THC Change: 58% Now Say Pot Should Be Legalized

THC change. I'm repeating that. I want to make sure you pot-addled stoner burnouts see what I did there.

THC change. Sea Change. Get it? Eh, you'll get it in about five minutes.

Gallup's survey asks, "Do you think the use of marijuana should be made legal, or not?" That leaves open the question of whether commercial production and distribution should be legal as well (as in Colorado and Washington). But other national polls that go beyond marijuana consumption also have found majority support for legalization. In a Reason-Rupe survey last January, for example, 53 percent of respondents said "the government should treat marijuana the same as alcohol." And last month a Public Policy Polling survey in Texas found that 58 percent of respondents either "somewhat" or "strongly" supported "changing Texas law to regulate and tax marijuana similarly to alcohol, where stores would be licensed to sell marijuana to adults 21 and older." The latter finding was especially striking given the state's conservative reputation.

Mary Katherine Ham, who's been a zealous advocate for decriminalization for a while now, got into it with O'Reilly last night.

Video here.

You have to watch this to see how demagogic it is.

O'Reilly played the "You've got a baby. Do you that baby to be smoking pot?" card. Mary Katharine stated that no, she didn't want her kid to smoke pot, but she would exercise parental responsibility to prevent or ameliorate that. He kept telling her she wasn't answering the question, even though she was.

In between O'Reilly's hectoring -- insisting that she didn't mind if her infant smoked pot, and that she wasn't answering his questions (though, you know, she was) -- Mary Katharine managed to state the following:

Freedom is much less likely to be damaging than paternalism in a nanny state.

O'Reilly then promptly informed her she was "babbling."

Let's just note this: The following statement,

Freedom is much less likely to be damaging than paternalism in a nanny state.

...is officially deemed to be "babbling" -- nonsensical, incoherent, and likely due to someone Taking the Pot -- by Bill O'Reilly.

However, she's decided that downside of criminalization greatly outweighs its upside.

For Bill O'Reilly, however, the matter is quite simple: If you are not in favor of a harsh, zero-tolerance War on Drugs to eliminate The Pot (and how's that working, by the way?), then it you must be okay with babies toking on bongs.

Only maximalist hostility to pot, expressed through support of a criminalization regime, counts as being anti-pot. Anything else is Tolerating Evil.

Maybe we should all Tolerate some things we don't actually approve of, in the hopes that our own disapproved-of habits might be tolerated as well.

Now you don't have to agree with Mary Katharine, but you have to concede that O'Reilly's repeated question, essentially "Will you be Smoking the Reefers with your Baby?," is unfair and itself "babbling."

Dumb. Dumb, dumb, dumb. O'Reilly is frequently unfair and dumb, including with people on the left we don't mind seeing getting the unfair and dumb treatment, because, let's be honest, that's their own stock in trade.

But one does notice the unfairness and dumbness when it's one of our own.

Thanks to @rdbrewer4 in the sidebar for this.

posted by Ace at 04:46 PM

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