Consider this: If you were a police officer in any highway patrol, just why would you suddenly choose to start stopping people based on skin color? Some of the states that do had federal judges overseeing their school systems for decades. Now, some deputy might well succumb to his or her prejudices on a remote county road, but on a big federal highway? Wouldn’t that be a real career-enhancer?

I really don’t think that is very likely to happen, the federal highway fund largess doled out to the states is far too great. Look at how states fell in line with the drinking age. Now, isn’t that something? You’re an adult (old enough to vote) without adult rights (not old enough th drink). And it stood, so now there’s a precedent for taking away property from older people.(Which some people are going to adjudge convenient very soon, because the old folks just don’t pass away like they used to.) Being adult doesn’t mean you have adult rights. . . . But that’s another story.

The police would undertake these stops en masse only upon assurance by the federal government that they could. And it took more than that, it took actual encouragement. The younger officers don’t generally have the prejudices of their forebears, they are of another time and place.

Now I watched both Vice President Gore and Governor Bush in debate pledge themselves to stop profiling and to further, investigate its origins. May I suggest to you here, that pledge was an utter crock, and they both knew it?

Vice President Gore knew much of the workings of government, but not enough to keep from hanging all the innovators out to dry. And surely he knew whence this profiling came, and so did Governor Bush, he of presidential papa and cadre of Beltway advisors. As the all-new (sorta kinda) President Bush, he certainly knows, um, if he wants to, which may well be a dubious proposition.

It came from the DEA, “Operation Pipeline,” which has been busily teaching profiling, overt racial discrimination, to state and local police for some years now with bipartisan blessing, in the White House and elsewhere. The spectacle of two attorneys general speechifying that they will “investigate” this problem should make an honest person puke. How’s your gut this fine day?

That‘s enough for now, is it not? Just some things to mull over there when you’ve run out of Scott Adams material.