Obama hazy on smoking
President Obama has signed a bill designed to give government more sweeping powers to regulate cigarettes, especially the way they’re marketed to attract teens, citing his own experience as a young smoker.
But on the question of whether he’s still puffing away now that he’s reached a more mature state, he’s about as forthcoming as he is about so many other aspects of his life and history—which is to say, hardly at all:
But he didn’t say how his own struggle was coming since he moved into the White House. And aides were no more forthcoming.
As senator, candidate and now president, Obama has veered between frank and cagey about his personal battle with smoking.
He promised his wife, Michelle, more than two years ago that he would quit if she let him seek the White House.
He has often acknowledged since that he has “fallen off the wagon.” But he hardly ever provides specifics. And though White House aides pack nicotine gum in their jackets to help him resist, they also refuse to give a clear answer to the question of whether the president still sneaks a smoke now and again…
“I don’t, honestly, see the need to get a whole lot more specific than the fact that it’s a continuing struggle,” Gibbs said. “He struggles with it every day.”
Honestly, Mr. Gibbs, I bet you don’t see the need. I wouldn’t either, to tell you the truth (I assume the White House is amply equipped with smoke alarms), except that it is typical of Obama’s cageyness (love that word!) or downright secretiveness on other aspects of his life that are far more relevant.
As far as cigarettes go, however, methinks Obama is following the example of St. Augustine, who said (albeit about a very different subject): “Make me chaste—but not yet.”
I think he not only promised his wife but made a commitment to his “followers” that he would quit. Still, why am I not surprised that he wasn’t able to keep this one either. Also be that he won’t have to worry about being denied health care due to his “unhealthy” habit.
Hey I have no problem with anyone not being able to get on top of an addiction right away – but this is just ONE MORE THING that falls under the category of “do as I say not as I do”.
More evidence that I’m better than Obama 😉
I quit cold turkey YEARS ago. 🙂
We all make mistakes. Obama continues to make them with due diligence. 🙂
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One of the first things anyone’s said to make me like the man.
Don’t you think it’s a bit, um, creepy to be this concerned about his life like this? It’s this push to have every aspect of the man monitored, observed, conscripted when he’s really, or at least he should be, just the director of the federal management department. Why the constant microscope? Why, frankly, should anyone give a shit? So he’s a private person. Let him smoke a fag in peace. Stop acting the informant, and stop trying to have it both ways.
Like Don Marquis, Obama has simply “conquered my goddam willpower.”
Robert Kelly: First of all, this post is rather tongue in cheek, in case you didn’t notice.
However, I actually don’t give a shit—in your rather elegant phrase—about whether Obama smokes or not. I believe I made that quite clear in my post.
What I do care about is that his coyness and caginess in this matter is a reflection of his coyness and caginess about a host of things about himself that really do matter
OK. I grant that I was acting unfairly and a bit mean.
Not to belabor on much longer, but — I mean — you say, this is irrelevant, I don’t care, but it is a reflection of something that is relevant yet unspecified — all while buried under loads of irony. I might be mistaken, but it seems as if you’re trying to have it both ways.
Anyways, I do think it’s absurd he signed in those smoking restrictions. That’s exactly what I don’t like about the Democratic Party, liberals, et al. They have this attitude that… well, I’ve struggled with smoking all these years. Kids, don’t do as I do. Here, the government can help you (um, coerce you, and me) not to do as I do.
We’re all expected to jump on the Obama train and go off the rails together. But that might be a poor metaphor, since we’re not going off anything (well, we’re going off smoking), but being regimented into a new, smoke free America. All aboard.
I would be more than happy to ignore the personal lives of elected officials if they would ignore me and leave me the hell alone. But that doesn’t seem to be in the cards.
neo’s point is spot on: What Obama does in his personal life is really none of our business. BUT, since he is supposed to give the example of being open and honest with the American people, his habit of “do as I say, not as I do” seems to eerily fit the way Leftists approach policy and life. In other words, neo has spotted a character flaw.
