Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — the former Democrat, then Independent presidential candidate and now Donald Trump BFF — attacked VP Kamala Harris for flip-flopping on cannabis policy. His comments came several days after Trump flipped from his anti-marijuana stance to endorsing legal cannabis in Florida.
RFK, who suspended his campaign for president in late August and joined Trump, also blasted the Hastings College Law grad, former California District Attorney, US senator and now vice president of not being able to string a sentence together.
“I don’t think that Vice President Harris is a worthy president of this country,” Kennedy told NewsNation’s ‘Cuomo’ podcast on Tuesday. “We need to have a president who can give an interview, who can articulate a vision, who can put together an English sentence, who can articulate her and defend her policies. And who can engage in a debate with, and regular debates, unscripted appearances.”
Dredging Up The Past
To make his point on Harris’s cannabis flip-flop, RFK dredged up a four-year-old CNN debate between Harris and former US Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, who recently flipped away from the Dems and is now supporting Trump. Speaking of flip-flopping, the Harris campaign had some choice words for Trump after his Florida cannabis endorsement.
In the CNN debate that RFK posted on X, Gabbard accuses Harris of jailing more than 1,500 people on cannabis-related convictions, a misleading accusation Trump has often repeated. The former president got specific in late June on Fox.
“She put thousands and thousands of black people in jail over marijuana. But when it came to big crime, murders and everything else, she was weak,” Trump said.
Fact Check: As California’s attorney general, Harris oversaw roughly 1,956 misdemeanor and felony convictions for “marijuana possession, cultivation, or sale,” according to a 2020 Reuters fact check. Defense attorneys and prosecutors in Harris’ office told the Mercury News in late June that most of the people convicted during this period did not serve jail time.
Convictions for marijuana also went down under Harris’s tenure as DA.
Flip-Flopping Vs. Facts Vs. Simply Changing One’s Views
“Never let the truth get in the way of a good story,” said Mark Twain. Or did he? Then there’s former Trump advisor Kellyanne Conway who coined the convenient euphemism “alternative facts.”
Certainly, there are compelling arguments that political leaders — all of us for that matter — should be able to flip-flop when necessary. Thank goodness Abraham Lincoln changed his mind in 1860 when he was elected on the promise that he’d keep the union together rather than end slavery.
H/T: www.benzinga.com
