File this one under #OKsure: Televangelist and all-around dubious individual Pat Robertson has come out in support of the decriminalization of marijuana.
Of course, it’s all the liberals’ fault. Robertson made the following comments on the March 1 episode of the 700 Club. (Many thanks to Tom Angell of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition for providing us with the link fest, lookit this hilarious retraction his network posted when Robertson made similar comments in December!)
Even though these prisoners may have been sentenced by some court for some offense, should they be behind bars? Here’s the thing, we have over 3,000 – the number must be much higher than that, but over 3,000 federal crimes.
And every time the liberals pass a bill, I don’t care what it involves! They stick criminal sanctions on it. They don’t feel that there’s any way that people are going to keep a wall unless they can put them in jail. And so we have the jails that are filled with people who are white collar criminals and I’ve became sort of a hero of the hippie culture I guess when I said I think we ought to decriminalize the possession of marijuana.
I just think it’s shocking how many of these young people wind up in prison and they get turned into hardcore criminals because they had a possession of a very small amount of controlled substance. I mean, the whole thing is crazy! And we’ve said, we’re conservatives, we’re tough on crime – that’s baloney! It’s costing us billions and billions of dollars.
Look at California. California is spending more money on prisons than it spends on schools! I mean there’s something wrong about the equation, there’s something wrong.
Here’s the video itself (start at 20:40 and go until 29:25) — the comments precede a pretty interesting segment on how the NAACP, the Tea Party, and a group called Prison Fellowship, a faith-based counseling group for prisoners and families founded by a Watergate ex-con and one-time Nixon aide.
Despite his classist assertion that white collar criminals shouldn’t get jail time, we’re with ya, homeslice. Hero of the hippie culture, yes you are.
And so, our nominally-progressive president now has a less tenable position on the War on Drugs than one of our country’s head crazies (who — let us not forget despite his newfound stoner ways — was the one who announced that Haiti was hit by those earthquakes in 2010 because it was “cursed” by a “pact to the devil.”)
Holler back, President Obama? Personally, we’d be happy if his attorneys would just stop shutting down our local dispensaries.