RUSH: Darrell in Elkton, Virginia, you’re next on the EIB Network. Hello.
CALLER: Thanks for taking my call, Rush.
RUSH: You bet.
CALLER: How you doing today?
RUSH: Thank you.
CALLER: I was looking at the USA Today and they had an article in there about the FDA requiring the cigarette companies to put these graphic images on there.
RUSH: I saw those yesterday.
CALLER: I’m wondering whether this can stop, you know, what’s next, a car crash on a beer bottle or… you know where I’m going with this? What’s your take on that?
RUSH: I think it’s just the natural extension of people who are consistently unhappy and will be unhappy until they have forced everybody to start living life as they want them to.
CALLER: Exactly.
RUSH: And I think it’s people that are miserable in their own lives, they can’t find anything to do to make them happy, so they have to involve themselves in everybody else’s life and share their own misery so they can have some kind of comfort in life. These new warning labels depict graphic pictures of sickness, illness, and so forth that are ostensibly tied to smoking. What they don’t understand, we’re talking an addiction here. You can put all of the rotgut pictures you want on a pack of cigarettes and somebody who is addicted to three packs a day of them it’s not gonna quit because of it. So it’s just proselytizing, it’s preaching.
Intellectually, what is wrong with these people is, the tax revenue from the sale of cigarettes in this country is funding children’s health programs. It’s the number one tax that pays for children’s health care programs. So on the one hand, they need the tax revenue to pay for the health care. They need the tax revenue, period, whatever it was for. On the other hand what exactly are they trying to do here? Do they actually want these people to quit smoking? There’s an easy way to do that. You ban it. If this stuff is as deadly as they claim, how in the world can they morally leave it on the market? If tobacco kills and does all this stuff to everybody, if there are no exemptions, if they can prove that everybody who is going to smoke a cigar, a cigarette, a pipe, or what have you, of course none of this happens if you smoke marijuana. Understand there’s not a warning necessary if you smoke marijuana. But tobacco, all these warnings, all these horrible things.
Well, what are they actually trying to accomplish here? The idea that if you quit — and they can’t prove this stuff universally causes all these things. If they could, it would be immoral not to ban the product. Here you have the United States profiting from the death of its citizens, allowing the corporations to sell and market a product that kills their customers, if all of this were true universally, if there were no exceptions, then it would be immoral not to ban this stuff. The problem is people who have never smoked get lung cancer, and some people who have smoked all their lives don’t. Every time I get talking about this people think I’m making excuses for Big Tobacco. I’m not. I really come down on the side of freedom. Somebody wants to smoke a cigarette, if they want to get sick, fine and dandy.
Now, the retort is, “Well, yeah, let ’em pay for their own health care.” Let’s not go down that road. Once you start going down that road then everybody’s behavior is gonna be subject to some central authority. We’re headed there now. You can’t do this because the cost is gonna impact society here and unless you can pay for it yourself… we’re going down, well, we’re already halfway down the slippery slope with this stuff. My point is they don’t want to ban cigarettes. They don’t want to ban smoking. They want to tax the hell out of them, but they’ve reached a point where they’ve created such a black market in certain states here that they are losing revenue to fund all these precious programs. All this is just a continuing opportunity for these people to preach and to eventually establish the premise that they know best how you should live, you don’t, and they are going to tell you how.
It’s a vehicle or a gateway for them to assume control over other aspects of your life. Because, folks, to me it’s Realville and common sense. I’ve seen these proposed packages of cigarettes with warnings. If it’s that bad ban the product. But they don’t. They can’t afford to. So there’s something other than safety. They’re really not concerned about you getting cancer. They’re really not concerned with you staying healthy. There’s something totally opposite of that which is the motivation for this. And that is, their effort to assume as much control over the way you live your life as possible, to attach as much stigma to the things that you do in your life that they don’t think you should do to shame you into not doing or to get you to allow them to control it under whatever pretense. But who are they?
Why in the world do we assume that a bunch of loco weeds in Washington understand how to make a car more than highly trained specialists and professionals in that business. Why do we assume that Barack Obama knows more about drilling for oil than Rex Tillerson at ExxonMobil? Why do we assume that Rex Tillerson at ExxonMobil is out to screw you via ExxonMobil? And Barack Obama is out to protect you from Rex Tillerson, when did we get started with this? Well, we got started with it because government, liberals need villains, they need enemies in order to distract you and find others to blame for the problems they cause.
Barack Obama wouldn’t know an oil drill if he saw one. He would barely know what to do with an oil rig if they had his helicopter land on one. He wouldn’t have the slightest idea and the sad thing is that nobody in his regime knows anything about anything in the private sector. They’re a bunch of theoreticians in the faculty lounge sitting around speculating what all of us ought to be doing and how we ought to be living and where we ought to be living and what we ought to be doing. Bunch of arrogant condescension going on from people who could not bring a single product or service in this country to market to save their lives. And somehow we invest in them this all-knowing, all-encompassing ability to regulate those who do.
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