Every so often a straight, reported story comes across the wires that is news, analysis, and commentary all at once. The best such stories are also metaphors and provide their own punch lines. The truly transcendent ones take big issues and reveal truths about them beyond the collective abilities of the billion monkeys at a billion keyboards that is the
blogosphere.
An AP story released late Monday afternoon achieves all these things. As such, although it is only the 11th, it is already my nominee for story of the month. The headline says it all: "Drug cartels
smuggle oil into the U.S."
It's not a long story. The facts are pretty straightforward. Mexican drug gangs have been stealing Mexican oil and selling it to U.S. distributors. The U.S. government has caught on to the scam and one oil exec in the U.S. has pleaded guilty. The Mexican government says it is part of a new wave of stealing the country's oil patrimony.
What the Mexican government doesn't say is that the drug
cartels that are smuggling tankers full of oil into the United States are probably
operating more efficiently than Pemex, the country's calcified national oil
company.
What the story doesn't have to say is that it was only
natural for drug lords to branch out from feeding one U.S. addiction to feeding
another.
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