Virgil Goode: Dripping with Contempt and Hatred

So a doctor is concerned that so many of our poor smoke. He develops a plan to reduce the smoking rate of welfare recipients. He shares such plan with his Congressman, Virgil Goode (R, VA-5).

Virgil Goode, who has repeatedly gone to bat for big tobacco interests (once by lamenting the idea of an elderly woman (his mother) being denied "one last pleasure" just before expiring on her hospital death-bed), responds thoughtfully.

So... I wonder how he would penalize those whose behaviors were "likely to produce AIDS." And who are these people? Some enterprising journalist may want to take the leap and ask the questions.

And trans-fats? Republicans don't generally get high marks for their sense of humor, but this is sublime. Tobacco hooks millions and millions of teens every year, eventually killing many of them -- but only after they spend a lifetime forking over a significant portion of their income to their killers. Virgil Goode considers the tobacco pimps morally equivalent to those that make home-made chocolate-chip cookies using a stick of butter. That's funny stuff.

Author's Postscript: I stand corrected. BUTTER IS NOT A TRANSFAT! I apologize to the all the good butter people and I promise not to make the mistake again. Now can we get back to speculating about what Good Ol' Virgil meant about "penalizing" those that "produce AIDS"? Or maybe talk a little bit about his comparison of tobacco death merchants to Crisco consumers?

Comments

[Pherdnut]

Maybe we also need to penalize welfare recipients when their kids don't get good grades or they refuse to keep their lawns mowed and their SUVs in good repair, or if they don't buy their fair share of useless crap at the mall to keep the economy going.

Or we could just let them eat the country's cake surplus and cease this welfare silliness once and for all.

[pzdoff]

The only people on the planet dumber than Virgil Goode, are the morons who vote for him.

[JonathanDS2U]

A Jack Lemmon movie recently shown on TCM (I think it was "Prisoner of Second Avenue") has him as an unemployed man transformed into a deranged psycho by his situation and radio talk shows. He denounces to Ann Bancroft, his wife, a conspiracy in the U.S. of self-destruction, which he holds responsible for unemployment and everything else bothering him. I think the movie comes out of the '70s, when they might just as easily have portrayed him as someone overboard about the environment - any theory that tries to point to one underlying issue as responsible for America's problems can only come from a nutcase (beware of those who put air in their tires!).

This makes it very difficult to defend the idea promoted by the Lemmon character, despite the possibility that it contains serious truth, nevertheless I shall: Our sublimated destructive sides are secretly fusing together with those same feelings going on in others. Self-destructive smokers are united by their self-destructiveness, and are not just united in a desire for nicotine. This is what we should be looking for, in order to confront Americans with it, in order to keep the self-destructive from manifesting this side of their inner psychology in votes for McCain.

[novowel4me]

Years ago, when my wife was doing an internship at a hospital with a drug rehab clinic, she told me that patients who could quit heroin and barbiturates found it more difficult to quit tobacco. Frankly, I'm all for anyone who wants to select themselves out of the gene pool by using nicotine or any other drug in any way they see fit. Like nicotine other drugs can then be taxed to pay for education, rehab and to re-coop medical costs while we eliminate costs to our legal system " so much the better.

[Nutcase]

There is a tax on tobacco. The settlement of the lawsuit against big tobacco required the companies to pay huge amounts to the states. That caused a large increase in the price. The states looked good because the companies were collecting taxes for them.

The states were required to spend that money on health-related areas. Of the 20+ states, only two complied. The others put it in general funds. Lots of luck those proceeds only to address health problems.

I started smoking when cigarettes were 10 cents a pack. There were real physicians in commercials telling us how wonderful cigarettes were. Almost 70% of physicians smoked. That was the highest rate of any identifiable group. They bear some blame. After 50 years of smoking, tomorrow will be 20 weeks without a cigarette. It is extremely difficult but I'm holding on. I smoked 2 to 2 and a half packs a day. There is no doubt I was truly addicted. I still am.

For the benefit of that M.D. who considers himself so superior: a study done about 6-7 years ago at Harvard (I think) showed that smokers cost the government less than non-smokers. That may seem counter-intuitive but it may be because smokers don't live as long.

Am I poor and uneducated? Hardly. I have twice as many years of college as an M.D. Using stereotypes and expecting simplistic solutions for complex problems is a character trait of the simpleminded.

[Peddler]

And to be fair and balance, let us not forget those who consume alochol, unprotected sex, obesity, drug addiction, alcoholism, annorexia, bullemia....etc. If you are going to penalize, then you must penalizes equally.....give me a break.

