Joe Scarborough wanted to clarify his stated aversion to marijuana. But first he had to get a few things off his chest this week about Matt Taibbi.
After an on-air segment last week during which Scarborough confessed that he doesn’t “get the legalization thing” and asserted that smoking pot “just makes you dumb,” Taibbi had a field day with MSNBC’s resident conservative. The Rolling Stone writer also took on David Brooks and Tina Brown, who joined Scarborough in taking a bold stand against stoners.
Taibbi’s fundamental point was that non-whites and poor people are disproportionately affected by pot prohibition. He wrote that “people like David Brooks, or me for that matter, don’t suffer serious consequences for weed arrests.”
Scarborough responded in his semi-regular Politico column by constructing a straw man.
Taibbi let his readers know that unlike David Brooks and myself, he is one with America’s urban poor and the disadvantaged black kids who get caught up in the racist web of drug laws routinely enforced by the Man. This working-class hero righteously lamented the fact that too many poor people’s lives will be “derailed forever by a pointless and intrinsically hypocritical marijuana arrest. But Scarborough wouldn’t know anything about that, apparently.”
He also mockingly praised Taibbi for taking the “extraordinary step of coming out in defense of pot smoking on the Rolling Stone website” and razzed the writer for his affluent background.
God, I’m such an isolated, ignorant spoiled prick. If only I could have been raised in the kind of misery and squalor as Taibbi, perhaps I could connect to the mean streets of inner-city America like him. But how could I ever be as empathetic on such realities as a disadvantaged soul like Taibbi, who was forced to grow up in the affluent suburbs of Boston, attend prep school at Concord Academy, and then go on to Bard College?
On his show Wednesday morning, Scarborough said that “the drug war against pot is insanity” and acknowledged the racial disparity in marijuana busts, all while signaling that he’s still uncomfortable with “the complete legalization of it.”
But don’t call him a square.
“God, like, most of my heroes smoke pot,” Scarborough, always eager to talk about his days in a band, told his panelists. “Paul McCartney, he’s probably smoking pot right now.”
And it’s not just for artists. Scarborough said he knows “a lot of really, really highly functioning, successful rich people” who still enjoy a joint on Saturday nights.
