It's Called "Change," You Big Dummy!

One thing you have to give Bush and Cheney credit for is bringing some excitement into our lives. You could never tell what hair-brained scheme they might launch next. Their saliva-flecked insanity and depths of stupidity kept us guessing, and they never lost that magic capacity to baffle and surprise us. "Shock 'n' Awe" was just the beginning.

But recently I've noticed that even political junkies are suddenly yawning. The intensity of conversation has dropped off except among primitive humanoids like Michelle Bachman and Sean Hannity, and we're already bored with Obama's timid, unimaginative, weak, wimpy, delicate, anemic, and reflexively conventional embrace of the status quo. "Change," his monotonous and incessant campaign mantra, is now revealed as what he's most afraid of, and this was never more in evidence that at a townhall meeting a couple days ago where our Ken-Doll preznit dismissed any notion of legalizing marijuana with a wink, a nudge, and a giggle.

Now, of course, anyone as much in thrall to established powers as Obama would never challenge the bread-and-butter practices dependent on keeping pot illegal. Hundreds, if not thousands of DEA agents depend for a living on being able to harass and persecute marijuana farmers, and protecting the perks of all the various precincts of the administration's vast and self-perpetuating bureaucracy is Priority One, even if it means ignoring a potentially game-saving revenue source, such as a ten-dollar-per-ounce tax on the harmless giggle that is now this country's richest cash crop.

"The answer is, no, I don't think that is a good strategy to grow our economy," Obama said in response to on-line inquiries about whether he might reconsider the Fed's long-standing hostility to legalizing marijuana. But he didn't say a word about why it's "not a good strategy."

Obama's poverty of imagination was further amplified after the meeting by his press secretary Robert Gibbs. "The president opposes the legalization of marijuana," Gibbs told reporters. "He doesn't think that's the right plan for America." Once again, there was no clue concerning the reasons or arguments for this approach to the issue, since there are none. It was the classic "Our minds are made up and that's the end of it" moment.

Maybe Obama will change his mind if he gets glaucoma or when the budget deficit balloons to a quadrillion bucks. Until then, strike a match and light another, and watch out for cops.