That wascally Duane Roberts is at it again.
Last time we checked in on the Green Party nominee for the U.S. Senate seat held by Democrat Barbara Boxer and coveted by Republican Carly Fiorina, Roberts was labeling Boxer's party “anti-immigrant.”
Now, the Anaheim resident is saying the Republican Party, at least in Orange County, is “pro-marijuana.”
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Writing on the Orange Juice blog, Roberts explains he'd just engaged in an email exchange with some fellow Green Party members “to assuage
concerns that the public might end up branding our political party a 'Marijuana Party' if statewide candidates like myself decided to
campaign heavily on the theme of legalizing pot up until election day.”
That is bunk, Roberts maintains, because the real “Marijuana Party” is the Republican Party of Orange County. He goes to cite three pot poster boys in the OC GOP:
- James P. Gray, formerly an Orange County Superior Court Judge, has been a strong
advocate of legalizing marijuana and industrial hemp since 1993. Now a
Libertarian, he was originally a lifelong Republican.
- Dana Rohrabacher, a Republican Congressman in the 46th Congressional District, has signed letters favoring pot decriminalization and has co-sponsored federal legislation to legalize medical marijuana.
- Chuck DeVore, a Republican State Assemblyman in the 70th Assembly District, not long ago co-sponsored a bill that would have legalized the cultivation of industrial hemp in the State of California.
In the interest of full accuracy, Roberts does note that DeVore came out against Prop 19, the weed-legalizing initiative on the Nov. 2 ballot. But Gray has become the law enforcement face of the Yes on 19 campaign, and Rohrabacher's Huntington Beach office “is literally the Grand Central Station of marijuana legalization efforts in Orange County,” according to Roberts.
“The irony here,” he says, “is that [DeVore], Rohrabacher, and Gray as Republicans have
done more work to make weed legal than every single Democratic Party
politician who has ever served in public office behind the Orange
Curtain.”
As for his own party: “All I'm suggesting that the Greens do is snatch it away from them before the Democrats start to catch on.”
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.