Smoking is Bad...if You're a Republican

Continuing the Obama Administration's frontal assault on John Boehner is Bob Schieffer on this morning's "Face the Nation":

Schieffer: “Mr. Boehner, I'm going to ask you this question because I'm not objective about this - I'm a cancer survivor, I used to be a heavy smoker. Do you still smoke?”

Boehner: “I do.”

Schieffer: “You have taken $340,000 from the tobacco industry. They've been the largest contributor to your political campaigns over the year. How do you square that with the fact that cigarette smoking is the leading cause of preventable deaths in this country, 435,000 people, their deaths are linked to cancer, that's 1 in 5. How do you justify that in your own mind?”

Boehner: “Bob, tobacco is a legal product in America. The American people have a right to decide for themselves whether they want to partake or not. There are lots of things that we deal with and come in contact with every day, from alcohol to food to cigarettes, a lot of the things that aren't good for our health. But the American people ought to have the right to make those decisions on their own.” …

Schieffer: “If you should become Speaker, you could set a good example for the country by saying, 'I'm going to stop smoking.'

You know who the highest-profile smoker in the country is, right? And who repeatedly lies about it too? Yeah, it's the President.

But this is a stupid issue anyway. We've got an economy in the drink and there's a war on. Suddenly, the MFM just wants to talk about John Boehner's smoking habit.

posted by Gabriel Malor at 01:00 PM

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