In a debate recently held in New Hampshire, all the major Democratic candidates for president came out in favour of a national smoking ban that completely obliterates the rights of 60 million American smokers who, as we know, have no rights at all because they are second-class citizens.
The host presented as a "fact" that 400,000 Americans die "prematurely" because of smoking, without of course pointing out that not even one of them can be demonstrated to be caused by smoking, but as we know, ideology must prevail on science just as it did in the USSR.
All praised existing state and local bans (Hillary especially touting the success of the bans in New York, which "increased business" and had thousands more people going out on the town because the town was now free of smoke pollution) while forgetting, of course, the bankruptcies. All agreed that if this amazing "progress" of repression and public disinformation didn’t continue, they’d favour and support a national ban.
Barack Obama, who only quit smoking a couple of months ago as a result of public and spousal nagging, was already showing signs of mental deficiency and was eager to preach about the well-known "dangers of secondhand smoke" from which he’d protect the national public through a national ban. As a "former" smoker, he completely forgot that those dangers are a complete fraud. Needless to say, he did not address the institutional problem of incompetence and corruption represented by the Surgeon General’s Report on passive smoking or the corruption of American "public health" institutions in general.
Joe Biden injected firmly, "I’d ban it!", showing an extremely compressed, sloganeering acumen à la "smoking kills." Bill Richardson, the current governor of New Mexico, bragged, "I already did!" (having forced through another American state-wide ban.) Chris Dodd said he would ban because "3,000 kids start smoking every day" and related this to rising Medicare costs due to senior citizens with "chronic disease" — disease that, of course, would not exist were smoking eliminated. Piping up last, John Edwards said, "I would, too."
Of course all the idiots proceeded with the false ideological postulation that by banning public smoking 400,000 stop "dying" and 3,000 kids a day no longer start smoking. As it was near a century ago regarding alcohol, prohibition becomes the Great Cure for the current consensus choice of the Great Evil — an adaptation too of the simplistic "Just Say No to Drugs" posture that did not work either. Why bother taking a real look at those junk statistics (or look to real science): it’s election time!
Talking about alcohol, none would allow individual states to lower the drinking age back to 18, where it was some years ago, before being raised to 21. In the United States, at 18 you are old enough to marry, vote, and die for your country, but not old enough to drink. It follows the usual demented logic of prevention culture: if you get killed in Iraq at 18 your health will be saved from the harmful effects of the alcohol you cannot drink in your grave because you are not old enough.
Why oppose lowering the drinking age to an international norm? Again they could produce stats, the new Scriptural references eagerly cited by all Healthist-era idiots. Biden produced the spectre of the "300,000 deformed babies" who are born every year on account of maternal drinking. Presumably, then, all 300,000 of the pregnant drinkers would be somewhere between the ages of 18 and 21; otherwise lowering the age from 21 would be irrelevant — but let’s skip that. Dodd produced "50,000 auto crashes a year, many of which," he said, "were caused by alcohol" but neglected to specify how many of these "many" were or might be caused by folks between 18 and 21. Richardson, who also wouldn’t lower the age, suggested the answer was "treatment, education, and law enforcement", that wonderful, all-purpose three-legged prong, which apparently applied to any 20-year-old who happened to drink a beer. Richardson probably does not know the all-Fascist motto: "Books, hospitals, and whips make the perfect citizen", but it just happens to be a perfect match to his ideology except for one thing: Italy’s Fascists thought that a "man" should smoke and not be a "sissy."
The question after that had to do with whether — if they knew for certain that Al Qaeda had The Bomb and also knew for certain that they planned to use it on a major US city in the next three days, and if they captured Bin Laden’s right-hand man, and also knew for certain that he knew where the bomb both was and would be used (this reminds us of an antismoking epidemiological questionnaire) — if they knew all that would they beat up the guy to get the information? Such a question is fairly nuts, by the way, as it represents a scenario more improbable (we think of epidemiology again) than the Moon crashing into the Earth. All ignored the implausibility of the question, however, and all responded, righteously, "Absolutely not." It was against American values! Americans respect human rights, parbleu! Except for smokers that is. If the question was intended to be a tricky way to gauge the principles and the character of the candidates, all answers have been given: it seems eminently logical that millions of Americans should be vaporized by an atomic bomb rather than giving a black eye to the guy with the information on where and when it would be dropped. Maybe the question was too short after all. If the guy with the bomb info was also smoking no doubt the Democratic candidates would be happy to slap him around personally! SHS kills! Nukes aren’t so bad but we can’t stand for killing!
So there you have the US Democratic Party. American smokers (and any sane person) should take note for next year — but there’s little hope that their Republican opponents are much better — for what is disappearing in America, along with public smoking, is intellectual integrity and a sense of reality. The Democrats will go to any lengths to protect Americans from secondhand smoke and to protect their "kids" from the perils of demon Bud, but wouldn’t lift a finger to protect them from the atom bomb — all in the name of "public health", and those human rights that "public health" defines while spitting on every true concept of human dignity and liberty.
We’ll light up a smoke to celebrate surviving the Democratic Debate — and then drink six pints to forget it.
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