We can add the drug war in Mexico to a growing list of issues that we cannot deal with honestly because no one is allowed to think outside a narrow box or they’ll have their knuckles rapped for being soft on crime, or terrorism, or on low utility prices, or deadbeats, or gangs, or whatever.

If a policy isn’t working and there is growing evidence that the policy is making things significantly worse, we ought to be able to bring that evidence into the court of public opinion and have an open debate. But it doesn’t work like that. Instead, we cover up the inconvenient evidence, or we hire people to say the evidence is a conspiracy of leftists and socialists and terrorist-sympathizers and anti-Semites, and ACORN, and George Soros, and The Tides Foundation, and Old Europe, and potheads, and secularists, and whomever.

It’s not working, folks.

As U.S. diplomats publicly praised “unprecedented cooperation” from Mexico in the fight against the drug cartels, they privately worried that poorly trained Mexican soldiers and a federal police force hobbled by corruption were failing to slow the surging violence…

…Meanwhile, the U.S. diplomats and law enforcement personnel at the embassy summed up the drug-trafficking organizations as “sophisticated players: they can wait out a military deployment; they have an almost unlimited human resource pool to draw from in the marginalized neighborhoods; and they can fan complaints about human rights violations to undermine any progress the military might make with hearts and minds.”

The memos asserted that some Mexican officials were equally fearful about the direction of the drug war.

One dated Oct. 5, 2009, warned that a top security official had “expressed a real concern with ‘losing’ certain regions” of the country and warned that “pervasive, debilitating fear” was settling into the countryside.

We could eliminate much of the power of these cartels overnight by simply creating a legal system for growing, selling, and consuming marijuana in this country. Alcohol consumption has ungodly costs for our society, but would you trade the status quo for a black market in alcohol that brought associated violence and instability throughout our society and throughout Mexico?

Whether it is climate change or the drug war or Israeli settlements in the West Bank or closing Guantanamo or holding civilian trials for terrorist suspects or housing bad guys on U.S. soil, we need to stop caving into the party that yells “boogey boogey” at us. None of these issues scare me as political issues. What scares me is the prospect of continuing on with failed policies that are making things worse.

Also, too, the Cuban embargo. End it.