And to that conclusion, I will close with the famous words of Gomer Pyle, USMC: “Surprise! Surprise! Surprise!”
It’s all theater for Obonga. Right now, the traveling show is Health Care for America. “Gypsies, Tramps and Thieves…”
I want to hear the administration refer to Iran as “Iran” and NOT “Islamic Republic of Iran”!
Robert Kelly: Unspecified? I didn’t specify them because they’re so well known. But here are a few: I’d like Obama not to have lied about and/or covered up salient facts about his relationships with Reverend Wright, Bill Ayers, and Rezko, to name just a few. I’d like to have seen his transcripts from each school he went to—Occidental, Columbia, and Harvard Law—as well as the paper he wrote at Columbia on the Soviet Union. I’d like to know how his schooling at each place was financed—whether he got scholarships, or whether he took out a loan, or whether someone paid for his education.
Things like that.
Neo, just reading your list on Obama’s knack for secrecy, it’s really staggering to consider we’re talking about the U. S. President.
Gore and Dubya released their SATs. I don’t believe Kerry did. FWIW, mine are higher than Gore and Dubya.
Gore, Dubya, and Kerry released their transcripts, which is how we found out that Intellectual John had a lower GPA at Dear Old Yale than Dumb Dubya. Neo is not the only one who has wondered why this information has not been released.
Ditto the financing. I read somewhere that Obama got Saudi financing, but have not idea if that is true or not.
We don’t know who this guy is, and IMHO his time in the rarified atmospheres of Hawaii, the Ivy League and the South Side of Chicago means that Obama doesn’t have a clue how mainstream Americans operate. Recall his ” bitter guns religion” remark about them in the sticks. He was thinking out loud trying to figure those yahoos out, because he didn’t have a clue how they operated.
Gringo: I fault the press as much as I fault Obama, by the way. Maybe more. They should have been on his case relentlessly and ferociously about all of this stuff way back during the campaign.
And if had been anyone but Obama, they would have been. And if it had been a Republican—well, need I say more? They would have published forged bad grades if they had to.
I want to hear the administration refer to Iran as “Iran” and NOT “Islamic Republic of Iran”!
I dunno, I’ve thought about that…. Maybe he is ham-handedly (little moslem humor there) trying to distinguish The People from The Regime there. Maybe that is too charitable….
(Nyomythus and I seem to be on the same wavelength sometimes. I’ll have to exercise some care and restraint when I disagree with Nyomythus in the future.)
So, how is this different from Prohibition? That sure stopped drinking in the U.S.
My hope is that all the young adults who think it’s cool to smoke will come to hate Obama and his nanny state and will vote against him in 2012.
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There’s nothing mysterious about Obama’s smoking. He smokes a hookah behind a semi-opaque curtain. Sometimes he takes the shape of a beautiful woman, and sometimes a dragon.
Let’s see…
The president who just signed into law draconian regulations on the use of tobacco smokes;
The president that tells you that you have to give up your SUV, yet uses a limo on an SUV chassis to get around town followed by a phalanx of SUV’s?
The president who derides corporate big wigs for their use of Gulfstream jets to get to Washington himself uses one of the largest aircraft in the world – unless he is headed to NY for a date with the bride – then he uses a Gulfstream, three of them.
Help me out here. Isn’t there a word for this type of behavior?
I could go on and on but I would wear my fingers down to bloody stumps…
But which is worse?
Doing something of your own free will that you well know will bring you harm – in this case, smoking?
or
Having your bad choices regulated and taxed by those who make the same bad choices, writ large much of the time, yet lecture you on those same choices?
This is also the president who keeps appointing tax officials who don’t pay their taxes.
On the transcripts, I tend to think it’s not grades he’s hiding but what courses he took. I’ll bet the transcripts would show plenty of courses in areas like Marxism, revolutionary theory, colonialism, community organizing, and such, that might reveal a little too much about the direction of the young Obama’s thinking.
Do we even know what his major was?
When someone keeps trying to control what others do in life then he, by his actions, makes his own failures suspect and open to comment.
