Rep. Allen West said Tuesday that if questions about his military service were fair game, so too should be those about President Obama's drug use in high school and college.
West was asked during a constituent town hall in Boca Raton, Fla., to release an Army report detailing his treatment of an Iraqi police officer detained while he was serving in Iraq, according to a report from the liberal blog ThinkProgress.
West initially defended his actions in responding to the question.
"I was not convicted of anything," West said. "I think everyone knows what happened. I mean, if you guys have a problem with the fact that people were out there planning to kill my soldiers, and I found a guy, I put a pistol, you know, shot over his head, and they weren’t killing my soldiers anymore. If you guys have a problem with that, you need to go talk to someone else, because if I’m in that exact same situation, I’m making the same decision for those men and women."
But West then turned his answer to Obama's admitted drug use.
"So if you guys want to go back and talk about what happened nine years ago for me, let’s talk about the president doing blow and smoking dope," West said.
West is in a tough reelection battle after redistricting forced him into a new, Democratic-leaning district. Almost 6 in 10 voters in his new district likely voted for Obama in 2012. An internal poll released earlier this month by West's Democratic opponent, Patrick Murphy, showed the candidates deadlocked.
The president's drug use has been in the news again lately after leaked excerpts from David Maraniss' new biography,
Barack Obama: The Story, reveal the president to have been an avid marijuana user in high school.
Tuesday night during an appearance on "The Daily Show," first lady Michelle Obama said the president went through a transformation after losing his father in college.
"He was like many young people," the first lady said, adding that Obama later "realized he could do more with his life."
