Dum Pendebat Filius

TMZ.com reports that Barack Obama might still be smoking cigarettes on the Q.T.

Forget about gender and skin color — is today’s America ready for a President who smokes? As we all know, it’s considered diabolically wicked to indulge in cigs these days. Anti-tobacco fanaticism has become so mainstream, and so fanatical, that smokers are thought of as, quite simply, bad people.

As a former cigarette smoker, I have to say I think it would be pretty surprising if Barack Obama was actually able to go through the pressure and stress of a political campaign without “falling off the wagon” and picking up a cigarette at least once in a while. I’ve been off the cigs for eighteen months now, and it’s still pretty much day-to-day — I still want to smoke almost all the fucking time. If I had known how hard it would be to quit, and that it would be hard for such a long time, I doubt I’d even have tried quitting. If the anti-tobacco fanatics had any idea how hard it is to stop smoking, I suspect many of them would tone it down a bit.

(Well, actually, no. No, they wouldn’t. Anti-tobacco fanatics are assholes, and if they didn’t have tobacco smoking to be assholes about, they’d find something else to be assholes about; but that’s neither here nor there.)

Anyway, readers, if Barack Obama is indeed still smoking, he had better keep it to himself. A cigarette smoker cannot be elected President in today’s America.