Health Fascists on the March

From Hot Air:

Don’t blame them. It was your elected representatives, in bipartisan fashion, who passed an anti-smoking statute last year requiring the FDA to impose more “graphic” health warnings on cigarette packaging. Evidently putting “you’ll get cancer” on the side of the carton is no longer deemed a sufficient deterrent to lighting one up, so now we’re actually going to thrust photos of putrefying flesh into smokers’ faces in hopes of steering them away. Coming soon, presumably: Mandating special flavor additives to ciggies so that you actually throw up while smoking…

Allahpundit’s exit question is exquisite:

Does this mean we’re ready for a law requiring pictures of dismembered fetuses on the walls of Planned Parenthood? It’s all about informed choices, after all.

But, of course, it isn’t about that, at all – its about providing funding for liberal advocacy groups who hate Big Tobacco. If they didn’t have this outlet, they’d have to get a real job. Naturally, this won’t stop government from raking it in off of tobacco taxes.

I’m a smoker. I like smoking. I know, all of us smokers are supposed to be wracked by guilt and we’re all supposed to say we hate it and wish we could quit. I don’t hate it and don’t wish that, at all. I still might quit, though things like this make me disinclined to do so.

Just to clear some things up – I agree with smoking bans in most places. Not in bars, because that is stupid – and if someone really wants a smoke-free bar, then let them open one up. But to mandate that every bar, everywhere, ban smoking when smokers really, really like to have a cigarette with their beer is asinine – un-American, too. Living in Vegas, I have the privilege of living in one of the last bastions of American smoking – but even here, it is coming to an end. More and more smoke-free areas of the casino…and I wouldn’t dream of lighting up without being sure that those around me also smoke (fortunately, its even money in Vegas that anyone you meet is a smoker). Smoking is a thing that some people really dislike – don’t like the smell, don’t like the concept. I’m entirely cool with keeping it as a private eccentricity. But I also just can’t stand fascism – and trying to scare me off of smoking by putting a corpse on my pack is fascist.

I’m fully aware of the health risks involved – but unlike wimpy liberals, I also know that I gotta die of something, some time. Its that old Redd Foxx joke…imagine all those people who never smoked and never drank, pissed off as they lie in bed, dying of nothing. Smoking might advance my date of death…on the other hand, it might not. Dad lived until 82 and almost the last thing he did on this earth was have a cigarette. Camel – unfiltered.

I’m just sick to death of these people – they’ve wrecked our whole world, but they want us to quit smoking. You’d figure that people who destroyed sexual morality and bankrupted a nation would be shy about pestering people on their smoking. But, nothing doing – they won’t stop until all fun, everywhere, is banned as everyone lives in a hovel on organic food rations while Al Gore flies around to lecture us.

No, thanks. I see lighting up these days as a means of striking a blow for liberty, and I’ll keep doing it just as long as I want to.

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