Conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt pressed the crap out of Washington Post liberal columnist E.J. Dionne on his program last night on a subject near and dear to everyone lately: pot smoking in the Washington Post newsroom.
No, Dionne hasn’t smelled it.
But that didn’t stop Hewitt from getting to the bottom of Dionne’s views on which is worse: pot or alcohol? For Dionne, the answer for himself was simple: pot, because he thinks it could be a gateway drug to cigarettes, a habit he kicked sometime ago. “My bad habit was cigarettes,” he admitted. “So I wouldn’t go near dope for fear that it would bring me back to cigarettes.”
Hewitt: “If the young bloggers around the Washington Post were stoned would they do the same level of work as if they’d had a few drinks?” Dionne: “Um..[LARGE GUFFAW OF LAUGHTER] I don’t think so myself but I could be wrong about that. …I don’t think a couple of pops is such a good idea either. We need to worry about both excessive use of alcohol and [pot].”
Dionne swore up and down that when colleague Ezra Klein came to his class one day at Georgetown he was not all doped up. “I’m quite certain of that. [He was] very sharp that day.” Hewitt countered, “Are you saying dope would rule that out?” Dionne didn’t waver, saying, “No, I just wanted to defend their honor.”
Still, Dionne surmises booze is worse than pot. “As a country we may have a larger problem with alcohol,” he said. “But that’s not a position I hold strongly, it’s simply an impression.”
Then Hewitt went in for the kill: “Do you ever smell dope around the Post? Ever see booze around the Post?”
Dionne held strong and replied, “No. You don’t even see cigarettes.”
For dope use, Hewitt might want to try Reason, Free Beacon or The Daily Caller (not that I’m insinuating anything, I’ve not smelled any pot around the newsroom…yet.)