute security and the status quo.
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Moralistic arguments were also pressed into service; the U.S.-Soviet confrontation was a conflict between good and evil, between Christian democracy and atheistic communism, between freedom and totalitarianism. The greatest obstacle to peace, Truman contended, stemmed from a "modern tyranny led by a small group who have abandoned their faith in GOd....Our effor to resist and overcome this tyranny is essentially a moral effort."

The changed rhetoric of postwar foreign policy begat a popular obsession for achieving a total victory over communism - or, what was much the same thing in the eyes of most Americans, the Soviet Union. The failure to do so, the then current reasoning went, would directly threaten American liberties and, in addition, subvert the American mission of moral leadership of the world.....

MOre importantly, however, Americans came to believe that the Soviets' development of an atomic bomb came about neither through Soviet science nor technology, but had simply been stolen by Soviet spies.

The result was an obsessive national fear of subversion. The real threat to America's security was now believed to come from betrayals on the part of disloyal federal employees. Nor were these employees viewed as mere reformers and radicals...but as actual foreign agents. This was Senator McCarthy's refinement on earlier charges.
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Committed to maximizing surveillance, both agencies wanted a standard whose basic premise ws that federal employment was a privilege, not a right. Accordingly, any doubts whatsoever about the individual should, even in the absence of conclusive evidence, be sufficient to bring about his dismissal. The Justice Department and the Loyalty Review BOard persistently emphasized that a real threat to national security would continue to exist as long as individuals of "doubtful" loyalty, and therefore "potential" danger, were retained in federal employment. They thus argued that the original dismissal standard had to be revised. Ultimately, in response to this pressure, and along with it the heightened security consciousness that emerged....he [Truman] amended the dismissal standard to preclude the employment of persons "who are potentially disloyal or who are bad security risks."

Throughout 1951 the Justice department went on to demand the enactment of more internal-security legislation. It recommended that the statue of limitations not apply to national-security cases; that harsher penalties be provided for perjured testimony; that immunity from prosecution be granted to individuals whose testimony might be essential either to a grand jury or to congressional inquiry involving national security; that investigative agencies be permitted to wiretap in internal-security cases; and that conflicting testimony - as opposed to prosecution proof of untruth - be sufficient for a perjury conviction.

The unique nature of the internal-security threat, the Justice Department argued, necessitated these legislative changes. The "fanatical, well-trained and highly disciplined" nature of the communist movement, Attorney General McGrath avowed, required restrictions undreamed of fifteen years earlier. McGrath pointedly warned against permitting "those who seek to destroy our form of government...to escape detection and punishment" through safeguards guaranteed by the Bill of Rights:

"I wish to invite the attention of the Congress to a provision of law through which persons who may be guilty of criminal subversive conduct - or, indeed, of other crimes - have sometimes been able to frustrate our law enforcement officials and our courts, and remain at large with impunity to constitute an ever-present danger to society. This loophole is the deliberate and malevolent abuse of the right to testify on the ground of self-incrimination, before a grand jury, a court, or before an investigative body of the Congress."

.That pot is still on the burner,,it may seem to be simmering,but it is likely
to heat up in the near future.....The Asa regime has a real problem here,because
they know that people are becoming disgusted with federal demagogery,,

>"You're not going to tolerate a violation of the law, but at the same time there are a lot of different relationships... a lot of different aspects that we have to consider as we develop that enforcement policy." <

.....The Hutchster doesnt sound all that sure of himself here,,he was trying
not to tread too heavily on the toes of those who remember the 12 amendment,
,,not to mention all the people who are helped by Marijuana,,,,,,

I tend to consider all Marijuana use as "medical"....If nothing else,it cures DWDS,,Drug War Depression Syndrome.

I think that conservatives, or people who deeply believe themselves to be conservatives, have been among the most staunch defenders of medical marijuana in America.

San Francisco is the home to the most bitchy mean-minded liberalism in America.

And I say that as a liberal, or at least someone who believes herself to be one.