Friedman Wants To Legalize Marijuana
By Vince Leibowitz on Sep 15, 2006 in Kink-Er-Iffic!
Take that makeshift bong out of your bedroom and into the streets! Kinky Friedman wants to legalize marijuana:
Independent gubernatorial candidate Kinky Friedman said Wednesday he favored legalizing marijuana to keep nonviolent users out of prison and said he would push to release those already in prison for the offense to free prison space for more violent criminals.
There is so much wrong with this I don’t know where to start.
First off, this is going to cost Friedman more votes from law-and-order types across the political spectrum than it will gain him from the faux-intellectual-aging-small-
town-hippie-criminal-defense-lawyer sect (which accounts for about .002 percent of the electorate), or any other group that supports legalization.
Second, it sounds more like what Friedman is talking about is more of a “decriminalization” than a “legalization,” although he’s taken it to the max and said “legalization.”
There is a vast gulf separating decriminalization from legalization. Decriminalization would mean less stiff penalities, more rehab, and similar measures. Legalization would mean, in its truest sense of the word, that it’s just out there for sale. That, too, is different from “regulated,” which would be something like they have in Amsterdam, if you can believe everything you see in Pulp Fiction, or possibly, that you could buy it at the corner store like tobacco products.
While decriminalization might be the answer, legalization certainly is not the answer—at least, if you have any desire of getting votes. That is, of course, unless Friedman’s new target is appealing to Libertarian voters.
And, my fears that Kinky Friedman and the Legislature would be in perpetual “stand off” mode if he were elected was also noted by the Star-Telegram:
Acknowledging the Texas governor’s authority is limited compared with executives in other states, Friedman said he would use the bully pulpit of the governor’s office to cajole legislators, whom he said he didn’t trust.
“I do not trust the media either,” he said. “This is a no-brainer right here. The legislators are not the visionary leaders of Texas. We don’t look for them to lead us. Right now the lobbyists are leading us. We have a lack of leadership, a vacuum.
Big, big, big mistake for Friedman. If you want to get something done if Hell freezes over and you are elected, the last thing you should do is criticize the legislature.
In that same interview, Kinky tried to downplay the racist nature of his recent unfortunate comments saying that the black hurricane refugees in Houston from New Orleans were “thugs and crackheads”:
Friedman last week said he would provide $100 million to Houston, or any other city facing similar crime problems, so Houston could hire 1,200 new police officers to deal with crime and weed out the “crackheads and thugs” among the thousands of Katrina evacuees from New Orleans who relocated to Houston.
Roundly criticized as a thinly veiled attack on blacks from Louisiana, Friedman said Wednesday his proposal “was not in any way racist.”
“How can you possibly regret that, telling the truth?” he asked. “I am not a racist, I am a realist. … I never said what color their skin was. …. I’m smarter than that.”
Yet on September 9, 2006, Guillermo X. Garcia with the San Antonio Express-News Staff reported on a question-and-answer session with Kinky and directly quoted him:
In answer to a question, Friedman said the comments do not indicate that he holds racist views. Rather, he said they demonstrate his ability to take on a subject the other candidates won’t touch.
“Racism was here before I came around,” he said. “I am just trying to bring up these issues within the (expletive) society.”
Later, he said: “As it happens, the crackheads and thugs who remain in Houston after Katrina happen to be black; that’s fact.”
This latest lie follows Kinky’s previous lies about his past claims that he vote for Ann Richards and Al Gore and against the Constitutional Amendment rejecting equal marriage rights. Here is one such false claim:
Susannah McNeely: … after your bid for Justice of the Peace in ’86, you said you were leaving “that worthless tar baby that is politics†to the young people. What happened that changed your mind and prompted you to run for governor of Texas?
Kinky Friedman: Nothing changed my mind, that’s still correct. This is not a political campaign. It’s a spiritual one—a spiritual calling.
…
SM: So does this idea of the honorable cowboy have anything to do with why you threw your support behind President Bush in this last election? You did, didn’t you?
KF: Yes. I did in this last election, but I didn’t vote for him the first time.
SM: Who did you vote for in 2000?
KF: I voted for Gore then. I was conflicted. . .but I was not for Bush that time. Since then, though, we’ve become friends. And that’s what’s changed things.
SM: So it’s your friendship with him that’s changed your mind about having him as president more than his specific political positions?
KF: Well, actually, I agree with most of his political positions overseas, his foreign policy. On domestic issues, I’m more in line with the Democrats. I basically think he played a poor hand well after September 11. What he’s been doing in the Near East and in the Middle East, he’s handling that well, I think.
Kinky statements about his past votes have proven false based on Kinky’s public Kerr County voting records:
“Quite often, I did not like my choices,” Friedman was quoted as saying in Friday’s Dallas Morning News….
“The voting record doesn’t look strong, but my voting record is better than Dick Cheney’s,” he said….
According to Kerr County voting records, Friedman voted in the 2004 presidential general election but not in any other contest since 1994.
As a “faux-intellectual-aging-small-
town-hippie-criminal-defense-lawyer” he had me at hello.
But my “aged-baptist-union-redneck-small town-Democrats for 50 years” in-laws are supporting him because they have seen too many of their kids ruined by drugs and they are ready to try something else besides sending them to jail.
[...] Original post by Vince Leibowitz and software by Elliott Back [...]
Thank you for inviting us to join you over at the Texas Bloggers section of the Democratic Party’s website. That was very nice of you!
However, since I am a diehard Kinky supporter, I think it would only irritate people if I began to participate over there [even though I support ALL other Democratic candidates on the ballot].
Keep up the good work. I have to have my daily dose of Capitol Annex.