Another Windmill Victim

I’m not a religious person or very spiritual at all. I’m definitely not a “new age” person. But I like to believe in karma. Even if it doesn’t really exist, it’s a good way to live your life. Basically, what you do to others will be returned to you, whether what you’ve done is good or bad. Basically, pay it forward and do unto others, blah blah blah.

Karma is probably not to blame for Rush Limbaugh’s advanced lung cancer. Rush has a long career of doing asshole shit unto others. The twice-divorced-family-values proponent, draft-dodging warmonger has spread hatred, racism, sexism, and misinformation for decades. And, it’s made him worth around $500 million. But, hatred, racism, and saying stupid shit doesn’t have any support from the science community for causing cancer. Smoking cigars for decades does.

People who have self-destructive habits tend to downplay the negative effects, even to the point of lying. Eddie Van Halen believes the cause for his tongue cancer is from his habit of holding copper guitar picks in his mouth while he was doing his double-tap method on the fretboard. I guess that’s possible but I think a larger culprit is Pall Malls or whatever brand he smoked since before he was even a teenager. My father, a lifelong alcoholic who drank a case of beer a day which would usually start around 6:00 a.m. was very defensive of his habits and swore he could quit at any time. He never did.

Rush once said to a caller on his show, “There’s no even major sickness component associated with secondhand smoke. It may irritate you, and you may not like it, but it will not make you sick, and it will not kill you.” He also claimed, “Firsthand smoke takes 50 years to kill people, if it does.Not everybody that smokes gets cancer. Now, it’s true that everybody who smokes dies, but so does everyone who eats carrots.”

Rush’s defense of smoking is almost as ridiculous as Donald Trump’s claim that the noise from windmills cause cancer.

Limbaugh was a huge defender of smokers and complained about the nation’s changing attitudes toward smoking. Even our major tobacco states, North Carolina, Kentucky, and Virginia, have banned indoor smoking in restaurants. Rush wailed, “I’m telling you, there ought to be some measure of appreciation for people who buy tobacco products, despite the forces arrayed against them, It’s getting harder and harder to use tobacco products, unless you want to call marijuana tobacco, and you can do that anywhere, for the most part. But the fact of the matter is they have to endure a lot, the public hates them, they’re despised, they can’t smoke in places of comfort anymore, can’t even smoke outside in a park! And yet their actions and their taxes and their purchases are funding children’s health care programs. I’m just saying there ought to be a little appreciation shown for them, instead of having them hated and reviled.” Then he said, “I would like a medal for smoking cigars.”

Rush should have eaten more carrots.

Here’s the thing I get tired of hearing from smokers and granted, I don’t hear it a lot because it’s stupid: You are not a victim of smoker persecution. You choose to smoke and spread your filth onto others. You don’t have a constitutional right to smoke anywhere you please. We all have the right not to inhale someone else’s destructive, nasty habit. And I say this being a former smoker (we’re the worst when it comes to hating smoke).

Since I believe in karma, I don’t want to go too heavy on Rush. I’m not rejoicing in his illness and I wish him a full recovery. Cancer isn’t something any of us should wish on anyone, even a troglodyte like Rush Limbaugh. Hey, when they go low, we go high, right? But, my hope from this is that Rush gets a better perspective. Somehow, I doubt he does.

This is a guy who was a strong proponent of the war on drugs and as you see above, complained about marijuana. Yet, he himself was a drug addict. He was against taxpayer-funded support for drug addicts, yet being rich, he was able to get help. When he had a health scare while on vacation, he claimed his access to high-quality medical attention was proof we didn’t need a national healthcare plan. Rush never understood it was more about access. Maybe now, he’ll think about preexisting conditions. Rush should ponder what would happen with his healthcare if he wasn’t rich and there wasn’t Obamacare. He’d probably use Obamacare while continuing to attack it. That’s what they do.

Rush once said he’d move to Costa Rica if Obamacare was implemented. Fortunately for Costa Ricans, he never made the move. And if he had, he may have been horrified to discover they have a national health plan…

…until he got advanced lung cancer.

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