7 Jan 2025 2:44 pm
It's actually refreshing to have a serious debate with you without the childish name calling and sexual innuendos.Cannonpointer » 07 Jan 2025, 2:50 pm » wrote: ↑ Daily in the clinton years. Not much after that.
I felt he was a mouth for wall street. Let me give you an example.
The cigarette industry, with ALL of its billions or trillions of might and influence, got sued by all fifty states You would think they could bribed ONE of those fifty to not sue them, yeah? North Carolina, maybe, where there's the town of Tobaccoville and where the brands Winston and Salem got their names?
All fifty states had the exact same idea at the exact same time: sue the tobacco companies. And the suit settled in a lovely was for big tobacco: with the tobacco companies immune from civil litigation brought by me or you. And Limbaugh was a voice of passion for big cig's "rights" and for how these legal actions were all "leftist" - politicizing big tobacco's crimes and asking people to side with them for ideological reasons.
RJ Reynolds had been caught red handed manipulating the ingredients of their cigarettes in a manner that their in-house scientists said would make them more addictive. What they had done was criminal - nothing short of murder by depraved indifference. And it was all cleaned up and flushed away by fifty states selling out their citizens and protecting big tobacco.
It was after the shilled for big tobacco that he went on my pay me no mind list. I knew that he was just a well paid product that was owned by the money boys and deployed to protect their interests. That is why it surprised me when he bucked the establishment and got behind Trump.
Personally, I always found Rush to be a libertarian as well as a staunch conservative. My recollection of that period where the states were suing the tobacco companies was that Rush felt there had already been a massive campaign to warn the public about the dangers of smoking, and saw this as nothing more than an attempt to grab a huge windfall of cash which amounted to outright theft on a legitimate business. He related his opinion that if the government really was concerned about the health of smokers, they could have just made cigarettes illegal instead of fining them for a producing a legal product. That wasn't their only dictum. They also regulated any advertising the tobacco companies wished to do, something that had never before been done to a legitimate business. And of course, as an avid cigar smoker himself, I believe he had his own personal reasons for speaking against the overreach of the government regarding tobacco regulation, and I certainly saw his point despite never being a smoker myself. And even after contracting terminal lung cancer himself, he never swayed from his opinion that the government bureaucracy had grown so out of control that they found it necessary to seek out businesses with deep pockets they could tap into, something they viewed as easy, low-hanging fruit. Rush firmly believed this type of strict control was never the intention of the Founding Fathers and needed to be stopped. And we've seen that transpire exactly as he predicted, with government also forcing businesses to put warning labels on alcohol purchases, on music, and even on movies and videos. Their current target seems to be the food industry where the government will begin attacking, fining, and suing those manufacturers who use dyes and preservatives to their food products, which I'm confident we'll begin seeing shortly with Robert Kennedy being given the power to do so.
I can certainly sympathize with those smokers who had started smoking before the deadly facts were known and became addicted, but the fact is that label warnings on cigarettes began in 1966, so now almost 60 years later, it's really not possible for younger smokers to complain that they were ever unaware of the dangers when they chose to smoke.