RUSH: Let’s go New York City. This is Linda. She wants to weigh in on the latest survey on the ugly in Canada. Hello, Linda.
CALLER: Hi. Actually it really may happen if the war against obesity follows the pattern of the war against tobacco. The ugly, at least as defined as being fat, may be banned. The lawyer, John Banzhaf, the guy who made his bones suing Big Tobacco and trying to get smokers banned from parks and beaches on the idea that children shouldn’t see them, is also the guy who sued McDonald’s on behalf of the fat kids. Remember that one?
RUSH: Yes.
CALLER: And in the context of this he also referred to the obese as, quote, ‘visual blight.’ So following that pattern, then the obese also should be barred from parks and beaches.
RUSH: You know, people laugh about this, but who would have ever thought that they would have actually made the SUV a target, or that they would have actually gone after a McDonald’s and the makers of fast foods? These people are out there, and it wouldn’t 
surprise me at all. This guy doesn’t define ugly in his work, at least not in the story that I read about it. So if it’s up to somebody else to define it, and a guy like John Banzhaf wants to come along and say, ‘Yeah, it’s a blight on the public, these overweight people,’ and do it as a matter of ‘compassion,’ he’ll say that, ‘Well, we’ve got to do something to get these people to help themselves, and if we ban them from the streets or whatever, it would materialize.’ Nothing would surprise me when it comes to the American activist left whatsoever.
CALLER: Well, it’s also — I don’t even know if Banzhaf specifically… You ought to really research him. He’s quite a character.
RUSH: Oh, I know who Banzhaf is. He used to be on Crossfire a little. He was trying to get someone — he took on the airlines about something.
CALLER: That’s right, it was about smoking. I think he was probably one of the original guys who all they wanted wasn’t just a little nonsmoking section on the planes, and, you know, Walter Williams boiling the frog theory. I think he’s just an opportunist and he sees money in this.
RUSH: But the thing is he wants the government to do all this. He’s a big government guy. He wants the government to be oppressive and judgmental on the people he finds objectionable doing the things that he finds objectionable.
CALLER: Absolutely, and he applauds this Calabasas law, which is even worse than you may know about because according to the ordinance, if you see somebody smoking outside in Calabasas, if you don’t report them, you are guilty of the crime of abetting the crime of smoking. I mean, they have really gone nuts with this.
RUSH: Let me ask you a question here Linda. How many people do you know who have died from any disease whatsoever having been anywhere — restaurant, public park, public sports arena — from being around secondhand smoke? How many people have been documented to have been killed by it?
CALLER: Oh, absolutely none.
RUSH: Zero. It is exactly right, and yet look at New York and all these idiotic regulations. It’s all because of a myth that secondhand smoke kills and there’s not one documented case.
CALLER: Oh, it’s gone even further than that. In Ohio and a couple of other states where they’re agitating for bans, they are truly claiming and I can tell you where to look this up, that 20 minutes of exposure to secondhand smoke will fell a healthy person of a heart attack. You only think I’m exaggerating.
RUSH: No, it’s the same kind of lies that are out there about global warming and all these other things that kill us.
CALLER: Exactly, and these things become — this is kind of a vicious propaganda machine, and these things, like global warming, become common knowledge; and like all arguments with liberals, how to argue with a liberal if you can, you can’t, because they know, and they know because the New York Times said so, and that’s the end of the argument.
RUSH: Well, but, yeah, also in addition, they don’t even argue. They engage in emotion, and when you hurt their feelings or whatever, then they start ripping you personally. They can’t win an argument on these things in the merits. In fact, speaking of this smoking business, we’ve done this story countless times and it’s something that’s in my Essential Stack of Stuff on the website. I’ll get Koko to <a target=new href=”http://www.telegraph.co.uk/htmlContent.jhtml?html=/archive/1998/03/08/wtob08.html”>post it today</a>. The World Health Organization actually did a study on secondhand smoke which showed that it doesn’t even make people sick, much less kill them. Now, it makes people uncomfortable. They don’t like it. I don’t like secondhand cigarette smoke myself — it reeks — but it doesn’t kill. It doesn’t.
It doesn’t make anybody ill, and they suppressed that, and it’s about ten years old now, I guess, maybe a little less than that, but they suppressed that. We got a copy of it on the website and have kept it for posting every time this subject comes up. Look, I appreciate the call. I didn’t know that about the Calabasas law, Calabasas, California. If you see somebody smoking in public in the park, and you don’t turn ’em in, you are also guilty of abetting — and I’ll bet you they will enforce that out there. I’ll bet you if an illegal immigrant turns you in, if you’re in Calabasas and you’re smoking, and an illegal immigrant sees you and turns you in, they’ll give the illegal immigrant a citation, an honorary badge, an honorary member of the citizens task force against public smoking in Calabasas, and you, for violating the law about smoking in an open-air park will be sent to the hoosegow.
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