Mrs. Whatsit, your theory about the courses taken, rather than the grades received, is quite interesting. I hadn’t thought of that angle.
As to the smoking, I don’t care whether he does or not. But to decide that tobacco will be regulated more and marijuana ignored seems a rather odd approach to civil liberties.
Last year I thought the same about why his academic transcripts are off-limits. I thought all along that this is a stealth candidacy that was put forward by some very powerful and wealthy people. They are putting up big bucks to make sure his birth certificate is sealed off from the public.
I suspect he had very mediocre grades at Occidental College, despite taking courses in those things he had a passion for. So, the really interesting thing is how he got into Columbia University with those kinds of grades, from Occidental and Punahou. I think some powerful, connected people were advancing him even back then.
The road for Barry seems just so well crafted by influential and moneyed people which makes me think he truly is the Manchurian Candidate. He’s hiding a lot. The people who groomed him and advanced him are REALLY hiding a lot.
On another thread I alluded to the somewhat stealth nature of Salvador Allende’s presidency in Chile. His way was paved by heavy financial support from the Soviet Union. He did not have a very large following of support in Chile, but he got the office he obtained because of the kind of system they had and the coalition politics that existed which is akin to how governments are formed in Parliament in Great Britain. You don’t need an absolute majority of voters in order to achieve that.
I’m convinced that Soros’ media 527 organizations were behind the eight years of beating up on George Bush by the MSM. It was constant, without letup. The average voter was barraged with dis and mis information and slanted coverage which, in a steady drumbeat, finally overcame all resistance and seeded the ground for a candidate like BarryO. Under normal conditions, if enough information made it into the MSM about Barry’s Marxist pedigree, do you think most voters would have put this clown into office? I do not think so.
His ascension into the presidency was the result of many factors perfectly coming into alignment, much of which was brilliantly manipulated.
Oh, and I have it on good information from a man I know who took the Illinois Bar Exam on the same day and in the same room with Barry that he was not admitted to the Illinois Bar until many months after my acquaintance was admitted. The guy thinks either Barry did not pass the exam or their were character issues involved, and that someone fixed it all for him. Most likely, the issue involved character things. Something did not smell right about Barry. But maybe the Ayers and Daley connection helped clear this up for him.
Gringo, I seem to recall that Kerry did in fact release either his SAT’s, GRE’s, or both and they were slightly lower than Bush’s, as it happened. My scores were higher than all three of them but that’s mostly because one of my few useful skills is that I am a good test taker.
I do see something slight but interesting in the Obama and smoking issue…a smoking gun, so to speak. As usual with many leftists, he is very good at telling people what they should do and even compelling them to do it, even if he’s not willing to do so himself.
He and his wife, remember, must have had a family income close to half a million dollars, yet he talked a lot about how Joe the Plumber types were going to have to sacrifice, to pay higher taxes, for the common good. He’ll pay higher taxes, too, but miss it a lot less.
It’s just like in San Francisco or Portland (Oregon) where the people who are already there push for “wise use” of the land, rent control, and the like. It benefits them greatly and prices ordinary people out of the market.
I was never much of a leftist but one of the many reasons I stopped being one altogether was that I realized authoritarianism isn’t an anomaly in leftism, it’s inherent; not a bug but a system feature.
In support of Mrs Whatsit’s hypothesis that the reason for Obama’s not releasing his transcript has to do not with his grades but with the courses he took, here is this well-publicized quote from Dreams From My Father.
Methinks that Obama never outgrew that nonsense.
FredHJr:
While Allende never had a majority, he had a large following. Depends on your definition of very large following.
1964 Presidential election 39%
1970 Presidential election 36%
1971 Mayoral elections 49%
1973 Congressional elections 44% ( “The People 44, Reactionaries 56” went the chant)
There was a joke that Allende told for years, having run for President since 1952, that on his grave would be inscribed: “Here lies the future President of Chile.”
