CIGARETTE TERRORISM

Clemency supporters strenuously object to calling them terrorists; they are "freedom fighters", "political prisoners", "nationalists". But they are part of a group which blew up bombs which killed innocent people to achieve a political goal.

You can’t call them terrorists, supporters claim, because they weren’t convicted of a crime called terrorism. So in this Clintonian age in which we aren’t sure what the meaning of the word "is" is, let’s see if we can now re-define "terrorist". And sure enough, the left is ready with a handy politically correct definition: If you are a minority and you blow people up, you aren’t a terrorist; but if you smoke a cigarette in public, you are a terrorist. That, at least, is the conclusion of one anti-smoking fanatic, who recently likened smoking in public to releasing poison gas in public, comparing public smoking to the Sarin gas released in a Tokyo subway in 1995.

So when a federal judge ruled that the 1993 EPA study which claimed to link second-hand smoke to cancer was deeply flawed, and ruled that study to be invalid, the anti-smoking fanatics vowed to ignore the facts and press ahead anyway, to combat cigarette terrorism with their bans on public smoking.

But ignoring facts is nothing new to this bunch. When the World Health Organization determined that not only might there be no link between second-hand smoke and lung cancer, but that second-hand smoke could even have a protective effect, the anti-smoking fanatics were undeterred. When the Royal London School of Medicine examined prior studies of second-hand smoke effects, and concluded that bias in those studies has led to a reliance on "very limited, and very biased, data", the anti-smoking fanatics were not interested. When the New England Journal of Medicine concluded that the health care costs for smokers are actually smaller in the long run than for non-smokers (they die younger and thus incur lower costs for old-age medical care), that finding did nothing to dissuade the fanatics from their assault against tobacco companies, an assault which is allegedly a high-minded effort to pay for what they claim are increased public health care costs.

Forget all that. All the fanatics care about is the negative side of the ledger, and if they have to ignore facts to achieve their goal, no matter. Actually, all the fanatics really care about is power, obtaining the power to run other people's lives, by any means necessary -- distortion, disinformation, and outright lies. You better live your life the way these little tin-pot tyrants demand, or they will use the power of the State to beat you into submission. Leftists call this "compassion". In fact, it might be more appropriate to describe those tactics as "terrorism". State sponsored terrorism.