Who smokes?
Mostly, the poor.
Of course there are a handful of hipsters who sport clownish pork pie hats, and defiantly puff away, viewing themselves as postmodern James Deans.
But really, it’s the poor and blue collar who indulge in the liberal sin of tobacco. Meanwhile, their liberal betters proudly sweat in gleaming gyms, or contort themselves into narcissistic bliss on candy-colored yoga mats.
The left insists that cigarettes are evil, a sign of moral weakness. But the left are not content to self-righteously posture. They impose crushing taxes on cigarettes, on the backs of the poor. Taxes of such severity that desperate cases like Eric Garner find a business niche selling single cigarettes to willing customers who cannot — because, I repeat, they are poor — go along with the left’s totalitarian dictates about health and diet.
The police, unlike Barack Obama or Eric Holder, actually uphold the laws they are sworn to uphold. Thus, they become the strong-arm of nefarious Democrat tax laws.
In the final analysis, Eric Garner accidentally died at the hands of police who were enforcing a Louis XIV style cigarette tax imposed by big government liberals.
This, of course, touches upon other liberal policies that are, to put it mildly, immoral.
According to liberal dogma, cigarettes are bad.
But marijuana is virtuous, must be legalized and, duh, taxed.
Of course, liberals like their constituency stoned out of their minds. It makes it easier to control them. And control of the citizenry is the name of the progressive game.
And then there is abortion.
The deaths of Eric Garner, Michael Brown and Trayvon Martin are rallying cries for the left, proof of widespread racism. But aborting millions of black babies is defined as women’s health. This is an Orwellian usage of language, a gruesome and wicked tactic through which Democrats impose their totalitarian will on the most defenseless of people.
We can thank Honest Jonathan Gruber — the Democrat gift who keeps on giving — for illuminating liberal enthusiasm for the industrial scale murder of black children in the womb.
Breitbart reports:
… Gruber’s abortion advocacy is of a particularly pungent eugenics variety. He’s on record repeatedly making the case from social science that abortion is a “social good” because it reduces the number of “marginal children,” by which he means urban poor—those he says can be counted on to commit crimes if they were ever born.
Gruber co-authored a paper during the Clinton years which argued that legal abortion had saved the U.S. taxpayer upwards of $14 billion in welfare benefits and that it also lowered crime.
Gruber’s work heavily influenced other researchers, including a paper called The Impact of Legalized Abortion by Steven Levitt of the University of Chicago, whose later book Freakonomics and whose ongoing work makes the strongest case that abortion legalizations in the 1970s caused a dramatic drop in crime twenty years later.
The cognitive dissonance of the left is epic — and deadly — to the very people they claim to represent.
Dad said, decades ago when the govt increased taxes on cigs and beer again, “It’s a tax on the working man.”
Every tradesman I know drinks and smokes, it’s what we do after working outside on a 34 * day or fixing toilets, and we’re all self-employed, beholden to nothing but getting the job done right.
Come to think of it, we’re kinda like hard-bitten anarchists in a world of babbling incompetents…
Mr Gruber’s comments go right along with those of Margaret Sanger. There is a hatred of G-d out there, and it’s often expressed by hatred of His image-bearers, whatever be their skin color.