Barack Obama Says Accurate, Boring Things About Weed, Daily Caller Hears Call For Dictatorship

David Remnick wrote a million or so words about Barack Obama in the  New Yorker  this week, and several of those words were about the loco weed. And what did The POTUS say about the pot for us?

“As has been well documented, I smoked pot as a kid, and I view it as a bad habit and a vice, not very different from the cigarettes that I smoked as a young person up through a big chunk of my adult life. I don’t think it is more dangerous than alcohol.”

Now where would he get a ridiculous idea like that? Doesn't he know about all the people who stab or shoot whole families while high on the pot?

Ah, but is it less dangerous than demon liquor, Mr. President? And because this is a New Yorker profile, we get some profiley stuff before we get the answer:

Obama leaned back and let a moment go by. That’s one of his moves. When he is interviewed, particularly for print, he has the habit of slowing himself down, and the result is a spool of cautious lucidity. He speaks in paragraphs and with moments of revision.

And now that we all have an insight into the man's mind, we will get the answer, with a side of gravitas and a soupçon of equivocation:

Less dangerous, he said, “in terms of its impact on the individual consumer. It’s not something I encourage, and I’ve told my daughters I think it’s a bad idea, a waste of time, not very healthy.”

In other words, Barack Obama is every single Boomer parent who smoked the stuff and knows it's not going to turn you into a slavering axe-murderer fiend (sorry, Nancy Grace ), but also doesn't want to see his kids spending all their time listening to Pink Floyd and slumming around wearing "Bong Hits 4 David Brooks" t-shirts. Kind of a realist almost.

And as far as actual policy goes, he notes that marijuana laws don't get enforced the same for everyone:

“Middle-class kids don’t get locked up for smoking pot, and poor kids do,” he said. “And African-American kids and Latino kids are more likely to be poor and less likely to have the resources and the support to avoid unduly harsh penalties.” But, he said, “we should not be locking up kids or individual users for long stretches of jail time when some of the folks who are writing those laws have probably done the same thing.”

It was very kind and generous of Obama to give the Daily Caller something to whine about; Neil Munro is already out this morning with a piece headlined "HOPE AND CHANGE: Obama uses racial politics to justify marijuana legalization." Why must you be so divisive by noticing documentable facts like that, Barack Obama? Whatever happened to being president of all the people, huh? Haven't you considered the likelihood that these disparities in enforcement simply reflect the higher tendency of The Blacks toward criminality? (Just look at how high their arrest rates on drug charges are, for instance.)

In any case, Obama says that he's cool with legalization in Colorado and Washington, and maybe even elsewhere:

“it’s important for it to go forward because it’s important for society not to have a situation in which a large portion of people have at one time or another broken the law and only a select few get punished.”

Since the piece was published before the NFL playoffs were finished, Obama was not asked to speculate on the possibility that God was sending a pro-legalization message with His choice of Denver and Seattle for the Super Bowl this year.

Even so, Obama also thinks that folks who talk as if legalization will make everything a happy hippie dreamworld with organic farms and Peter Max posters everywhere just might have some unrealistic expectations:

“Having said all that, those who argue that legalizing marijuana is a panacea and it solves all these social problems I think are probably overstating the case. There is a lot of hair on that policy. And the experiment that’s going to be taking place in Colorado and Washington is going to be, I think, a challenge.”

This is clearly a man who has at some time in his life been cornered by someone at a street fair and harangued about the wonders of industrial hemp.

And, of course, he's aware that legalizing pot could lead to man-on-dog weddings, because that argument has to be addressed:

“I also think that, when it comes to harder drugs, the harm done to the user is profound and the social costs are profound. And you do start getting into some difficult line-drawing issues. If marijuana is fully legalized and at some point folks say, Well, we can come up with a negotiated dose of cocaine that we can show is not any more harmful than vodka, are we open to that? If somebody says, We’ve got a finely calibrated dose of meth, it isn’t going to kill you or rot your teeth, are we O.K. with that?”

Which would probably be a more serious concern if pot were as addictive as meth, cocaine, or, for that matter, vodka, but sure, he's president, and now he's at least nodded to the fear that legalizing weed will inevitably lead the entire country to turn into the restroom of Studio 54 in 1978.

But Neil Munro has the best synthesis of what all that back-and-forth on marijuana really means, because he is excellent at doing logic:

Obama’s zig-zag response, however, doesn’t necessarily indicate ambivalence on his support of marijuana legalization.

Instead, it may reflect his usual strategy of zig-zagging towards his goal of imposing more control of Americans’ economic and civic life by university-credentialed progressives.

That's because Obama said something earlier in the interview, in discussing gay marriage, about politics being a matter of not charging at things in a straight line, but of tacking like a sailboat. Which inevitably means elitist tyranny, because only Kennedys know how sailboats work, and somehow removing restrictions on marijuana equals socialistic government control of our lives.

[ New Yorker via Salon / Daily Caller ]