it's tough to find anybody who actually thinks what we're doing now is anything but disastrous. So why do we keep doing it?

As with so many of our other dysfunctions and stupid ideas, we lack the political will to change them. We're well aware of how to solve many of the problems we live with but as a society we lack the political will to make it happen. I suspect you'd have to take on the entire law enforcement industry who have grown fat and powerful by way of The War on Drugs. We've pumped billions into outfitting the police with all the snappy, jazzy, very expensive equipment and gear to track down those awful, dangerous pot smokers and sellers. The same equipment they use to monitor and spy on and subdue you for all kinds of reasons. They aren't going to just let you slaughter their golden goose without a fight. Then there's all the prisons that have done well for themselves protecting society from the dangers and horrors of pot sellers and pot smokers. All in all a pretty stupid, corrupt, wasteful system, not the least all the lives scared and ruined in the process.

After reading the interview, and stumbling over a lot of Pelosi's attitudes toward these people, (the internet as the progenitor of political anger is pure blarney) and then some of the letters I just sensed that something was wrong with Alexandra Pelosi's apologetics for right-wing Republicanism. I couldn't articulate it though exactly. I kept thinking she's really condescending to these people somehow, and she's portraying them as some kind of marginalized group when in fact they've been in control of the country for the past eight years. Their values and their concerns and issues have played center stage throughout the Bush years. She's trying to get us to "understand" them? Hmmmm, what's wrong with this picture?

Then I read your post. That's it. That's exactly it. Perfect.

During the 2008 election, Obama co-opted huge portions of the Left and its infrastructure so that their allegiance became devoted to him and not to any ideas. - GG

Gore Vidal pointed out a long time ago that we don't have political campaigns in the United States, we have personality contests based on Most Popular Person.

Politics in its most salient form is most starkly evident on what the government decides to spend the public purse. Regardless of who is plying the public with oratory and rhetoric, you can immediately determine the values of the governing class by watching what they do with the money.

It took hardly sixty days for the government to bail out banks and the wealthy investment class to the tune of nearly $1 trillion when you add the actions taken by the Federal Reserve to the TARP funds. That's $1 trillion for 5% of the population. The current crises has been going on since September, five and half months. So far not a dime has been spent on middle class/working people. $789 billion has been proposed for all the rest of us. And still we wait.

Vidal also pointed out that there is only one political party in the U.S., The Money Party. There's just the right wing and the left wing of it. It is difficlt to see how anything will ever be any different. Glenn, how do you manage to keep plugging at this day after day?

The drug laws in the U.S. have got to be some the most colossally stupid public policies anywhere in the world. They exist in their current state essentially as a way to justify funneling billions of dollars into prisons and local police forces all over the country. They have absolutely no redeeming social value whatsoever but rather cause enormous hardship and pain to individuals and communities across the country. We have MOTHERS locked up in prison in this crazy country because they refuse to testify against their husbands for growing a marijuana plant. It's insane.

The War on Drugs is The War on The People.

There's an ugly, shameless, deep-seated misandry loose in our culture and it comes out in many ways. Television is full of it, in the commercials, the stories, the news items. Not only is it unfair to grown men, it's extremely damaging to developing boys and young men. A great deal of this misandry is thrown around and indulged in by other men. There are also many deeply sexist women in our society. That disability is not confined to men. The gender conceits would fill an encyclopedia.

The South was lost for a generation, two actually, after civil rights legislation in the sixties, but now it is rejoining America.

There are roughly 15 or so Southern states, depending on how you define "Southern". Three of them (Virginia, North Carolina and Florida, which isn't really a "Southern" state) voting for Obama I don't think constitutes a "rejoining of America." Tennessee just elected its first Republican legislature since Reconstruction. Mitch McConnell won his seat in Kentucky. For the first time in a long, long time no Southerner is in the driver's seat of any branch of the federal government. It seems to me that the South went one way and the rest of the country went the other way.

I am Southerner, born and raised in the South. I live in the South. #*@# the South.