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“The roar you hear, Mr. President, is the gay community
saying, in unison, ‘If LBJ had been as timid about civil
rights as you are about gay rights, do you think you’d
be signing this memorandum in the Oval Office today?
No, you’d be lucky to have a job washing dishes in the
White House kitchen’.”
With a sigh of relief, the election was over and hope was a welcome fragrance after the smell of the past eight years. The sad state of the economy would finally be addressed in earnest. The hard work of folks, prepared to evacuate, successfully prevented a new totalitarian regime. Finally, hateful voices were drowned out by cheers of joy. But wait! There’s more! Those hateful voices were only drowned out, they never went away. They are seething and even more hateful now. Words broadcast from hate radio, right wing blogs, and a certain ultra right wing television network, are actually endorsing a revolution inside their own country. They want a civil war.
Again, these extremists are not satisfied with just being bullies, they want to be conquerors. They see themselves as warriors for their narrow, frightening dogma. A recent Op Ed from New York Times columnist Charles M Blow has described the problem.
They’re (Right Wing) apocalyptic. They feel isolated, angry, betrayed and besieged. And some of their “leaders” seem to be trying to mold them into militias.
Glenn Beck, keeps warning of an impending insurrection by saying that he believes that we are heading for “depression” and “revolution” and then gaming out that revolution on his show last month. “Think the unthinkable”
Representative Michele Bachmann of Minnesota, urged her fellow Minnesotans to be “armed and dangerous,”
As the comedian Bill Maher pointed out, strong language can poison weak minds, as it did in the case of Timothy McVeigh. (We sometimes forget that not all dangerous men are trained by Al Qaeda.)
Then counter argument to Charles Blow’s editorial comes from Rick Moran of The American Thinker:
Blowhard NY Times contributor a paranoid loon (Updated)
Perhaps he (Charles Blow) is the official liberal hand wringer. Or maybe he is the designated hysteria monger for the left.
Whatever he does, it is apparent he needs a change of underpants after trying to scare the crap out of the left with visions of bloody revolution, right wing terrorism, and conservative mobs running amuck:
Mr. Blowhard is a liar. If he read more conservative commentary than what he has linked above, I will eat my William F. Buckley Memorial Skimmer. If he had, he would not have had a column to write. No one at NRO has called for a “revolution.” No one at The Weekly Standard has written anything remotely resembling a tract that pronouces conservatives “isolated, betrayed, and besieged. I haven’t even heard Rush Limbaugh urging conservatives to pick up a pitchfork and head to Washington. Nor has Mr. Blow read American Thinker, Pajamas Media, Powerline, Hot Air, Instapundit, Hugh Hewitt, Townhall, Outside the Beltway, or most of the other top 50 conservative blogs that, if not always objective in tone and substance, certainly fall far short of advocating or promoting “revolution” or “garbled facts” or “twisted logic” and most especially “veiled” hate speech.
To my mind, there is little difference between Beck and Blow - neither ventures to argue using a logical framework for discussion nor do either of those two gentlemen grant their political opponents any legitimacy whatsoever.
So, as the controversy continues. Each side will expose the extreme words of the other by using quotes, distorting content and emphasizing the worst scenarios. As much as I want to see America pull to the middle, I feel the alignment still needs work. I hear the words, too often, “We want Obama to fail”! Republicans in both houses of congress are bound and determined to obstruct Obama’s agenda any way they can. What totally eludes me is that it is not about personal agenda anymore, we just escaped from that mindset. This is about saving America. That’s where all of us live. The America we have sold to the world for so long, is why so many “Illegal Immigrants” risk everything to get here. They bought the advertisement, and now America has become expert at ‘bait and switch’. To save America we have to accomodate laws that address the unattended disparities that have become a nightmare. Immigration needs a lot of attention because it is related to the ragged economy. Drugs are another grand bait and switch issue. Drugs are fine as long as the right people profit. FDA and Big Pharma kill just as dead as crack and heroin. Education is a mess because it is too expensive for too many, and too few students take education seriously enough to compete with other countries. Why else would we have to import so many scientists and engineers? America has mined the brains of other countries to maintain its competitive edge on the world market since WWII. Now, Americans are embarrased when many return to their native countries to compete with us.
With my own ears and eyes, hateful rhetoric is tolerated in my own region. Hearing hateful and threatening commentary, I admit cowardice and remain silent for fear of bringing attention to my disagreement. Reason and deeper logic, where are you? Trying to have an educated dialog is out of the question. Most of the vociferous haters distrust anyone who tries to open constructive dialog … “git yer guns and dogs, lets join the militia”. This confirms my fears and endorses my silence. After all this country has been through lately, civil war is not an option.
