COMMENT: The first half of this column is just the usual banal, throwaway drivel about the hazards of the usual laundry list of everyday things like fatty foods, automobiles, bathtubs, alcohol, etc., that we've all heard dozens of times already, until finally arriving at his off- target point about the tobacco deal.

QUOTE FROM ARTICLE: "The law has always been that the home builder is not responsible if you fall down your stairs any more than is the softball manufacturer if you twist your knee sliding into second base. The tobacco deal has thrown out this principle. It represents a massive attack on the moral, political, legal, economic and religious basis of our society."

QUOTE FROM ARTICLE: "The $368 billion tobacco agreement was not the result of a lawsuit. Rather, greedy plaintiffs lawyers, politically ambitious attorneys general, and unprincipled tobacco company executives agreed to turn cigarettes into coffin nails for individual responsibility. If the responsibility does not rest with the smoker who chose to smoke, but with those who made the product available, then the farmers who grew the leaf and the government that subsidized the crop [sic] are also responsible."

COMMENTS: These words are no ringing statement of principle. They are just a hypocrite's ink-cloud of self-delusion. Even more importantly, they evade the culpability of those who are guilty of planning and instigating this assault, and those who went along with them, including himself.

While Roberts and his ilk slept on the job, the US Centers for Disease Control and the Office of Technology Assessment deliberately, willfully, and knowingly concocted fraudulent smoking cost claims purporting that smokers are an economic burden to society.

For ten years, the media have knowingly collaborated with this government disinformation campaign by spreading those lies and suppressing the truth. They have systematically ignored the most vigorous protests against those lies. They deliberately incited those lawsuits, and aborted and silenced all meaningful discussion, to stifle public opposition.

It is not out of ignorance of the facts, but out of this mutual criminal scheme to commit extortion against smokers through malicious legal action against the tobacco industry, that the media have fraudulently misrepresented the nature of the Medicaid lawsuits with the words "restitution," "recovery," and "reimbursement," in every single news report -- in flagrant violation of the fact that smokers have actually been subsidizing non-smokers' costs all along, and owe the states nothing whatsoever. The states owe us instead.

Whose responsibility was it to expose these lies? It was the responsibility of pretended defenders of civilization like Mr. Paul Craig Roberts himself. It is precisely because of their irresponsibility that the anti-smokers have gotten away with their crime. They have questioned nothing, and allowed the conspirators to lay the necessary groundwork of lies and deceit without challenge.

We have waited in vain all these years for them to expose and condemn the government for lying to the public. We have waited in vain for them to raise the alarm about a media which no longer functions as a watchdog, but as co- conspirators in fraud, corruption and tyranny. They let the media pretend that they just stood by as uninvolved and unbiased (snicker) observers.

They are lazy and credulous, and simply could not be bothered to investigate the facts. They are tame and complacent little lapdogs, grown fat and stupid from eating out of the hands of the criminals themselves. They collect their paychecks for parroting cheap demagoguery about smoking dangers which they've never questioned either, and emitting empty puffs of hot air about smokers' responsibility -- but never anyone else's, especially their own.

It is thanks to them that those attorneys general have gotten away with lawsuits whose pretense of injury is founded on nothing but an act of perjury to Congress by three staff members of the OTA, which was exposed by the Congressional Research Service, while Roberts and his sorry crowd slumber unaware. It is because of them that they brazenly flaunt their conspiracy to deprive us of our rights under color of law, in violation of federal civil rights statutes, as an act of public virtue.

Thus, it is not that the anti-smokers suddenly and unexpectedly attacked and then destroyed "the moral, political, legal, economic and religious basis of our society" with their lawsuits. It is that individuals like himself abdicated them without a fight, and betrayed them every step of the way, long before the first lawsuit was ever filed.

Counterpoint by

Carol Thompson
Smokers' Rights Action Group
P.O. Box 259575
Madison, WI 53725-9575
Phone: 608-249-4568