Like a chaperone on a high-school field trip, Jake Tapper's sniffing around for the odor of tobacco:I have an unusually keen sense of smell and immediately I smelled cigarette smoke on Obama. Frankly, he reeked of cigarettes.
Obama ran off before I could ask him if he'd just snuck a smoke, so I called his campaign. . . . I knew what I'd smelled and I asked his campaign to double-check and to ask him if he'd had a cigarette. . . .
Maybe I imagined the cigarette smoke. . . .
[L]ast night on MSNBC's Hardball, Obama admitted that his attempt to wean himself from the vile tobacco weed had not been entirely successful.
"I fell off the wagon a couple times during the course of it, and then was able to get back on," he said. "But it is a struggle like everything else."
Franklin Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower were both smokers. Reagan smoked for years, but quit in the '60s. I don't know why people get so prudish about these things. Do they suppose Obama would set a bad example for kids by firing up a Marlboro in the middle of the State of the Union Address?
One politician who's not hypocritical about his taste for tobacco is Bob Barr, currently rumored as a Libertarian Party presidential candidate. Barr would no more deny his enjoyment of a good cigar than he'd disavow a fine single-malt whiskey. Here he is at CPAC in February, relaxing with both:
At the left in the photo is Stephen Gordon of Third Party Watch; Stephen's wife is trying to hide behind Barr; to the right are two College Republicans from California.
Gordo just passed along the word that Barr will appear at 4 o'clock today on Sean Hannity's radio show. That should be interesting . . . .
UPDATE: Allahpundit on Jake Tapper and Obama:
What right does a presidential candidate have to lie to a nosy reporter about something that’s totally irrelevant to the election and therefore none of his business?
Sarcasm: Breakfast of champions!
UPDATE II: Kelley Vlahos of The American Conservative:
I have a favorite t-shirt and it says simply, “Smoking is Healthier than Fascism.”
Very interesting: I didn't know TAC had a blog, and didn't know they'd hired Kelley Vlahos.
The TAC blog is uber new. I just found it a few days ago.
ReplyDeleteAnti-smoking prudery and revulsion is just one shiny ring in the Leftt's self-anointed Halo-O-Health, and a brilliant-stone obsession in their Grand Tiara of Doogoodism - and they think it looks lovely on them...
ReplyDeleteI had been thinking, for awhile, that The American Conservative should have a weblog, like so many other magazines - and news networks - had been doing. (This was not true when I started my own blog, but it gained prominence thereafter. I was thinking of volunteering to be the blogger for The American Conservative - back when this was more of a new thing.
ReplyDeleteI also only now discovered that The American Conservative finally has a blog... I found the link via Elizabeth Wright's excellent Issues & Views - I had known about the publication for years, but I also only now discovered that it has a blog (from whose sidebar I found that The American Conservative also now has one. And it was from doing a search of Kelley Vlahos' name [which I saw on the TAC blog], that I found that you have one too.
Very-appropriately, listed right below where I see our friend Daniel McCarthy blogged about TAC having a blog.
With more and more websites and weblogs out there [including more from a traditionalist conservative and pro-liberty perspective... something that I had been advocating for, for years] - it is becoming harder and harder to keep up with everything. And it seems that available time, for doing things like this, is becoming rarer and rarer as well.