Mayor (Pastor) Coles provides us with a fresh thought on smoking
Commentary by PAT MURPHY
And all this time, most of us believed smoking was a health issue.
Nope.
Ketchum Mayor Guy Coles, who’s out front working to scuttle a
proposed anti-smoking ordinance, wants to correct that notion.
Such a city law banning smoking in bars, Mayor Coles insists, would amount
to "legislating morals." Forget the health of customers and employees.
Morals?
So, that’s what’s been killing so many people who light up and
puff on cigarettes—lack of morals.
Most thinking folks, however, still consider smoking a health issue. One
study, "Mortality from Smoking in Developed Countries, 1950-2000," by Dr. E.
Loren Buhle of the University of Pennsylvania, estimates that 50 million men and 10
million women have died from smoking in industrialized nations of the world in the past 50
years.
That’s roughly equivalent to wiping out the combined populations of
California (32.2 million), Texas (19.4 million), Colorado (3.8 million), Oregon (3.2
million) and Idaho (1.2 million).
Mayor Coles will have none of that. The issue of smoking to him is pure
morals, presumably in the same company as adultery, lying, cheating, stealing.
So, light up all you sinners.
It’s the immorality that’ll kill you in time, not nicotine.
So sayeth Pastor Coles.
#
It’s just as well that Dennis Mansfield didn’t make it to
Congress to succeed Idaho Congresswoman Helen Chenoweth-Hage.
If Chenoweth-Hage’s views have been, well, sort of wacky, then
Mansfield would’ve shown Washington that Idaho could send another Republican there
with his own peculiarities: he’s thin-skinned, touchy and tends to whine, qualities
that can be fatal in politics where thick skins are required.
Hardly had the last votes been counted in the Idaho May 23 primary than
Mansfield filed a libel lawsuit against The Idaho Statesman and columnist
Dan Popkey.
The grounds? That Popkey had allegedly libeled Mansfield in a column about
Mansfield’s son, the son’s drug problems and Mansfield using his son on TV as an
election device.
If that tame column is enough to pique Mansfield and send him into court,
imagine what he’d have been like had he been in Congress.
Mansfield might’ve filed a lawsuit every week, bellyaching that some
meanie newsman in the prickly Washington press corps had upset him.
#
If e-mails from South Florida friends are representative of the public
mood, then Miami relatives of little Elian Gonzalez have created a backlash they’ll
eternally regret.
Resentment of Cuban-American militants has become so intense that
sympathies are now shifting toward what might’ve seemed unlikely a few months
ago—resuming relations with Fidel Castro’s Cuba, which would be a nightmare for
heavy-handed Cuban-Americans who’ve dictated U.S. foreign policy toward Cuba for the
past 40 years.
The argument that Castro is a tyrant doesn’t wash anymore, either,
since the House of Representatives voted permanent trade status for mainland China, a far
more bloodthirsty regime than pipsqueak Castro’s bumbling Marxist government.
Pat Murphy is the retired publisher of the
Arizona Republic and a former radio commentator.
