Thank You For Smoking

Despite their support for raising the minimum wage and providing social services for the needy, liberals have somehow managed to claim the mantle of caring about poor people. That's why I'm grateful to my Prayer Warrior P.J. O'Rourke for exposing the hypocrisy of this so-called compassion of The Left's punitive anti-smoking laws in public housing:

And poor people do have a lot of troubles. Sometimes, when you’ve got a crap job and are going to get laid off from it besides and your crack-head daughter has three kids by four fathers and your oldest son is on the front in Afghanistan and your youngest son can’t decide which drug crew to join and the cable company has cut off service and somebody’s jimmying the twelfth lock on the sheet-metal door, you’d like to sit down on your own damn chair in your own damn kitchen and have a smoke.

Well, forget it. The progressive elites are already charging you $7 for that pack of king-size filter tips, and pretty soon they’re going to add the price of eviction. Because they hate your guts.

While I think Brother P.J. may be a little off-message here about the taxes paid by the poor on their cigarettes -- can they ever truly be high enough to compensate for the drag they are on our job Creators? -- I fully agree with his underlying conceit: that liberals demonstrate their contempt for the poor by legislating away life's small pleasures.

That's but one example. What would be more edifying for our underclass than sitting on their toilets, taking a gentlemanly dump, and reading The National Review, The Weekly Standard, or perhaps even the liberal New Republic? Doing so would open their eyes to what parasites they are and inspire them to go out and so something productive, like maybe even getting a job at a conservative think tank! But unfortunately, thanks to the Democrats' incessant calls for stricter food safety regulation, they'll never experience the enlightenment (or the quick weight loss - did you hear that, Michelle Obama?) that a bout of chronic diarrhea from food poisoning can provide. Naturally, the lamestream media will paint the libtards as altruistic heroes and revile us conservatives as heartless villains, but that's just the sad facts of life until Obama is sent packing back to Kenya. Praise Him!