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Amazing what a difference a month makes. Andrew Sullivan, at long last, pulled his head out of the sand and did the absolute bare minimum of research about Obama’s marijuana policy before writing about it. Just last month Sullivan praised Obama for somehow helping to advance the cause of marijuana legalization despite the fact that Obama has waged a very aggressive multi-agency war on marijuana. To quote Sullivan, “Under Obama, support for marriage equality and marijuana legalization has crested to record levels.”
After I painstakingly pointed out to him that Obama has proven to be even worse than George W. Bush was on the issue of marijuana, Sullivan still ignorantly defended Obama on marijuana having done no further research on the issue. From Sullivan’s January 17th attack on me for pointing out the basic facts about Obama administrations marijuana policies:
Oh please. If you accept my premise – that he “leads from behind” for a “long game” – you can begin to see my case. Obama is not going to crusade for either cause [marijuana legalization and marriage equality]. But he is not going to oppose them either and has quietly encouraged them. Hence instructing the DEA not to interfere with state laws on medical marijuana and withdrawing a legal defense of DOMA. Yes, there’s been some regional slippage in California on allowing states to determine their medical marijuana laws, but that hasn’t apparently come from Obama’s office.
Shockingly just one month later Sullivan read this single Rolling Stone article by Tim Dickinson “Obama’s War on Pot” and undergoes a radical conversion on the issue. From Sullivan February 17:
What Obama is doing is causing sickness and death. It seems to me that the Obama generation who helped elect this president need to go to war against this betrayal. Every time you are sent a fundraising email or in any way contacted by the Obama election campaign, tell them to call you back when they call this war off. Hit them where it hurts. Heckle him and his surrogates whenever you can.
Holder and Obama have betrayed us on this. Make sure they hear from you.
Very little of that dickensian article talks about things that have only happened in the last month. This has been a ongoing problem that many prominent figures in the marijuana reform community have been talking about for months. In fact, I laid out almost all the same evidence in my October article “Obama’s Multi-Agency War on Medical Marijuana” that I cited in my response to Sullivan.
I guess a whole month later is better than never.
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Of course, Andrew Sullivan (whoever this guy is) does not need to research marijuana policies because his views indicate he must be smoking plenty of this stuff. Obviously, it is readily available to him until he himself goes in smoke.
Those of us who have had the misfortune, over more than twenty years, of seeing the piece of journalistic performance art known as Andrew Sullivan are not surprised. Sullivan is always the last to come around to reality (if he ever does) and always claims to be the first one to see the light.
Even bottom feeding at Daily Beast/Newsweek is more than he deserves.
AND THE KILLIN’ GOEZ ON AND ON AND…
Citizen Jon Walker:
Andrew Sullivan is a dilettant, a preening intellectual peacock who has managed to convince a bunch of beltway bubbleheads that anything he says has intellectual substance…don’t spend anymore of your valuable time on the bastard, he’s irrelevant.
KEEP THE FAITH AND PASS THE AMMUNITION, FASCISM IS NOT HEALTHY FOR CHILDREN AND OTHER LIVING THINGS!!
Final Score:
Firebaggers: 1
Rest of the World: 0
Their law transgresses my rights as a totally free human being. And as such is to be shunned.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_law
I see no reason to stop doing what I am doing law or no law. I harm no one.
As opposed to those, under whose law millions are slaughtered. Are those laws to be obeyed..I hardly think so.
That is the sum total of my politics, and there will come a day when they are reality. Egalitarian and uplifting.
and nice post Jon…the battle continues for humanities rights
Since he has made that little revelation you think he might be able to connect the dots to the private prisons? You know, the ones that say/promise to stay 90% full?
If they don’t have an infraction like smoking a joint to throw people in those cash cow prisons, they might end up throwing a jay walker or phone talker into the slammer.
Interesting. Sully was pro-torture until Bush signed an antigay bill. Will he be pro-impunity until Obama goes anti-pot?
ot thought
Man speaks
god laughs
god speaks only to, to republicans and pat robertson
Something is amiss, ya think
Why does anyone care about Andrew Sullivan. He seems like an imminently forgettable person.
WHO
Thanks John, yep with 0 and his pay holder no one is safe except the criminal class.
Someone must have explained to Andrew Sullivan that, unlike him, not all of us accused of federal marijuana infractions can get our records expunged by expensive legal talent on the grounds that an arrest record might hurt our citizenship application. Yes, that happened for him, after being found with a joint on the Cape Code National Seashore.
Andrew Sullivan just makes his fellow Britons (moi, etc.) just plain embarrassed.
Desperately seeking the limelight, no matter what……….. or how wrong.
That’s what Thatcherism does for you. Rots the brain.
Gauging the Pres position on this during an upswing in the election cycle would be a bit like cosmology.
There pertinent issues, of course, which would be in play; however, I think right now the merits would be at the end of that list.
After Nov it will all be new and ripe.
What this article shows is Sullivan, like many Obama supporters, blindly believe the hype about Obama. It doesn’t matter that he has been the third Bush term. They think he ended the Iraq war, instead of being kicked out at the end of our ‘lease’. They think he is better on taxes even though he extended the Bush tax cuts, better on the military, even though he involved us in an undeclared war in Libya for no reason, and drone killed more civilians than Bush, better on rights even though he signed the NDAA, better on internet freedom even though he signed a treaty without consulting congress, better on money, even though he has borrowed even more than Bush and has the banksters that collapsed the economy in his cabinet, etc, etc.
It is very, very unfortunate for this country that our choices are Obama and Santorum. Hopefully in 2016 if this country isn’t totally broke or involved in WWIII we will get some real choices, but I won’t hold my breath.