Alex Bensky: While I do not recall seeing Kerry’s SAT scores, I read an analysis online comparing what he and Bush got on some Armed Forces aptitude-type tests, and I also recall that Bush scored slightly better than Kerry. Just like at Yale, eh?
“Butcher of Beirut” = Mirhossein Mousavi
three decades ago Mir-Hossein Mousavi was waging a terrorist war on the United States that included bloody attacks on the U.S. embassy and Marine Corps barracks in Beirut.
as i said, the only difference is if russia thinks that she can get more out of the new guy than the old guy, but that the old guy will not be different.
The connection to the attack is direct, according to the man in charge of American operations in the Mediterranean at the time:
“We had a tap on the Iranian ambassador to Lebanon,” retired Navy Admiral James “Ace” Lyons related by telephone Monday. In 1983 Lyons was deputy chief of Naval Operations, and deeply involved in the events in Lebanon.
“The Iranian ambassador received instructions from the foreign minister to have various groups target U.S. personnel in Lebanon, but in particular to carry out a ’spectacular action’ against the Marines,” said Lyons.
and
“When Mousavi was Prime Minister, he oversaw an office that ran operatives abroad, from Lebanon to Kuwait to Iraq,” Baer continued.
“This was the heyday of [Ayatollah] Khomeini’s theocratic vision, when Iran thought it really could export its revolution across the Middle East, providing money and arms to anyone who claimed he could upend the old order.”
Baer added: “Mousavi was not only swept up into this delusion but also actively pursued it.”
Retired Adm. Lyons maintained that he could have destroyed the terrorists at a hideout U.S. intelligence had pinpointed, but he was outmaneuvered by others in the cabinet of President Ronald Reagan.
“I was going to take them apart,” Lyons said, “but the secretary of defense,” Caspar Weinberger, “sabotaged it.”
Russian agents have a stranglehold on the UK because Putin has modernised the Russian concept of intelligence. Now they are putting emphasis on the use of Russian emigrants and not on the use of leftist or liberal Western intellectuals, whom Lenin once cynically described as his “useful idiots”. Though a lot of KGB officers still hark fondly back to the days of Stalinism, they would never dare to recruit a British intellectual today because they know that your intellectuals would believe that Russia has finished with Communism. That is not the case at all.
In the Soviet period the number of vacancies for KGB and GRU agents in the Soviet embassies was strictly restricted by the Central Committee of the Communist Party. Today though, Russian intelligence does not suffer restrictions. The KGB’s privileged position in Russia gives it unrestricted freedom to operate all over the world. British intelligence is deprived of such a privilege.
What should the UK do about all this? Increase their spy missions in Russia? I am afraid it is too late for that. People are already afraid to contact Britons or British institutions for fear of being accused of espionage. As the FSB (the successor to the KGB) now doesn’t need to hamper itself with the search for proof, it is possible to declare anybody a British spy. Once that happens the person will go to prison for 15 years, as has already happened to Igor Sutyagin and many other Russian intellectuals. On the other hand, North Korean intelligence is allowed to work in Russia openly. They are friends. You, the British, are not.
When I spoke on CNN a few days after Litvinenko’s murder, the interviewer wondered: “Why are you sure it was Putin? Why not anybody else?”
It was a question put by a man who had been brought up in a democratic society, where the state’s intelligence apparatus are civil bodies in which officers are allowed a degree of freedom in their political views. The KGB is a military body. It is a part of Russia’s military bloc, and it is subordinate to the Supreme Commander of the Russian Army – former Comrade President Vladimir Putin. As such any uninvited intruder into the sphere of Putin’s personal power can expect to be severely punished.
Can Putin order his agents among Islamic terrorist cells to create acts of sabotage in the UK? He’s already probably ordered them to do the same thing in certain Russian cities. It’s strange that the West still considers Russia its ally in fighting world terrorism when terrorism as a concept was initially invented in the KGB’s headquarters as a tool of world Communist revolution. Terrorism is a part of Communist ideology. That is why, as Litvinenko used to tell me, that terrorism in Northern Ireland faded as soon as the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991: the paramilitaries stopped getting support from Moscow.
