Hightower Lowdown

Here’s some big news on the agricultural front--this
year’s crop has reached the highest level ever, with
an increase of 49% over last year’s production!
Unfortunately, we’re not talking about American
corn, but the opium crop in Afghanistan.
Even though the Bushites failed to find Osama bin
Laden there, either “dead or alive,” we were told
that they had set that country on an inexorable
path to democracy.
Mission accomplished! But wait--Afghanistan
has now turned as messy as Iraq. The Taliban is both
resurgent and insurgent, Bush’s handpicked leader
can’t travel outside of the capital of his own country,
and the poppy fields-- which sustain the Taliban
with millions of drug-trafficking dollars--are flourishing again. Despite the fact that poppy eradication has cost us taxpayers millions of dollars, there was a 59% hike in the acreage devoted to poppies
this year. “You can say it’s out of control,”
said the head of the UN office on drugs.
So far, Bush & Company have spent $88.2 billion of
our tax money there and lost 3338 American lives.
The result is not a shining monument to democracy
and peace but a country at war with itself, currently
supplying 92% of the world’s opium crop.