Sometimes you see the cutest li’l headlines in that Media Matters for America box I have on the right sidebar:
On the July 15 edition of Fox News’ Hannity & Colmes, co-host Sean Hannity called an underground marijuana factory a “secret liberal lab”:
HANNITY: Finally tonight, college has long been called an institution of higher learning. But it seems that some people, well, they may be taking that a bit too far. Now, contractors working on a water main project on the Long Island campus of the State University of New York discovered a massive underground — get this — marijuana facility. A factory, actually.
They found three massive underground tanks, each 60 feet long, 10 feet high, each with about 100 marijuana plants growing inside. The university’s plumbing and electric lines had been tapped into the water to heat the plants, and the tanks were accessible by a homemade hatch door and a ladder that the culprits used to climb down into their secret liberal lab.
Because after all, growing and smoking marijuana is a liberal thing. None of the fifteen million estimated regular ganja tokers and millions more who support decriminalization could ever be considered true conservatives. Not President Bush, not California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, not Nobel Prize Economist Milton Friedman, nope, just a bunch of hippie freaks cooked up in a secret liberal lab.
What Hannity and other drug war demogogues fear is the fact that many true conservatives are becoming fast allies to the cause of marijuana decriminalization. They believe that it is an issue of states’ rights. They believe the taxpayer’s money is misspent on big government programs that show little or no results. They see the corruption in police and tyranny over the citizens that make up this War On (Some American Citizens Using Non-Pharmaceutical, Non-Alcoholic, Tobacco-Free) Drugs. And even as “tough on crime” as most conservatives claim to be, they are beginning to see that the crime is a result of the prohibition, not the weed itself.
So Hannity and his ilk put on their “with us or against us” hat with little jibes meant to equate “marijuana” with “liberal” in an attempt to embarrass and demonize any so-called conservative away from the party-line groupthink. It’s only a matter of time before they cook up some sham study that claims marijuana smoking by women of childbearing age leads to the birth of gay babies. Gay liberal babies who burn the flag, hate the troops, blame America first, and would go back in time and abort themselves if they could.
