The kid your mom wouldn't let you play with.

It just occurred to me that the U.S.A. has become the equivalent of that kid. We clearly have the bully-thing going. Give me your lunch money or I'll smash your face. We substitute ideas like, if you don't practice government in the manner we would prefer, we'll smash your face. Or, my personal favorite, you are not 'free enough' so we will smash your face. To be fair, we aren't exactly like the schoolyard bully. He eventually got tired and went home. Once we have begun to get-up-in-your-grill, count on us never going home. We don't get bored. We don't pause. We don't wander off to focus on something else for a while.

Then there is the whole drugs and violence thing. Briefly stated, our citizens have a huge appetite for recreational drugs. This appetite is overlaid with our innate puritanical attitudes (as expressed through our so-called War on Drugs). In short there are good people and bad people. Bad people 'do drugs'. We must hunt down and destroy bad people. However, by our own definition, a huge number of our own citizens are bad people. Luckily we have a time-tested playground-inspired plan to deal with such cognitive dissonance. As a nation we close our eyes, we put our fingers in our ears and commence to running around making mindless blathering noise. A discrepancy ignored is a discrepancy solved. Well played, America.

Some of us are thinking, isn't there a flip side to this coin? As it turns out, yes- though it is only fractionally different from the obverse side.

It seems that our largest trading partner is Mexico. One point for all the Wall Street Journal readers who were thinking Canada. However, Canada is our above board trading partner. The largest single transfer point for illicit drugs entering the U.S. is Mexico. This is incredibly convenient. It allows us to rationalize our demonization of Mexico and Mexicans who, after all, don't look as much like us as Canadians. Also our appetite for drugs along with our War on Drugs, creates the perfect marketplace for the millions of assault-style firearms we produce. The circle is complete.