"The Drug War is about control."

"Obama likes control."

And here's the NYT reporting on the way the Obama administration is supposedly mulling over what to do about Colorado and Washington.

Some law enforcement officials, alarmed at the prospect that marijuana users in both states could get used to flouting federal law openly, are said to be pushing for a stern response. But such a response would raise political complications for President Obama because marijuana legalization is popular among liberal Democrats who just turned out to re-elect him.

It's all about Obama!

(Why didn't I have a tag "Obama and drugs" before? All that "choom" stuff and so on....)

ADDED: Meade riffs on Obama and hope and segues into "pocketful of hope... money for dope... money for rope..." and I find the old John Lennon song in my iTunes:

No short-haired, yellow-bellied, son of Tricky Dicky
Is gonna Mother Hubbard soft soap me
With just a pocketful of hope
Money for dope
Money for rope 

That makes me think about and "10 For 2: John Sinclair Freedom Rally" which took place in Ann Arbor in 1971 — where I was in town, listening to the live feed on the radio — and John Lennon himself showed up and that "inspired the creation of Ann Arbor’s annual pro-legalization Hash Bash rally, which continues to be held as of 2012."

40 years ago. Obama was 10. It was the year Obama returned from Indonesia to Honolulu to live with his grandparents and go to prep school. As David Maraniss tells it:

A self-selected group of boys at Punahou School who loved basketball and good times called themselves the Choom Gang. 180 Choom is a verb, meaning “to smoke marijuana.” As a member of the Choom Gang, Barry Obama was known for starting a few pot-smoking trends. The first was called “TA,” short for “total absorption.” To place this in the physical and political context of another young man who would grow up to be president, TA was the antithesis of Bill Clinton’s claim that as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford he smoked dope but never inhaled. When you were with Barry and his pals, if you exhaled precious pakalolo (Hawaiian slang for marijuana, meaning “numbing tobacco”) instead of absorbing it fully into your lungs, you were assessed a penalty and your turn was skipped the next time the joint came around. “Wasting good bud smoke was not tolerated,” explained one member of the Choom Gang, Tom Topolinski, the Chinese-looking kid with a Polish name who answered to Topo.

Obama likes control!