Three and a half million people participated in the event, but the “trolls” had their way: Following a coordinated campaign by marijuana advocates to vote their topic to the top of the list, questions on the future of the U.S. dollar and the rising unemployment rate were superseded by questions about legalizing pot as an economic remedy.
Once again, somehow the marijuana advocates are better able to coordinate a campaign than gun rights advocates, anti-abortion advocates, animal rights advocates, free speech advocates, victims’ rights advocates, cancer research advocates, autism advocates, etc. And we were able to do this by mental telepathy, since we didn’t mention a thing about the Open for Questions campaign until eighteen hours after it had opened and the marijuana questions were already at the tops of most categories.
The president himself had a good laugh about the volume of marijuana-related questions, saying, “I don’t know what this says about the online audience — we want to make sure that it was answered. The answer is, no, I don’t think that is a good strategy to grow our economy.”
But the die was cast. Through a perfectly legal “underground” campaign, a relatively insignificant question had risen to the top.
22 million American adults will smoke pot this year. 872,000 of them will be arrested for it. I know it’s not the tanking world economy or militant extremism in the Middle East, but when 1 in 10 American adults face a 1 in 25 chance of arrest, incarceration, job loss, asset forfeiture, revocation of student aid, loss of housing, loss of benefits, loss of child custody, and a lifetime “criminal” record for their personal use of a plant, it’s not “relatively insignificant” to them.
For the White House, the question was not so much how to answer it — but what to do about it, and how to prevent it in the future.
Unlike privately run Web sites, whose managers are free to remove nettlesome material, the White House finds itself searching for a way to combat these disruptive users without infringing on their right to free speech and inciting cries of censorship.
Has anyone considered that perhaps the idea of legalizing marijuana is a popular idea?
Maybe Fox would like to do a story on how prohibition was brought into being by a propaganda campaign of outright lies directed to frighten an ignorant population that had far too much trust in the government.
No?
They can all Fox themselves.
-ED
Oh shit i see you all ready got this one Russ. My fresh stash post can be ignored.
Fox’s news has display some insight that Obama seems to lacking. In fact I would say that the Republican party has become aware of how important the online community is politically. IMHO, the online community is responsible for Obama getting elected.
Fox/GOP have found an opportunity to separate a significant base of Obama’ support from him. They did it by making it appear that it was Obama whom had called the online audience trolls.
IMHO, Obama really screwed the pooch on this one by laughing at the marijuana initiative. And it behooves Obama’s enemies to exploit his serious error.