Ass bitten
Just five years ago, conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh went on a pro-tobacco rant on his show, during which he downplayed the risks of smoking, said it’s “a myth” that secondhand smoke causes illness or death and argued that smokers aren’t at any greater risk than people who “eat carrots.”
Smoking and eating carrots are not mutually exclusive.
“Smokers aren’t killing anybody,” the conservative host declared in an April 2015 segment of the “Rush Limbaugh Show,” then argued that tobacco users should be thanked because their purchases generate tax dollars that fund children’s health care programs.
“I’m just saying there ought to be a little appreciation shown for them, instead of having them hated and reviled,” Limbaugh said. “I would like a medal for smoking cigars, is what I’m saying.”
So smoking is a right-wing cause? People on the left are all stupid smoking-avoiders because it’s so politically correct, and good honest folks on the right all smoke like chimneys because God and country and tobacco? Is that it?
Fast forward to Monday, when Limbaugh, 69, went on his radio show to announce that he had been diagnosed with advanced lung cancer. Limbaugh said he has begun treatment for the cancer, but didn’t go into details, the Daily News reported. He only said he had noticed shortness of breath close to his birthday on Jan. 12, then had two professionals diagnose the cancer on Jan. 20.
I wonder if he’ll find a way to blame the left for that too. We messed with his pleasure in smoking, and we made him have lung cancer.
On his show, Limbaugh talked about the glamour of smoking and how “cool” it was, the Daily News reported.
That is neither cute nor funny nor politically incorrect. It’s just bad. Nicotine is one of the most addictive substances known, and smoking is not healthy, so using a popular radio show to promote its coolness is bad. Very bad.
And as an asthmatic, I can tell you I have ended up in the emergency room from second hand smoke. Please, if you are near me, smoke toward New Jersey, right?
I was so glad when my school went totally tobacco free. No smoking or other tobacco on campus. Period. I have felt better not having to walk out to my car through a cloud of lung-destroying smoke.
“and argued that smokers aren’t at any greater risk than people who “eat carrots.””
I guess Rush believes a person is either utterly cavalier towards all health risks, or is a salad-eating vegan, with no middle ground. Not unlike a certain someone known for disregarding advice against looking directly at an eclipse. Complex thought, with shades of grey, is simply beyond some.
Apparently Trump presented Limbaugh with the Medal of Freedom at the State of the Union.
Excuse me while I wipe the barf off my keyboard.
I wonder if he’s lying.
He could then have a miracle-god-cure.
I definitely think smoking is an excellent habit for people like Limbaugh to have. The more the better I say.
Why is he even bothering with treatment? He didn’t care before; why should he start caring now?
Pro-smoking is actually a traditional Objectivist talking point–Ayn Rand was vehemently pro-smoking; anyone who didn’t smoke wasn’t doing their part to support the capitalist economy.
I must admit, listening to Rush in the mid to late 80’s when he was with KFBK in Sacramento was one of my guilty pleasures, and I credit him with creating for me, an interest in political issues that previously I was happily ignorant of. He was basically a shock jock back then, and even though I disagreed with him on many things, he was more entertaining than anyone else on talk radio by far. I eventually lost interest in his show after he became widely syndicated, mostly because he began taking himself too seriously and the show became watered down, and more political commentary than satire.
Having had several friends and loved ones die from cancer, I wouldn’t wish it on anyone, and I refuse to celebrate a cancer diagnosis no matter who it is. Certainly Rush isn’t the worst among us, and I hope he recovers from this, and I hope he decides to speak out against smoking if, because of this, he realizes the harm it does. Despite any political disagreements I might have with him, I hope he does just that.
twiliter:
Yes, all that. Except that I gather from OB’s threadstarter that Limbaugh was actively promoting smoking; in keeping with his being a mouth for hire. So he has been a high-class drug pusher for much of his career, and does not resile from that, even though his chickens have come home to roost in what has to be for him a personally disastrous way.
He is like the hired gun in some western movie who pulls the trigger before his gun is out of its holster, and blows his own foot off.
The oft-quoted parallel is tobacco and the fossil-fuel business. They kept flogging tobacco after their own research had revealed its dangers. Likewise with the fossil carbon sequence of positions: 1. there is no global warming; 2. there is global warming, but fossil carbon is not responsible; 3. there is global warming, fossil carbon is responsible, but it is a good thing (CO2 is plant food, etc.) 4. there is global warming, fossil carbon is responsible, forests may burn, but the only thing we can do is adapt to it. Corollary: the one thing we cannot do is switching to renewables. We must keep mining and burning coal.
I think so Omar, people believe a lot of things that run contrary to scientific proof, and they occasionally say things that are wrong, none of us are exempt. Rush was a heavy smoker and despite his attempt to quit (he often referred to his “formerly nicotine stained fingers”), he continued with cigars. Nicotine is, as OB pointed out, a powerful addiction. I see people justify and promote it in all sorts of ways, it’s glamorized in the movies and elsewhere, etc. I’m pretty sure most of his audience is not of the young impressionable demographic, but still, promoting tobacco use is never a good thing. Cancer has a way of convincing folks.
