Timothy Birdnow

How about he go suck on a tailpipe then.

I'm always hearing variations of this from the Gang Green, the global warming hysterics, who equate "Big Oil" with the cigarette companies.

The fact is the cigarette companies got a raw deal; they were selling a legal product and nobody ever tried to make them illegal, just tried to strangle them through the backdoor, through taxation and other means. The public used to smoke and enjoyed smoking.

What terrible things did Big Tobacco do? They increased the nicotine in cigarettes - something their customers WANTED. People used to hate European cigarettes because they had lower nicotine levels.

Did the tobacco companies hide the dangers of smoking? Maybe, but one can hardly expect them to advertise with "smoking causes cancer" after all. It was a legal product and control of smoking was up to the authorities. Tobacco companies owed a fiduciary duty to their shareholders; public health was not their responsibility. A kitchen knife can be misused too.

When I was a child, I mean six or so, my mother would give me five dollars "go up to Gasens and get me a pack of Camels" and I would walk up there and tell the clerk who would pull them down and hand them over to me. In those days we did not control every aspect of life. Now the clerk would go to jail for doing that. That is how far America has fallen from a free society. When a kid can't buy cigarettes...

America has become a nanny state, where the "best and brightest" tell everyone else how to live. There used to be a term for that "Noblesse Oblige" also sometimes called the White Man's Burden (in he colonial era) It was the presumption of superiority by the aristocracy over the "benighted" lower classes. Very Medieval. It was soundly rejected by the Enlightenment thinkers and especially the Founding Fathers who believed in the wisdom of masses. But it never died and it reigns supreme in the Western World these days, the concept that the elites are, by their very nature, smarter and wiser than we and should rule. If they decree something bad then the masses must be made to do without. 

At any rate the Gang Green has tried to use the tobacco model on oil and is using the same lawfare tactics that took out tobacco. (BTW my brother lives in Kentucky which has a lot of wineries now, almost all of them planted on former tobacco farms.) They are picking the target, freezing it, personalizing it, and polarizing it. This is just one example.

But there had always been a dislike for tobacco in America and it tapped into a deep-seated disapproval of the product. The old puritanical Protestants thought it frivolous and decadent. Oil is a whole different thing; it's the very heart of our technology and the only way we can get around by and large. Nobody has wood-fired steam engines anymore, after all.

Also, the public is losing faith in global warming as the spectacular predictions made by the warmiacs have no panned out.

So El Sayed can go huff on a tailpipe and do America a favor. He is telegraphing what he will do if elected; he'll go after the lifeblood of the American economy because, like, climate and stuff.

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