It’s perfectly fine that people are raising questions about the legality of President Trump unilaterally ordering military strikes on suspected drug smugglers boating out of Venezuela. But the tell that Democrats and the dying media don’t genuinely care about constitutional integrity issues is in the way they talk about America’s raging, deadly drug problem as if it’s a matter of selling loose cigarettes.
They don’t like the idea of confronting a very real problem, so instead they trifle with questions of legal authority.
An “analysis” piece this week by The New York Times’ Charlie Savage is a prime example of the media feigning concern for legality while revealing that he either doesn’t understand just how devastating narcotic abuse and other street drugs have been to this country, or, perhaps more likely, he doesn’t care.
“After breaking new ground by labeling drug cartels as ‘terrorists,’ the president is now redefining the peacetime criminal problem of drug trafficking as an armed conflict, and telling the U.S. military to treat even suspected low-level drug smugglers as combatants,” wrote Savage on Thursday. “But the trafficking of an illegal consumer product is not a capital offense, and Congress has not authorized armed conflict against cartels.”
Tens of thousands of people die each year from overdosing. Some of the deadliest substances, like fentanyl, are overwhelmingly traced to countries south of our border, plus China. And nobody in Washington is so naive as to believe this is a “peacetime criminal problem,” wherein underground networks evade law enforcement to push drugs into the U.S. No, everyone knows that these are state-sponsored enterprises with foreign governments either deliberately ignoring or actively encouraging the poisoning of America to the enrichment and advancement of their own interests.
And these incredibly lethal toxins aren’t “an illegal consumer product” in the same vein as Cuban cigars. They’re not recreational items or minor indulgences. They’re debilitatingly addictive on a good day and instantly deadly on a bad one. Guess what. There are a lot of bad days.
Somebody tell Charlie Savage that George Floyd was a fentanyl addict with lethal levels of the drug in his system when he overdosed in 2020. Maybe then The New York Times will grasp the gravity of the issue.
A genuinely curious article in America’s most prestigious news publication might explore why the president took such an unusual measure to deter drug trafficking. How did it get to be so big of a problem? Why has our government failed until now to fix it? Are there stronger or smarter measures the administration can take to address it?
That’s not what we get, though, because The Times and Savage aren’t genuinely curious. They’re hatefully unserious, and they resent anyone with power making a sincere effort to confront the nation’s drug crisis.
