This Hullabaloo post got me thinking. Digby discusses a blog post by a fellow named Dennis Praeger whining about the fact that the left has imposed anti-smoking ordinances on the good Americans on the right.
There is a tendency, more pronounced (I think) on the right than the left, but general enough, to place issues on a left right continuum when doing so makes absolutely no sense. Why, in this country, the question of religious faith, against all the evidence, has become a left-right issue. Against all the evidence, conservatives are religious and left wingers atheistic or godless, while the truth is far more murky. I mean Karl Rove doesn’t even believe in god.
The smoking issue seems even more ludicrous. I am a very political person, but I wasn’t that political when early on, before I received my first communion, I developed an abiding loathing for tobacco. In my case, it was exposure to concentrated second hand smoke in the car, for at the time my mother smoked like a chimney. I don’t recall politics having anything to do with it. I suspect that if one were to poll on the issue one would find antipathy to tobacco spread rather evenly across the political spectrum.
What’s amazing, as Digby’s post illustrates, is how easily we allow ourselves to fall into this left-right trap in situations where it really makes no sense. Let me hasten to add that I can conjure up both a left and right wing case for both sides of the tobacco issue, so it won’t work to say that restrictions on smoking offend right wing libertarian principles.
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