Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson and the rest of the Religious Right.
“Illuminati”?
Anyone interested in this thread might want to check out another GD thread I just started:
“Nader and Buchanan find common ground?”
Yes, a self-annointed intelligensia who look upon themselves as endowed with a supremacy to lord over the proletariat.
At the moment, Razorsharp, that would be the neoconservatives. Heute die Welt, morgens das Sonnensystem! Fnord!
Which leads us right back to the premise of “Six of one, half doxen of another”. Anyway, back to a point I made earlier, do you think that the Clinton administration was right in evoking federal law to prohibit the citizens of Arizona and California from using marijuana for medicinal purposes?
No, I don’t – but only because I’m pro-legalization of marijuana, not because I question the legitimacy of the federal government’s involvement in such questions. In fact, ideally I would like to see weed legalized by Congressional fiat in every state including those whose state governments are too conservative to consider the idea. Politically impossible, of course. And there’s no constitutional way to do it, not unless SCOTUS decides the Constitution’s implicit “penumbra of personal privacy” they recognized in Roe v. Wade is so broad that it extends to deciding what substances you can put in your body. Which isn’t going to happen in this decade or the next. sigh
The legitimacy of the federal government’s involvement is beside the point. The Clinton administration had the option to stay out of it, but instead, choose to interject the Fed’s involvement and threaten the citizens of Arizona and California with prosecution of federal law. I bet that really came as a shock to the members of NORML, who, I bet, voted 100% for Clinton.
As I have been trying to point out, and to the premise of the OP, it’s six of one, half dozen of another. The Democratic party is just fooling its constituency that it is the party of personal freedom and choice. Only when it suits the powers-that-be. Otherwise, the sentiments of freedom and choice be damned. Every knee shall bow.
So . . . where does that leave us? Do you think we shouldn’t go to the polls at all because voting only encourages them? Or is there a third-party movement out there you support? And how do you feel about electoral-system reforms designed to open the field to third parties, such as instant-runoff voting, ballot fusion, and proportional representation? (We’ve had GD threads on all of these – I started several of them.)
– On that note, see current GD thread, “What do you think about proportional representation in the US House of Reps?” – http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=261571