The origins of Right and Left wings of politics began in the French Revolution. America has modified these terms to describe two sides of the political/philosophical spectrum. The extremes of each side appear to resist discussion. The only hope is for more moderate voices outnumber the extremes. I listen to the right extreme and they listen to the left extreme, and somewhere in the center there must be US!.
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In the abstract, the answer is: “Of course not.” And naturally, law and criminality are frameworks for abstract thought. If it were purely a legal decision of whether we go after the Bush crime syndicate, it would be just as easy as it would be if it were merely a partisan issue. Go for it. Unfortunately, it’s never that simple.
OBAMA: We’re still evaluating how we’re going to approach the whole issue of interrogations, detentions, and so forth. And obviously we’re going to be looking at past practices and I don’t believe that anybody is above the law. On the other hand I also have a belief that we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards. And part of my job is to make sure that for example at the CIA, you’ve got extraordinarily talented people who are working very hard to keep Americans safe. I don’t want them to suddenly feel like they’ve got to spend all their time looking over their shoulders and lawyering (up).
Greenwald is unimpressed, likewise Digby. Mind you, they are looking at things from an admittedly ideological/partisan lens, but their conclusion that even looking for a compromised centric position on blatant violations of Constitutional and International Law principles — running from the left as all Democratic leaders instinctively do — is that Obama’s approach is fundamentally flawed. But if America wanted assurances that all corporatists, constitution shredders and torturers would be put up against the wall, we’d have elected Dennis Kucinich or at least John Edwards.
Elections have consequences, but even the victors have to acknowledge at the end of the day that Obama is Pat Buchanan and Tom DeLay’s president too.
From a partisan perspective, it is a losing cause to think that by acting “reasonable” (read: accepting Right wing framing) you will win over conservatives to support, or at least not thwart your agenda. I’m not just talking about the Hannitys and Limbaughs or even “Cigar Dave” who insists that B. Hussein Osama [sic] will invite al Queada to tea at the White House — but also to think that the Village Courtiers in Washington will blythely go along with anything that smacks of liberalism without being persuaded the alternative presents a moral imperitive on a par with their insistence that terror suspects are fair game for torture.
However, it is not a partisan issue whether we investigate and prosecute members of the Bush administration for their crimes. Not really. It is a political decision to be sure, but not a right/left issue. Just as any prosecutor in this country is invested with nearly unfettered discretion on their decision whether or not to bring charges against a suspect — and under what circumstances and at what time — what the Obama administration does is about whether they are willing to invest his enormous political capital into transformative change or engage in retribution. The political calculus may require that he cannot do both, at least for now — at least that’s the decision the smoke-signals from Camp Obama seem to indicate he’s made.
That doesn’t mean that members of both the right and the left won’t reenact the Sturm and Drang we always do over this — and all of us will be convinced that Obama isn’t one of us no matter what he does. Maybe that’s a consequence of leadership of a nation this diverse and as vocal as we all are about it. Bush was disavowed by the true-believers on the right some years ago, crystalizing the moment he thought about appointing Harriet Meirs to the Supreme Court and didn’t round up anyone with a Mexican accent lacking a green card.
Note how “concerned” the right is with protection of (at least) American lives as they defend what can be argued are crimes against humanity. Beyond the elitist view of American exceptionalism this betrays, it also highlights the bullying nature of the conservative mindset. Just as their anti-abortion/abstinence-only stance has the fringe benefit of saving innocent lives while perpetuating male domination of women (that’s the feature, not the bug), environmental and consumer protections, food and drug regulation, occupational safety as well as anti-discrimination laws all protect American lives everywhere. The reason they scoff at such measures yet champion torture and war in the name of shielding us all from danger is that it gives them a chance to show just how tough they are.
One thing that would do immeasurable damage to their chest-thumping culture would be to set an example at the highest level that their kind of ends-justifying-means, Jack Bauer approach to national security is punishable by law. But that’s the whole point, isn’t it?
America’s Second wasted effort, the War on Drugs. This war represents a giant contradiction within the realm of Civil Laws. Enforcing a law against the most basic human endeavor to assuage mind-body conflict, is wasted effort. From the beginning of human time, people have used mental or physical altering substances for medicine or recreation. Right or wrong, if those substances don’t effect the welfare of their social unit, they only impact the user.
