Yes we cannabis!
October 20, 2009
Obama supports liberty and states rights. Yep, you read that right, he is willing to subordinate federal law to the laws of individual states. Well, he is willing to if said laws involve burning down a blunt.
Pot-smoking patients or their sanctioned suppliers should not be targeted for federal prosecution in states that allow medical marijuana, prosecutors were told Monday in a new policy memo issued by the Justice Department.
Under the policy spelled out in a three-page legal memo, federal prosecutors are being told it is not a good use of their time to arrest people who use or provide medical marijuana in strict compliance with state law.
Obama supports individual liberty if it involves blowing a doob, gay marriage, abortion on demand or condoms for kids. Essentially, Obama supports your right to get high and get laid. Obama gets behind any right that doesn’t get in the way of government power. Freedom to get high and get laid are freedoms that don’t diminish governmental authority. If they are distracting enough, they might even open the way for increased state power.
Property rights, gun rights and economic freedom, on the other hand, can very much detract from government power and, therefore, are not supported by Obama and his fellow travelers.
In his novel Brave New World, Aldous Huxley described a future world were tyranny came, not with a jackboot to the face as foreseen by George Orwell, but in a world of state sponsored hedonistic nihilism. The Brave New World described by Huxley was painless, amusement laden, sexually promiscuous, stress-free existence where every citizen was genetically engineered to be happy in his or her lot. There was no dissent because it never occurred to anyone to question the order of things. The citizenry lived as distracted and drugged serfs existing in world of generally happy and vacant servitude. They were distracted, entertained and over-sexed pawns serving a statist machine. In the tyranny of state sanctioned pleasure, there was no reason to ban any book. Nobody wanted to read one.
Leftists like Obama are quick to support rights that distract the population. Freer access to a high, more sex with fewer complications and less commitment are the new opiates of the masses. None of these rights diminish state power and, through their ability to distract from more serious pursuits, allow the state more leeway to expand actual power.
Economic freedoms, property rights and gun rights, however are not merely distractions. They involve gaining and holding power and are therefore opposed by Obama and the left. Smoking pot creates a weak and docile citizen and is an acceptable leftist freedom. Entrepreneurialism creates a powerful and driven citizen and is, therefore, unacceptable to the left.
Watch in the coming months. Whenever there is some demand for new distraction or access to some hedonistic pleasure, Obama will support the demand as a baisc human right. As long as the demand in no way diminishes the power of the state, Obama will back it extravagantly. If, on the other hand, the individual liberty has the power to diminish government authority or power – property rights, private health care, gun rights, economic freedom – he will strongly oppose it.
This is the soft despotism Alexis de Tocqueville described in the 1840s in Volume II, Book 4, Chapter 6 of Democracy in America.
After having thus successively taken each member of the community in its powerful grasp and fashioned him at will, the supreme power then extends its arm over the whole community. It covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided; men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.
Both Tocqueville and Huxley understood that a population is better dominated with bread and circuses than an iron fist. Blissed-out and vacant servitude, not the darkness of 1984, is the Brave New World.
Hey, don’t bogart that joint dude.
R.D. Walker :
Date: October 20, 2009
By the way, I am not arguing that the federal government shouldn’t acquiesce to state laws regarding marijuana; it should. I am simply pointing out that the left supports civil liberties only to the extent that they don’t challenge the power of the state.
RUDE JUDE :
Date: October 20, 2009
I totally get your drift R.D. and I agree.
MadBrad :
Date: October 20, 2009
Correct. The government thrives on the addictions of others, regardless of what they are. American Marijuana Growers need to learn the lesson being taught to them by the Poppy growers in Afghanistan. Should the government ever discover people growing weed and buying firearms with their earnings we could expect a reversal in this policy.
What a joke. I’m glad he’s out there doing it to himself. Then again, all he is doing here is trying to be sure that he will carry California in 2012.
R.D. Walker :
Date: October 20, 2009
Also: Obama is subverting of the rule of law by refusing to enforce the law, and particularly to announce that unenforcement will be administration policy. Want to bet that wherever federal gun laws are more restrictive than state laws, Obama’s Justice Department will scrupulously and enthusiastically enforce those laws?
MadBrad :
Date: October 20, 2009
The Law is enforced selectively, therefore it is moot.
People who care what is written in the U.S. Code are fools. The U.S. Code is a tool to keep Slaves in line. The Chief Law Enforcement Officer of the United States believes our Constitution is defective, this Nation is defective and that HE and HIS friends ARE the cure for all that ails American Society. I have no respect for them or their Laws. Compliance is an activity of Slaves this day and age.
R.D. Walker :
Date: October 20, 2009
“I have no respect for them or their Laws.”
You and Obama have that in common.
R.D. Walker :
Date: October 20, 2009
MadBrad :
Date: October 20, 2009
My life is MUCH more important than any tool designed to destroy it. Respect is due when it is given. The Law I follow was given to Moses and no attorney is required to interpret it even though MANY do everything they can to criminalize it. They are the perverts, not me.
MadBrad :
Date: October 20, 2009
FURTHERMORE…
Any Code of Law that makes it legal to murder babies in a land where Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness is supposed to be held sacred is a perversion not worthy of respect by free people with any intelligence.
MadBrad :
Date: October 20, 2009
The BIG difference between me, Obama and his associated thugs engaging in THEIR criminal enterprise is that THEY selectively ignore the Law for PERSONAL GAIN.
I ignore the Law because it has become destructive to my GOD GIVEN Rights and my life. I have nothing to gain but a Prison Sentence and my self respect for being so bold as to declare my Liberty from Tyrants.
REFERENCES…
Believe me, dear Sir: there is not in the British empire a man who more cordially loves a union with Great Britain than I do. But, by the God that made me, I will cease to exist before I yield to a connection on such terms as the British Parliament propose; and in this, I think I speak the sentiments of America.
—Thomas Jefferson, November 29, 1775
When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s GOD entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.