One of the things I hate about the Internet is what I love about the Internet. I find fascinating stuff, and then I often can't determine whether the fascinating stuff I find is true.

For example, there's a deck of cards for sale in England, and each card features a picture of prominent politician accompanied by an embarrassing statement he purportedly made about marijuana.

Because of its perplexing logic, the Newt Gingrich card especially fascinated me:

While the bad logic is self-evident (because the supposed immorality of marijuana was what led to the hysteria resulting in its criminalization in the 1930s), the threshold question is whether Newt Gingrich ever said that.

The statement is quoted at several left-wing sites, but it does not appear in his Wiki bio, and I could find no original source anywhere. Even though I don't like Gingrich, I find it very difficult to believe that he would be so stupid as to make a public statement like that. Seriously, the man is highly intelligent, and a student of history. If he did say that, what must he have been smoking?

Certainly not marijuana. Not if what he said about his personal marijuana use is true:

"I tried it once; it had no effect on me."

Politically, executing people for drugs is not a popular position to be staking out, and as Gingrich is polling behind Romney, Palin, and Huckabee as a possible presidential candidate, it's doubtful that he'd be saying things like that in the hope of pulling ahead. So (unfortunately) I think he means it sincerely, which is scary.

According to a column purportedly written by Michelle Malkin in 1998, he did a dramatic flip-flop on medical marijuana:

Who would stand in the way of these private and professional efforts to heal, relieve and restore hope?

Politicians. Hacks on the left and right, Democrat and Republican. Control freaks inside the Beltway and down in Olympia who favor the deadly grip of government over compassion. Moralists who sacrifice the sick and infirm in the name of upholding public safety, defending the regulatory process, or protecting the collective good.

As citizens in Washington state and Washington, D.C., prepare to vote on medical marijuana initiatives this fall, they should ready themselves for six weeks of Drug War wile and dissimulation.

Let's start with Republicans. It was Rep. Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) who once sponsored a bill in Congress to allow therapeutic use of marijuana. In 1982, Gingrich wrote an impassioned letter to the Journal of the American Medical Association attacking the "outdated federal prohibition" of medical marijuana. He decried the plight of "thousands of glaucoma and cancer patients" held hostage by "bureaucratic interference."

Sixteen years later, Gingrich is Speaker of a House that just declared that marijuana "contains no plausible medicinal benefits." No, the plant wasn't corrupted. Gingrich was.

The odd thing about this post was that while I didn't set out to bash Gingrich, it now looks like I did, simply because I've carried on so long in an anti-Gingrich fashion. So by way of atonement, I should probably say that I liked Gingrich's spirited defense of Sarah Palin's "death panel" remarks. Here's the video:

I might be misreading the interview, but it appears that Stephanopoulos was all but inviting Gingrich to take issue with Palin over the death panel stuff, and he didn't. Good for him.

And meanwhile, Romney is trying to make it look like he was always against government health care. We have always been at war with government health care? (Never mind the facts.)

Oh, I almost forgot about the Sarah Palin card. Like Gingrich, she's also a black queen. (Jeez, I'm sorry about that last remark. I mean, how must it sound?)

I like the quote, which was easily verified. And by the way, Andrew Sullivan liked it too -- so much that it inclined him to like Sarah Palin before he hated her (and apparently before he even hated vaginas).

I guess the bottom line is that if you don't like something, don't inhale it.

(If only I could learn to treat politics that way....)