The very problem of world terrorism had also faded until the KGB regained power in Russia in the mid-1990s. That is why, according to Litvinenko, all the leading world terrorists have been KGB agents, like Carlos the Jackal. Even al-Qaeda’s two leading figures, Ayman Al-Zawahiri and Juma Namangani, are KGB agents. In 1996, Litvinenko secured the secret arrival of Al-Zawahiri in Dagestan in the Northern Caucasus in Russia to be trained by FSB instructors. Namangani was once a student of the Saboteur Training Centre of the KGB’s First Chief Directorate in 1989-91. Litvinenko’s friend saw him there.
Russian intelligence is using Islamic terrorism all over the world. Now it is trying to prevent any easing of tension in the Middle East in order to keep the price of oil high for the Kremlin’s coffers.
– Konstantin Preobrazhensky
Nokia Siemens Networks (NSN), a joint venture between the Finnish cell-phone giant Nokia and German powerhouse Siemens, delivered what is known as a monitoring center to Irantelecom, Iran’s state-owned telephone company.
A spokesman for NSN said the servers were sold for “lawful intercept functionality,” a technical term used by the cell-phone industry to refer to law enforcement’s ability to tap phones, read e-mails and surveil electronic data on communications networks.
William Daly, a former CIA signal-intelligence officer for the agency’s Office of Science and Technology who retired in 2000, said the monitoring center in Iran will be used to “monitor dissidents and those ayatollahs who oppose the Supreme Leader [Ayatollah Ali Khamenei].”
Mr. Daly, who provided technical assistance on surveillance missions for the CIA, said that lawful intercept as a concept was created by the cell-phone industry to provide law enforcement agencies the ability to track criminals and terrorists.
Indeed, the telecommunications industry’s own international standards require that data networks allow law enforcement to intercept phone calls, e-mails and other electronic data.
“This functionality is offered by all major mobile and fixed network system vendors,” Mr. Roome said. “Such functionality can provide the proper authorities with an important tool for the investigation of serious criminal activities, such as terrorism, child pornography or drug trafficking. The use of such surveillance is based on local legislation and typically overseen by high-level independent government bodies, such as courts.”
“There are a lot of export controls in place in Western countries on technology that might have a dual military purpose,” he said. “But there are virtually no restrictions on the export of high-tech equipment that can be used to monitor or control free expression.”
on another note, any one paying attention to the assasination attempts?
The President of Russia’s southern republic of Ingushetia Yunus-bek Yevkurov, 45, was injured when a suicide bomber detonated explosives packed in a Toyota vehicle parked by the side of the road which his motorcade was using to head to his office, news agencies are reporting today.
Here’s the lowdown on the grades hypocrisy. For Republicans, grades matter because they determine, in leftists’ eyes, whether the candidate is stupid or evil, as those are the only two varieties of Republicans.
For Democrats, grades and transcripts don’t matter because someone could be very smart or talented without doing well in school (the Einstein Effect). However, only liberals and progressives get the benefit of the doubt here. This is why the MSM could claim that Slow Joe Biden was a “genius” on matters of international relations.
This is similar to the smoking controversy, as liberals essentially are saying, “Do as I say (despite the fact that you might have received better grade in the class most relevant to the issue)”
For example, I’m betting that the vast majority of readers here have a much better understanding of elementary economics than Obama, yet he still is able to claim that he knows more, despite his inability to comprehend high school level economics.
To Mrs.Whatsit’s point, I’ve presumed that the secret was the nature of Obama’s studies, rather than his performance.
As Ozymandias points out, Obama could count on top cover from the MSM for any deficiencies in performance, unless they were truly appalling, but it would be harder to cover for the content of the courses. One little nugget such as “Reintroduction to Islam for Apostate Muslims” (or something of that ilk regarding Marxism, such as having had Ayers as a TA after denying knowing him) would put “paid” to Obama’s career, and even the MSM couldn’t put lipstick on that pig.