[sher2x4]

The really strange thing about all this is:

I SMOKE,
and yet I agree with most if not all of the non-smoking comments in this thread.

Help!

[gorideabike]

During WWII Russian POWs who were starving to death in German prison camps were said to trade food for tobacco. Among contemporary people who suffer from poor education and low income, tobacco is often the first addiction. A whiff of educaton could cut back on tobacco use, and would not discriminate against the poor. That won;t happen because the government has become habituated to the taxes they levy on tobacco, and the legislators are addicted to lobbiest bribery. Governments all over the world are addicted to tobacco. Any "what ever it takes" enterprise with sufficient income can trump public health and welfare regulations.

[rsottong]

Vote Perriello, Virginia. Send (no)Goode packing. It's time ...

[BrooklynC]

I wouldn't count on the big c saving you from dementia. Nicotine aggravates dementia. It's a horrible affliction. I know--I just watched my father died after years of suffering from progressive dementia. He smoked a pipe for 40 years. No mouth cancer, no throat cancer, no emphysema, just years of sinking into an infantile state. It sucks.

[Helzapoppin]

If smoking-related illness is such a huge burden on the healthcare system (which admittedly, it is), why is it that every insurance plan goes out of its way to state they will not cover smoking cessation programs?

And if disease and illness related to America's obesity problem are also so overwhelming, why does no insurance plan cover weight reduction programs??

It's all so stupid.

[Twopennygal]

And why do they raise your rates if you lose weight "too quickly," i.e. more than 20 pounds in a year!

[twofish]

You both suffer from the common illusion that insurance companies are interested in keeping you healthy. Their purpose is to collect as much as possible in premiums and pay out as little as possible in claims.

One strategy is to drop you like a hot potato if you trigger any of the invisible trip wires they set up -- like getting sick. Fortunately, the California insurance commissioner has just gotten one of them, Blue Shield I think, to reinstate people who had been dropped for getting sick. The stated reason, of course, was that these people had omitted some important fact on their application forms, which the company had just gotten around to noticing when they -- got sick.

[max08]

Hasn't the good doctor heard that marijuana (the real thing not the synthetic) protects the lungs against lung cancer.

Read all about it here:
http://www.counterpunch.org/gardner05032008.html

[Bobrobert]

Please.


Another myth - don't spread it - smoking pot yields tars and carcinogens too.

ANYTHING smoked puts carcinogens into your lungs.

Pray for all the IGNORANT smokers of anything.

[jotunloki]

Tobacco is carcinogenic without being burned. That is why people who use snuff and chewing tobacco get cancers of the oral region (lip, tongue, jaw, etc). Marijuana is not. Don't senselessly parrot DEA propaganda.

[laocoon]

when the study came out on how Marijuana does not have the expected effect I looked around using Google and remember reading about how some researchers in Japan are looking at properties THC has that kill cancer cells. Never hear about that on the Media in America

[CyrusBeaucephus]

Pot causes emphasema, but not cancer--There has been plenty of reputable research on pot not causing cancer, it just doesn't make it to USA Today or FOX News

People who pray shouldn't be calling anyone ignorant, IMHO

[TRYKER]

My friend who smokes says he doesn't want his mind to give out before his body, so figures smoking will kill him about the time dementia sets in. Works for me.

[MJane]

My Dad used to talk like that. Life wasn't worth living without tobacco, who wants to be old anyway. Then he developed a smoking-related cancer and died an agonizing death. Needless to say, he changed his mind. He told me, "Don't tell me not to smoke. Figure out a way for me to smoke without consequences." Now he is dead, and Mom just celebrated her 17th anniversary with a man who was man enough to stop smoking. No dementia in either one of them.

[MourningDude]

Didn't the tobacco companies already settle for billions of dollars to reimburse states for medical care?

I guess when the 'solution' to every problem is life from libs is a new tax, it's to be expected that they would forget so soon and want to take another bite at the apple.

[indypete]

So you want your tax dollars to be spent for someone else's health care? Doesn't sound like you. Or are you a smoker and you want someone else's tax dollars paying for your health care?

[fiduciaryatlarge]

Yeah, all those liberal doctors, all they want is new taxes.

[CyrusBeaucephus]

Whereas your solution is endless war, corporate welfare, complete deregulation, pollution, fossil fuel dependence and zero political accountability. We've tried that already under Bush--it doesn't work

See you in November, Dude

[EngineerBill]

I think Rep. Goode's letter was the equivalent of "Go away kid, Ya Battah me." The truth is he may never personally smoke but he is, like a pack of cigarettes, in Big Tobacco's pocket.