by Robert M. Traxler

Our esteemed editor penned an editorial, “American politicians don’t care what we want.“ In it he sang the praises of legalizing marijuana and abortion at the national level. He also wrote that the corporations, not the people, rule our nation, but forgot the existence of the Constitution and Bill of Rights, and that we are a constitutional republic, not a democracy.  Let me provide a counter point.  

In the last four national elections, the Democrats have been paid off by corporations more than Republicans. Strange how the editorial forgets that. American corporations are polluting more than they did several decades ago, a good bit more — they are just doing it in China, and the progressives just do not give a damn, as they are paid off by the corporations with money laundered through the environmental corporations.

Please google ‘pollution in China’ and count the dead, but the American progressives/socialists tell themselves they are saving the world by banning oil production in our nation, indeed on our continent. Oil shipped by tankers burning millions of gallons of diesel is better than a pipeline from Canada, and a pipeline is also an environmental threat to our existence? Go figure.

The Exxon Valdez supertanker sprung a leak, dumping 11 million gallons of crude oil in Prince William Sound in Alaska, a disaster that would (according to the environmental movement at the time) destroy the planet. It is a disaster that is conveniently forgotten as we ship crude oil in by supertanker from around the world. 

The American Lung Association stated: “Smoke is harmful to lung health. Whether from burning wood, tobacco or marijuana, toxins and carcinogens are released from the combustion of materials. Smoke from marijuana combustion has been shown to contain many of the same toxins, irritants and carcinogens as tobacco smoke. Beyond just what’s in the smoke alone, marijuana is typically smoked differently than tobacco. Marijuana smokers tend to inhale more deeply and hold their breath longer than cigarette smokers, which leads to a greater exposure per breath to tar.”

Many of us smoked cigarettes and laughed at the warnings in the 1960s and into the ’70s. If we were not so stupid, we would have listened, but the government at least warned us; with marijuana not so much or not at all. Mark this, your grandchildren will suffer from the lack of caution in smoking/using marijuana, as our generation was with tobacco. If we add in the known brain damage tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) causes, and you need to keep telling yourself, it is healthy and a good thing to do cannabis in its various forms.

And don’t get me started on our government clandestinely working to censor only conservatives on Twitter. The open-source facts have been released by Twitter and are in black and white, in the emails from twitter, government officials and the democrats, all ignored by the socialist media.

The standard rebuttal to marijuana use is that it is not as bad as alcohol. OK, a rattlesnake bite is not as bad as a king cobra’s bite, so is it good to be bitten by a rattler? The lame argument forgets that we do not need to use either drug. The medical use is another canard. It absolutely does help a very few folks; however, drugs are available that do the same thing and do not add to the risk of cancer and brain damage. 

The United States of America is a constitutional republic, not a democracy. The elected officials need to do things the majority of people do not approve of, and a full-blown democracy would be an unworkable disaster. The founders developed a system of checks and balances to ensure big government did not act like a king and his court. A House of Representatives full of hotheads, but a Senate that was more deliberate and cautious — it has worked for centuries and has been imitated to some degree by nearly every nation on earth. Our system may not, indeed is not perfect, but it is the best in the world. 

My Opinion.