What a difference a decade makes. I was just thinking about this the other day. When George W. Bush was running for president way back in the beginning of the century, the msm were all over the possibility that GWB had partaken of some illegal substance -- marijuana, cocaine or some such.
Al Franken even tried to trick him into admitting it by asking if it was true that he was once a coke dealer. Franken expected him to say "no," at which point he would follow up with, "If you'll answer that one, why won't you tell us whether you actually used drugs?" GWB was a step ahead of him and declined to answer the first one.
So now we learn that Obama was a stoner. Click A User's Guide To Smoking Pot With Barack Obama for details plus a guide to his smoking crew's vernacular. Cheech and Chong would beam with pride.
Actually, it wasn't really the decade that made a difference, it was the political party. There are two standards, you know. As Jim Treacher observed:
It’s just funny that the same people who are scrambling to defend him were, shall we say, somewhat less accepting of Bush’s youthful indiscretions.
Yo 'bama, don't bogart that joint my friend.
Penn's Sunday School, a weekly video blog Penn Jillette releases, spoke about Obama's admitted drug use in a fair amount of depth. As anyone who has been a fan of Penn (he's the guy who genuinenly got me to think about libertarianism for the first time. At which point I became one, until I realized it wouldn't work. Now I'm more of a socialist-liberal-libertarian. Maybe a tad like Noam Chomsky but, y'know, not nearly as well read)
Anyway as much as I disagree with him on some things, there are quite a few things I either am made to feel wrong about-Because he is so well read and well-traveled (his argument for why he feels wrong about things he disagrees with The Hitchmeister on, er Christopher Hitchens :P). He really hit the nail on the head here, though. Obama joking about this stuff and taking it lightly is a freakin' disgrace and it's a shame so many of my fellow cannabis users thinks it makes him hip. It doesn't it makes him a hypocrite, which doesn't bother me too much, it's more about the fact that IF he had been busted for "Blow" as he so casually puts it-Which, btw, I've never met someone who's only used coke once or twice that calls it "blow," I've met plenty of coke users that call it that-But if Obama had been busted does anyone think for one second he'd be president right now?
You get busted your life is ruined, you don't qualify for college loans, you can get fired from your work, on top of the ridiculous amount of money the government "charges" you for your indiscretions. And of course the vast majority of people are poor or lower-middle class.
One in six people are in jail for CANNABIS alone. This is what Obama accepts for the "Good of the nation." So he can get other things done. I know it's not that simple, nothing ever is, and the more complexity we add to our tax code and laws the worse it seems to get. I keep in mind the filibuster rate Obama had to deal with in his first 2 years, that would rattle anyone. I keep in mind the rabid opposition he faces. What I cannot and will not accept is that it's okay for the past three presidents to have done drugs (Clinton didn't inhale? Doesn't matter even if he didn't had a cop rolled by, it's all over), and hold the most presitigious and highest-level of government one can ever hope to aquire-Yet the millions of us regular folk are just F-U-C-K-E-D fucked!
It's not about hypocrisy, it's about class. Obama should be ashamed of himself if he could see past his own bullshit.
PS: I'm probably voting for the guy anyway. Ron Paul is an overhyped nut who wants to take things back 150 years, Mitt Romney is the worst of Bush and Obama combined. So all I can hope for right now is that Obama will get more gung-ho on his second term.
Posted by: TheBoxingCannabyte | May 27, 2012 at 11:43 AM