Buzz kill

Poor Michael Phelps. The gold medal-hoarding Olympic swimmer gets photographed wrapping his lips around a bong, and the next thing you know, Kellogg’s is canceling his corn-flakes contract. “I engaged in behavior which was regrettable and demonstrated bad judgment,” Phelps apologized. “I’m 23 years old and despite the successes I’ve had in the pool, I acted in a youthful and inappropriate way, not in a manner people have come to expect from me.”

I beg to differ. The only bad judgment Phelps need regret is using a water pipe instead of a vaporizer. Filtering marijuana smoke through H2O lessens the THC content, thus killing your buzz. As far as acting inappropriately, what could be a more appropriate response to the multitude of problems plaguing our beleaguered planet than huffing copious amounts of Hindu Kush? You can hope for change all you want, but you can’t put hope in your pipe and smoke it.

Speaking of hope and change, we’re less than a month into President Barack Obama’s administration, and we’re already scraping out the pipes. Don’t get me wrong, I haven’t given up on the new president. I am, however, starting to come down slightly from my Obama high. While it’s true that no president in U.S. history has been dealt a worse hand than Obama, I’m down to smoking the weeds and stems. I’m suffering from hope famine.

Who can really blame me? Let’s start with foreign policy. Two years ago, Obama first gained traction as a candidate for his principled stand against the war in Iraq. After winning the election, he then proceeded to staff the State and Defense departments with the most hawkish Democrats he could find. Before taking office, he announced he was launching a major new offensive in Afghanistan. One week after the inauguration, he told a nationwide TV audience that without our good men and women fighting the war on terror, we wouldn’t be having the Super Bowl.

It really is true! The more things change, the more they stay the same.

When it comes to the economy, I believe the president when he says he wants to help ordinary Americans. With both houses of Congress in Democratic control, he has the ability to change the ruinous course charted by unregulated finance. Yet his entire economic team is staffed with the very same Wall Street insiders who plotted the path in the first place. Instead of forcing the issue and pushing a bailout that would really make a difference, Obama has capitulated to Republican and conservative Democrat demands to cut our already dangerously frayed safety net, slicing $40 billion off the stimulus program that would have gone to cash-strapped states such as California.

So yeah, I’m coming down. But like I said, there’s still some hope left, maybe more than a little. What I need is a good bong hit. As a candidate, Obama pledged that once in office he would end federal Drug Enforcement Administration raids on medical-marijuana dispensaries, which are legal in more than a dozen states, including California. Unfortunately, the DEA must have skipped the inauguration, because last week it raided four Southern California dispensaries. An administration spokesman said the president was looking into the issue and planned to staff the Justice Department with people more in tune with his views.

But here’s the deal, the thing that gives me hope. The president has the authority to end the raids immediately, a decision that would be controversial but nonetheless supported by the vast majority of Americans. There are some signs that he’s beginning to chafe against Washington’s gray and grizzled status quo. He’s already lifted the ban on providing U.S. aid to countries that allow abortion. C’mon, Mr. President, give us change we can put in our pipes and smoke.

Blow our freakin’ minds.