Agreed.
Ah, Rand. Her followers were still denying that nicotine is addictive, or that addiction even exists, decades after her death.
Promoting the increased risk of lung cancer as a weapon against personal smoking has always been a double-edged sword.
For one, it stigmatizes people who get lung cancer and never smoked.
For another, only about 10% of smokers actually get lung cancer. This feeds the ‘my grandfather smoked 80 cigarettes a day and lived to be 90 years old’ nonsense. Yeah, but if he spent the last 20 years of his life with emphysema, COPD, vascular dementia, blind from AMD, or type II diabetic, maybe smoking wasn’t such a great idea. But most people have no idea how these (and many others) are just as highly associated with personal smoking. I really wish there was a more complete approach to the dangers of personal smoking.
There used to be a good anti-smoking ad on British TV aimed specifically at young men highlighting the risk of impotence with personal smoking. It had the men in it sitting smoking cigarettes that went all droopy. It was rather clever I thought.
Claire, a corollary to that is the conversation at my school around secondhand smoke as they were discussing banning it. One of the smokers rang in to inform us (as if we didn’t know already) that you aren’t going to get cancer from inhaling small, occasional amounts of secondhand smoke; it takes a lot of frequent exposure. Therefore, there is no reason to ban smoking, at least the kind that you do outside.
What she did not acknowledge was that smoke (firsthand or secondhand) has other problems besides just cancer. As I mentioned above, I am asthmatic, and nearly died from a secondhand-smoke induced asthma attack. That doesn’t take years; it only takes seconds. And people who smoke outside never moved away from the doors by the required distance; they stood right by the door and smoked, and every door, even though some were designated non-smoking. If you made any comment on that, they would say it wasn’t right that they had to go outside in the cold to begin with. So those of us exiting the building would get a huge whiff of smoke (if someone was outside, and they nearly always were) or a smaller whiff (if someone had been there recently, and that was practically 100%).
The tendency on toxics has been to research only whether it causes cancer or death, forgetting the many other things that can be a result of hazardous compounds. We are starting to move away from that, but much of society still hasn’t gotten the message. Doesn’t kill you? Does it cause cancer? No? Safe, then.
Expanding a bit on Claire and iknklast’s points: my grandfather stopped smoking when the woolen mill he supervised went under (the mill had been losing money for years and he was paying the workers out of his own pocket; eventually it was discovered that the treasurer, who was also the mayor, had been embezzling; the latter fled the country). He lived for another two decades or so after that, into his mid eighties, but in the last few years he suffered from emphysema; he was confined to the first floor of his house and spent large chunks of the day hooked up to a nebulizer.
As an asthmatic myself, I had a pretty good idea of what he was going through, and I knew that if I lived to old age I would not want to suffer the same. I did try cigarettes a bit in my teens, but I never got hooked and I never bought a second pack.
twiliter @ 8 – notice I didn’t celebrate Limbaugh’s getting cancer.
Sorry O, I know, and I didn’t mean to imply that at all. There is a lot of hate swishing around the twitter toilet though.
As there always is, sadly. I’ve just seen some academic guy there wondering what he should do to prevent Kathleen Stock from giving a talk she’s been invited to give.
I think twitter is as bad as it gets. I try to limit my exposure there because it invariably puts me in a bad mood. Ingesting that much negativity wholesale there is poisonous, I need to keep that garbage out of my head.
@iknklast Oh yes. The LD50 test is still the gold standard of toxicity testing but it’s garbage really. Rats and mice are not humans and although it was useful once when we had few other options, it really needs to be replaced or at least augmented with other methods.
To put it another way – rats and mice have a very low tolerance to caffeine. If we were to extrapolate to humans, none of us could drink coffee.
That’s not to say animals can’t provide vital data for science. Just that toxicity tests can be more refined than current FDA standards.
Exactly, Claire. And there are some things that might not affect rats and mice that could still be toxic to humans. Because, as you note, rats and mice are not humans. Apes are not humans, either, so are an imperfect tool. Same with pigs.
Being safe for rats is not necessarily being safe for humans; being bat for rats is not the same as being bad for humans. (Dogs can’t eat chocolate, and humans can, so another example of something we wouldn’t do if we solely relied on animal testing).
And, of course, cancer is not the only horrible thing that can happen from exposure.
I spend a fair amount of time in Canberra, the capital city of Australia. Some years ago, the Federal Government not only banned all tobacco advertising nationwide, but decreed no smoking in any public buildings, including offices. So circles of office workers would form outside office buildings, many of them women-only, all smoking away in the open air.
An overseas visitor on a sightseeing tour of Canberra remarked to her tour guide on how remarkably well-dressed all the city’s prostitutes were. That story made its way rapidly to a prominent place in the city’s newspaper, The Canberra Times.
It did nothing to help local tobacco sales. Quite the reverse, actually.