Marijuana legalization is likely to be an issue
in the 2016 presidential elections candidates in both party’s
primaries will use to differentiate themselves from each other. And
Joe Biden, who recently said he couldn’t see any “obvious” reason
he shouldn’t run for president, wants potential voters to know he’s
an old school tough on crime Democrat.
Via Time:
In the Senate, Biden was on the forefront of the
Democratic Party’s war on crime, authoring or co-sponsoring
legislation that created the federal “drug czar” and mandatory
minimum sentencing for marijuana and the sentencing disparity for
crack and powder cocaine.“I am not only the guy who did the crime bill and the drug czar,
but I’m also the guy who spent years when I was chairman of the
Judiciary Committee and chairman of [the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee] trying to change drug policy relative to cocaine, for
example, crack and powder,” Biden says.
Biden told Time the White House’s marijuana policy is
“still not legalization” while paying lip service to the idea that
the federal government shouldn’t focus on busting marijuana
smokers. No shit, Mr. Vice President, and politicians from both
parties who think coming out against something that the federal
government isn’t doing anyway in some way dampens their
full-throttled support for a federally-funded and mandated drug war
that destroys thousands of lives and families every year over
essentially non-violent, consensual behavior.
That crime bill that makes Joe Biden
so great committed $10 billion in federal spending on prisons
and $13 billion on local cops. As a senator, Biden also pushed
bills
escalating the war on ecstasy and other club drugs, expanding
asset-forfeiture laws, and making the drug war more awful in
any way he
could imagine. We should be thankful, I guess, that he doesn’t
seem a particularly imaginative person.
On the drug war, as in foreign policy, where former Defense
Secretary Bob Gates went so far as to say Biden had never been
right in 25 years, the vice president represents some of the very
worst the Democratic party has to offer, mixing stupid policies
with shallow intentions. And while the idea that he could win his
party’s nomination seems laughable, especially running against
someone with Hillary Clinton’s name recognition, no vice president
interested in his party’s nomination for president has been denied
it since Ablen Barkley, Harry Truman’s vice president, in 1952. He
was 74 at the time. His campaign ended at the national convention
in Chicago when a
statement from several labor union leaders came out and said
what everyone was thinking: that he was too old. Biden turns 74
next year, but it’s not his old age that ought to disqualify him as
a candidate but his old and tired thinking. Will any Democrat come
out and say it?
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