The acceptance of capitalism has intruded on many primal needs and replaced them with wants, courtesy of corporate or political marketing. Money is now the object of the game. Corporations cannot make money by appealing to needs that don’t include buying product. Underground capitalism fills primal needs for mind or body altering substances. The CEOs of underground capitalism provide 
products that are banned by laws intended to control primal needs, they are the Drug Lords. Prohibition failed because the wasted effort to control desired substances was too costly. American capitalism has not learned its lesson. Alcohol is the most popular mind-body altering substance in America, and much of the world. Alcohol manufacturers are now among the elite of American corporations. Their products provide acceptable solice for anything desired … relief from a hard day at work or play, social events, you name it and there is an excuse to drink alcohol. There are now studies that confirm alcohol products have medicinal properties.
Cannabis is a similar substance to alcohol, with multiple manufacturing uses besides recreation and medicine. America’s War on Drugs is BIG BUSINESS! Whole political, industrial and medical programs revolve around fighting import, sale and use of cannabis. The cost for this effort far exceeds the war on alcohol from 1920 to 1933. Twelve years of alcohol prohibition allowed America to rely on “law breaking” capitalists, we now call them Racketeers, Mafiosos or Bootleggers who profited from providing consumers what they desired. These ‘underground capitalists’ made the fortunes that would have helped the US Government and Americans, if alcohol had stayed legal. Prohibition forced the ‘underground economy’ to flourish for 13 years.
Wiki: Many social problems have been attributed to the Prohibition era. A profitable, often violent, black market for alcohol flourished. Racketeering happened when powerful gangs corrupted law enforcement agencies. Stronger liquor surged in popularity because its potency made it more profitable to smuggle. The cost of enforcing Prohibition was high, and the lack of tax revenues on alcohol (some $500 million annually nationwide) affected government coffers. When repeal of Prohibition occurred in 1933, organized crime lost nearly all of its black market alcohol profits in most states (states still had the right to enforce their own laws concerning alcohol consumption), because of competition with low-priced alcohol sales at legal liquor stores.
The same condition applies today concerning cannabis, pot, marijuana.
The U.S. federal government spent over $19 billion dollars in 2003 on the War on Drugs, at a rate of about $600 per second. The budget has since been increased by over a billion dollars.
Today’s American economy is in dire peril. Wasting billions of dollars on fighting Cannabis usage is just plain stupid when looking at the BIG picture. Drunk drivers cost Americans billions of dollars in life and property loss, but, this fact is treated with less importance than catching someone with a baggie of “weed”.
At the end of Prohibition some supporters openly admitted its failure. A quote from a letter, written in 1932 by wealthy industrialist John D. Rockefeller, Jr., states:
When Prohibition was introduced, I hoped that it would be widely supported by public opinion and the day would soon come when the evil effects of alcohol would be recognized. I have slowly and reluctantly come to believe that this has not been the result. Instead, drinking has generally increased; the speakeasy has replaced the saloon; a vast army of lawbreakers has appeared; many of our best citizens have openly ignored Prohibition; respect for the law has been greatly lessened; and crime has increased to a level never seen before.[14]
Some historians have commented that the alcohol industry accepted stronger regulation of alcohol in the decades after repeal, as a way to reduce the chance that 
Prohibition would return.[15]just to
Many Americans, today, are complacent about Cannabis use. It the acceptable alternative to alcohol. Some Americans even flaunt their ability to use cannabis in public without incident. Politicians, celebrities and ordinary Americans use it for recreation or medication. Law enforcement often make arrests improve their statistics … the “weekly roundup of users” can make them look good in the media. This is not to be confused with manufacturers of Methamphetamines and other exotic chemicals to addict and “waste” their consumers. This is not to be confused with Heroin, however, heroin also has medicinal properties that can be regulated for public funds if categorized as a pharmaceutical.
Cannabis as medication has been tested over and over by factions both for and against its use. American pharmaceutical industry only approves its use if THEY can profit from it, likewise for States. The Federal Government has a lot of money at stake from enforcement to industry. Politicians use War on Drugs as a tried and true campaign platform. Ever wonder who really profits from this expensive war? Drug Lords, themselves, have invested in this industry to legitimize their operations, just like Bootleggers had ties to the same law enforcement commited to arrest them.
Controversy will abound until the US Government re-evaluates it’s investment in their self propagating, wasteful efforts, aimed at the Marijuana Industry version of Underground Capitalism. It is time to re-think America’s strategy.
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The American Medical Marijuana Association
