The News-Times chose to print the essay, "Death of tobacco legislation welcome decision to Hart," (N-T, 7/15/97) by Jeffrey Hart, a columnist with King Features Syndicate. Out of the thousands of recent commentaries by columnists which are distributed over the AP Wire, The N-T chose to print this vacuous piece of drivel.
Parroting the Republican leadership's propaganda line, Columnist Hart says hiking taxes on cigarettes is just a way for politicians to get their hands on more "private money." He denies that smoking results in higher costs to the public for health care because, he says, "smokers die...years earlier" than non-smokers, and so they don't collect as much social security and medicare benefits.
At first the Knight's Apprentice thought maybe the piece was satire or tongue-in-cheek. According to Hart's reasoning, non-smokers should welcome emphysema, lung cancer, and heart disease in their fellow citizens, since, by dying early, they are leaving their retirement pensions behind in the Social Security Trust Fund. The same "benefit" could be said to come from fatal auto accidents, homicides, etc.
The Apprentice is not kidding here. The paper really printed this stuff - and it gets worse: Hart calls for public officials to, "drop the words 'children' and 'kids' from their political vocabulary." To Democrats' criticism that the, "Republican leadership has to make a decision - whether they're for Joe Camel or whether they're for the kids of the United States," Hart responds, "There are those damned kids again."
Need I say more? The bi-weekly News-Times decided to put this nonsense before its readers instead of reasonable material concerning local issues. The Apprentice thinks the paper owes its readers an apology for choosing to reprint Hart's irresponsible article.
___The Knight's Apprentice