Bob Dole has Stage 4 lung cancer it was just reported. During his presidential campaign against Bill Clinton, Dole was underwritten by a flailing tobacco industry and he actually said there was NO PROOF that cigarette smoking caused cancer. Now he’s being touted as someone who was an ADVOCATE for health care reform!?!?” WTF? Is that because he got paid to endorse erection medication?

I bet Rush Limbaugh, who just died a few days ago from the same thing at age seventy, also didn’t fall for the “fake news” they would describe the science about tobacco as being. It’s beyond the pale that he made a whole career out of generating it for his evil purposes. Rush Limbaugh just had a high school diploma and held himself out to be some kind of “intellectual” for his extreme racism-based causes. I don’t think most people realize he had no credentials or formal education on what he spoke about.

My father and his mother both died from smoking when each of them was around the age of 50, twenty years apart. They were not spoiled rich kids or heirs to the Dole fortune. Medical technology might currently enable some to live longer with the pain of treatment they cause themselves with choosing to start to smoke (although most start in childhood). As I’ve always said in my activism in this arena: I don’t blame smokers for succumbing to addiction, but the tobacco industry that convinced high-profile politicians and pundits into spreading their lies is beyond contempt.