Attorney General Eric Holder has announced, as expected, that the Department of Justice will not let Proposition 19, which would legalize marijuana in California, stop them from waging the War on Drugs Which Are Less Harmful Than Alcohol and Nicotine in their never ending effort to fill up prisons across the nation. I expected that response from the Feds.
I’ve been browsing through some Tea Party sites and other forums in California and what I didn’t expect was the knee-jerk opposition to Proposition 19 from them. It seems an ideal issue for the Tea Party people. The federal government taking away the rights of the local people of California by imposing big government wasteful spending.
When the Tea Party people speak in generalities I sometimes like their ideas. When they get into specific issues, however, they are repulsive, hypocritical morons.
I’ve avoided commenting on Tea Party policies because I’m not convinced they’re organized enough to have a coherent policy. That is, I have trouble imagining a sentence I could write that begins “The Tea Party believes…” that ends in any useful observation about Tea Partiers.
The media has been quick to talk to anyone who claims to be in charge at the Tea Party, and left wing pundits have been looking for all kinds of sinister people they can claim are backing the Tea Party, but I think that, like most outsider political movements, a lot of it is spontaneous, unplanned, and decentralized. Not that right wing politicians wasted any time trying to take charge, or at least look like they’re in charge.
There’s certainly no central organization, yet, on the local level, they do emulate the usual party structures such as making for/against statements about issues. To see what the Tea Party “believes”, or, as I prefer to think of it, supports, you need to go check out the local websites and forums and see what the consensus seems to be.
What they “believe” and what they (by consensus) “support” are often very different, as in this case. They “believe” in smaller government, yet “support” more police crackdowns for marijuana.