All kidding aside — which, as Ta-Nehisi Coates points out, isn’t a bad strategy when discussing this topic – I’m generally with Sullivan on this one:

The chuckle suggests a man of his generation. The dismissiveness toward the question of ending Prohibition as both a good in itself and a form of tax revenue is, however, depressing. His answer was a non-answer. I’m tired of having the Prohibition issue treated as if it’s trivial or a joke. It is neither. It is about freedom and it’s deadly serious. As for your online audience, Mr president, have you forgotten who got you elected?

In Obama’s defense, I get that he’s navigating tricky political waters here. Were he to take a strong, rational stance against the violence promoted by the drug war, the knee-jerk response of Americans his generation and older would likely reduce his political capital, making it more difficult to bring about change on other important issues.

But there’s no two ways about it. His dismissive response was insulting not only to the people who demanded he answer the question, but to the people for whom a more serious answer is most pressing. I thought we were done with the teasing style of W (who referred to reporters by insulting nicknames) and the taunts of W’s daddy (my grudge against whom I only recently let go of, nearly 17 years after he tried to win election by calling us “spotted-owl people”).

Obviously, not everyone agrees with me on this one — if they did, the violence of the so-called “War on Drugs” would be history. It’s just that Obama’s star shines brightest when he brings us together, when he shows respect in the face of dissent. Please, Obama, don’t fan the flames of the dying culture war. Don’t slip now.

As I said a year ago after reading Obama’s interview in The Advocate:

Obama teaches us to speak to each other in a way that makes it no longer necessary to make that first look around the room to see who’s listening. The respect that Obama has learned to show people who disagree with him on an issue has the welcome affect of lowering the temperature in our political debates, which is why Obama draws the support of many reasonable people who don’t agree with him on every issue.

Would you care to rephrase your answer, Mr. President?

Home from college at the end of my first year, I was hanging out in my parents’ yard with a small group of close friends who still lived full-time in the town where I grew up. I’d just come outside after a long shower. Fumbling for a cigarette, I asked Nat for a lighter. Sometimes a gentleman, Nat lit my cigarette for me. Sometimes not a gentleman, he also commented on my “gnarley” fingernails and cuticles, whose long soak in the shower exaggerated the damage done by my teeth.

“Dude,” he asked, “Why chew your nails if you’re gonna smoke cigs?”

I couldn’t answer him. I shrugged, hoping the conversation would quickly turn to making fun of someone else in the group or, just as likely, someone’s mother.

I quit biting my nails that summer. It took me another dozen to quit smoking.

Part II

I stayed home tonight to write; and I’ve successfully alternated between blogging and dissing. I just took a break to heat up some split-pea soup on the stove, which I intended to eat in front of a 10-minute TV news broadcast at the top of the hour. I sat down to eat, discovering only then that the cable was out.

“Dude,” I asked myself, “Why watch cable TV if you’re gonna surf the ‘net?”