After decades as one of America’s most vicious and uncompromising drug warriors — and three years of promising to become less vicious and more compromising — US president Joe Biden finally took action.

On October 6, he announced pardons for thousands of Americans convicted in federal court of “simple marijuana possession,” urged governors to do likewise at the state level, and ordered a review of the federal “Schedule I” status that, contrary to reality, treats marijuana as a narcotic with “no currently accepted medical use.”

Why now? Well, it’s October of an election year, and Biden’s the kind of politician who keeps simple, easy, popular deliverables in his pocket until he believes they’ll produce positive impacts at the polls for him or his party.

It’s no coincidence that the Democratic Party’s candidates in all five close (even “toss-up”) elections for US Senate (Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin) support legalizing cannabis. Biden’s move could could conceivably seal the deal with thousands of voters in elections that may come down to recounts.

“October surprises” come in all flavors. The surprise on my part is mild rather than extra hot, but it’s still a welcome move in the right direction, and consistent with Biden’s recent conversion to the position that “no one should be in jail just for using or possessing marijuana.”

No one should be in jail for growing or selling marijuana either.

Perhaps this move will get a bandwagon rolling toward the day when cannabis is treated like any other common plant — pick a few seedlings up at Walmart, try to remember to water them, and maybe put one on your desk at work.

The devil, unfortunately, is in the details. If the “review” of marijuana’s “scheduling” results in it being removed from that system altogether, good deal. If it locks marijuana up in the Food and Drug Administration’s approval and doctor prescription/permission systems, on the other hand, it could actually be a step backward, wrecking existing freer state regimes on both the medical and recreational fronts.

Nothing short of complete federal legalization — including a “hands off” mandate on the FDA — makes any moral or practical sense.

If you vote, let candidates who support moving in that direction know why you’re supporting them, and candidates who want to keep the war on drugs rolling along why they’re not getting your vote. We can’t count on little “October surprises” to get this job done.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

In every election cycle, one or more candidates for public office end up getting publicly dragged through the mud over alleged past non-political actions. Sometimes the allegations are true. Sometimes they aren’t. When they are true, they’re sometimes really terrible — and, given the candidate’s policy positions, indicative of hypocrisy — and sometimes blown out of proportion. Sometimes the scandal costs the candidate an election; other times it merely stains the elected official’s reputation.

The current poster child for that phenomenon is, of course, Herschel Walker, Republican nominee for US Senate from Georgia. In the course of his campaign, the “Christian, family values, pro-life candidate” has ended up admitting to fathering three children outside the confines of his marriages and now stands accused of encouraging, supporting, and paying for at least one abortion.

I understand why the GOP recruited Walker to run for Senate. He’s got (and deserves) great positive name recognition, especially in Georgia, for his career in football.  His public political positions prior to running clearly fell within the Republican ambit. What wasn’t to like?

Well, let’s be honest: There were signs long prior to his candidacy that he might not be the wisest choice. His first wife publicly accused him of domestic violence circa 2001. He wrote a 2008 book on mental illness. Not on mental illness in general, but on his own diagnosis of dissociative identity disorder, in which he described possessing a dozen distinct identities/personalities.

I guess Republicans might consider 12 senators for the price of electing one a darn good deal. Then again, if half of them are Democrats, it’s a wash, right?

Given the skeletons already released from Walker’s closet, it was a safe bet he had more of them still locked away, and that some of them would get out once he decided to run for US Senate.

We ALL probably have a few skeletons in our closets. Things we’d rather everyone didn’t know. Things we don’t talk about unless we have to. Things we’d find embarrassing, and that would damage our own reputations, if they pranced out and started dancing around in public.

But we’re not running for US Senate, so we don’t have to worry about that.

Herschel Walker IS running for US Senate, so he does.

Life hack: Don’t want your dirty laundry aired in public? Don’t run for public office.

If you feel like you have to run for public office (you don’t; plenty of other people are willing to), sit down with your campaign staff and discuss every embarrassing incident in your life from junior high school on, truthfully and completely, so they can at least have a plan for dealing with the coming live action re-enactment of Walt Disney’s 1929 animated short, “The Skeleton Dance.”

No one is really qualified to be a US Senator. The position shouldn’t exist. Giving some people power over other people’s lives is always a bad idea.

But some people are even more unqualified for the job than others. Herschel Walker seems to be one of them.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

“GOP Needs to Leave Trump Behind on Trade” proclaimed the Wall Street Journal opinion page on October 3.   The Cato Institute’s Jeb Hensarling offered “a refresher course on the dangers of protectionism” to Republicans who have yet to reckon with the economic losses stemming from Trump’s full-throated embrace of tariffs — or to reconcile their abandonment of Reagan’s free-trade rhetoric with talking points about “freedom of speech, free enterprise and the freedom to bear arms.”

I’m not holding my breath. The Bush administration’s foreign policy blunders haven’t impelled the GOP to rediscover the noninterventionism of its earlier Congressional leaders such as Robert Alphonso Taft Sr., Howard Homan Buffett and Mark Hatfield.  (Hensarling cites Adam Smith’s “national-security exceptions to the free-trade rule,” making a concession to current Sinophobia. Hopefully a revived Adam Smith wouldn’t take exception to Tetris, dubbed “glasnost in a computer game” by AMIGA Plus magazine in 1989,  as exemplary of the exchange across the Iron Curtain that thawed the Cold War.)

That conservatives would neglect their traditions worth preserving is at least understandable in the short-memory world of partisan politics.  Far more puzzling is why the trade policies of the Trump Tower landlord live rent-free in the heads of those who purport to despise everything he stands for.

There have been some sharp jabs at Trump’s views on trade: During his first month in office, Vox’s “Zero-sum Trump” took a deep dive into Donald’s deep obliviousness to the gains from trade in markets with more room to grow than NYC’s tightly regulated real estate.  Yet the issue barely registered in the contentious half-decade since.

Perhaps it was simply lost in the noise.  Or the left-of-center may have gotten too used to demonizing Reagan to grasp the magnitude of the shift from “tear down this wall” to “build the wall.” Bernie Sanders told Vox that immigration freedom was “a right-wing proposal” which “would make everybody in America poorer” a month into Trump’s campaign.

Sanders should have taken a page from Noam Chomsky’s 2007 tome What We Say Goes, which observed that “Cuba and Venezuela are doing exactly what we were all taught we’re supposed to do in graduate courses in economics: they’re pursuing their comparative advantage.”  Over a century earlier, Vilfredo Pareto had noted that “the workers of [England] enjoy much greater well-being than the workers of the European continent” due to free trade making food affordable, and Benjamin Tucker made a socialist case against “the tariff monopoly.”

At the end of George W. Bush’s first term, libertarian author James Bovard explained that “the notion of ‘free trade’ — but only with nationalities that American politicians bless — is a charade. This is like proclaiming freedom of the press, and then adding that people can buy books only from publishers specifically approved by the U.S. Congress.”  How many election cycles will it take for American voters to see through the sham?

New Yorker Joel Schlosberg is a senior news analyst at The William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

1. “The Left Needs to Leave Trump Behind on Trade” by Joel Schlosberg, OpEdNews, October 15, 2022