Christopher Caldwell of The Weekly Standard offers a scathing critique of the National Drug Control Policy’s SuperBowl advertisements. After noting that “We can leave aside the general question of whether government agencies ought to be spending the public’s money to — in effect — lobby that very same public to keep shelling out money for them,” Caldwell takes issue with one ad in particular, the 30-second spot in which the “camera cuts between various teenagers either making outrageous confessions of murder or excusing drug use.” The spot ends: “Drug money supports terror. If you buy drugs, you might, too.” Caldwell responds:

What crap. Teenagers who are buying drugs are not killing families in Colombia. They’re not even ‘helping’ to kill families in Colombia. They are just buying drugs. Oughtn’t that be bad enough for the Office of National Drug Control Policy?

Seems not. The drug bureaucracy appears to believe that no one will take its drug war seriously unless the federal government resorts to propaganda worthy of the Zhdanov-era Soviet Union. Like communist propaganda, these ads assert something that is kinda-sorta-true-in-a-certain-sense-like ‘Western capitalism rests on the enslavement of the Third World’–as both an unambiguous truth and a call to action. (‘The Reagan administration is killing nuns in Latin America.’ True! True! All that’s missing is a context!)

The ONDCP is both degrading the public discourse and playing with fire. This may be Chomskyism in the service of right-wing ends, but it’s still Chomskyism. Once you start making assertions that are ‘in a sense’ true, anyone can start playing that game[…]”

The Bushies in bed with Chomsky? Time to rethink the strategy, guys. We’re fighting a real war now. This is no time to be wasting money and time on silly little pet projects like “the war on drugs” — which in my view represents the worst kind of governmental nannyism anyway, and so was destined to fail from the outset.