The U.S. Food and Drug Administration, a government entity presumably that works for the betterment of all of us, has now stooped to the very slime and filth it is charged with protecting us against. Earlier last week it was announced the government – our government – would soon require pictures of corpses, cancer patients, and diseased teeth be placed on cigarette packages and cigarette advertising.

The gruesome illustrations, of course, are part of a ludicrous and a very misguided effort to stop cigarette smoking, which the FDA alleges are responsible for the deaths of over 440,000 people every year but, in my opinion, this latest example of lunacy is a greater reason we still need to rid ourselves of the dumbest collection of government officials ever be to assembled in The Land of the Free.

First, it has been proven for centuries that no governing body can legislate morality. It didn’t work with women’s suffrage, prohibition, teenage abstinence, the AIDS virus, or anything else you can name. Only crazy people would think that putting pictures of rotting teeth and gums on a cigarette pack will do any good. That’s mental illness, which is altogether another story.

For FDA commissioner Margaret Hamburg to say, “Some very explicit, almost gruesome pictures may be necessary,” clearly shows her values are badly twisted; to further offend 46 million adults who enjoy smoking will get her canned faster than a politician on the take. This poor woman needs psychiatric help if she thinks insulting millions of people is the answer to anything.

Secondly, there was a study several weeks ago that showed alcohol, i.e. beer and whiskey, is now more dangerous than heroin. The logical next step in somebody like the daffy Mrs. Hamburg’s realm would to be place pictures of deceased fetuses on beer cans to warn pregnant mothers, jail cells on whiskey bottles to warn potential DUI offenders, and gruesome car wrecks on bottles of wine lest someone buy what an FDA official might deem more than necessary.

Such governmental “righteousness” is absurd and, as you think of further labeling avenues that will assault your senses, ask your elected officials if they support such a waste of taxpayer money. After all, 46 million smokers pay a heap in taxes and, trust me, most of them vote, too.

Please! This isn’t at all who we are, not the America where I want to live. I don’t go to horror movies or watch surgical procedures that are broadcast “for my enlightenment” for a very good reason – I am not going to subject myself to such garbage. I’ll assure you I’ll be properly zonked during any part of surgery I must endure and there are enough things that scare me without ever having to pay for it to happen.

I can also promise the FDA that if they pursue the gruesome-pictures idiocy, be it on billboards where children will see it or on cigarette packages where fellow Americans are ridiculed and demeaned for enjoying tobacco, I and many others will work very hard to make sure we quickly replace the hysterical hand-twisters with responsible, logical and dignified people who will accept their offices responsibly.

What Commissioner Hamburg and her followers didn’t happen to notice was that the majority of Americans are fed up with idiots who think they have the right to foist their crazed opinions on those who are gentle, law-abiding and free. We don’t want the government to make our moral decisions. And now we are increasingly aware the FDA itself is veering from what is in the best interests of the America people.

Does a picture that is forced on you, showing some poor guy with a tracheotomy smoking a cigarette, make you proud of what is being done in Washington? My goodness gracious!

I don’t smoke cigarettes – I have in the past – but still greatly enjoy my cigars. I am careful to never offend anyone with their smoke. I play by the rules, never enjoying one where I shouldn’t, but the fact is that I understand what W.C. Fields said a long time ago, “A woman is a woman, but a good cigar is a smoke.”

Now along comes a pious woman, Commissioner Hamburg, who has no earthy idea of the mess she is making for herself. I’m all for childhood education against the perils of smoking, and I applaud and support those who quit, especially as the price for a pack of Marlboro’s is now almost $5.00, but I’ll promise you people like Commissioner Hamburg will be far more dangerous to America and its freedoms than second-hand smoke ever will.

We don’t need anybody else trying to legislate morality because, not only will it not work, it proves we still have the wrong people with their awful ideas in places that certainly should have never been put in charge. My heavens, let’s get rid of such morons!