“As a cancer survivor, I am particularly susceptible to the wonderful ad in which a woman recovering from breast cancer tries to express her gratitude to the drug companies that saved her life. I know she feels the same gratitude to the doctors, the nurses, the orderlies, the health-insurance company, her best friend, her mother-in-law and many more. I know the gratitude caused by surviving cancer. I just didn’t expect to see it exploited by Big Pharmas to counter all the rotten publicity they’ve been getting for their greedy, blood-sucking, murderous behavior all over the globe.” – Yes, it’s Molly Ivins!
AMERICA THE PURITAN: The Supreme Court’s ruling against medical marijuana was no surprise, and it shouldn’t be held against the Court. The ruling clearly defers to a Congressional statute, which clearly outlaws medical use of marijuana. The problem is with the Congress and the White House who seem determined to deny sick people a genuinely helpful treatment as part of their foolish crusade against even soft drugs like pot. (For a terrific mini-essay on the injustice of this, check out Richard Brookhiser’s piece in National Review Online.) It also seems to me to be a pretty obvious case of conservative hypocrisy on states’ rights. If states like Hawaii or California want to make medical marijuana legal, why should the feds get in the way? D.C. voted for it as well – and we weren’t even allowed to see the results because Bob Barr thought it would be bad for us. This action seems to me to sum up a lot of what’s wrong with contemporary conservatism: it’s hypocritical on federalism when it doesn’t like what states do (remember the Defense of Marriage Act?); it can appear to be callous with respect to some people’s real and genuine needs; it’s illiberal when it denies individual adults freedom of choice in their personal lives. For more on this, and the left’s puritanism as well, check out my piece just posted opposite.
THANKS: For the more than 400 emails in response to my Stanford talk on C-SPAN. I’ll try and respond eventually but cut me some slack, will ya? Also sorry again for the server problem this weekend. We rely on Blogger, and they were AWOL (and still are) from Friday on. These postings are done manually by folks at Fantascope. I hope I’ll be able to post myself soon.
NOT SO SMILEY: Tavis Smiley, the avuncular host of Black Entertainment Television fame had a book-signing in D.C. last week. He’s always come across to me as a fair and balanced commentator, so it was shocking to hear what he had to say. According to the Washington Times, Smiley was a grim-faced version of Al Sharpton. On crime, Smiley observed, “Black man kills a white man, he gets executed, especially in Texas. White man kills a black man, we have riots, like in Cincinnati.” On politics, Smiley opined that Republicans are “determined at all costs to turn back the clock on the progress we’ve made.” He later described black conservatives as “self-hating” and “disturbed.” His broader message for the African-American community? “Every black person should think black first all the time.” Thus the color-blind vision of Dr King is utterly reversed. I thought identity politics couldn’t get more depressing. It just did.
The Dish 