LIBERAL DEMOCRATS GAVE HITCHENS CANCER!
(or something like that)

I'm no Christopher Hitchens fan (to say the least), but I find I'm not inclined to say anything unkind about him in response to the news that he has esophageal cancer. If he recovers and resumes his career as a professional irritant, fine -- I'll consider him fair game. Not now; not for this.

But I do find a post by the righty blogger Don Surber rather appalling. Surber seems to think it's unseemly that a number of news reports point out the link between esophageal cancer and some of Hitchens's habits:

... Suppose he had a less deadly disease, say, AIDS.

AIDS is less deadly? News to me. It may be more manageable than esophageal cancer, but it never goes into remission.

Would they mention that he had gay sex when he was a schoolboy?

Not unless someone's discovered a new strain of HIV with a forty-year dormancy period.

Would the Los Angeles Times say there is a strong link between male homosexual sex and AIDS?

What's bugging Surber, clearly, is that, in his view, there's moralizing going on, and it's directed at the wrong target. People shouldn't moralize about smokers! They should moralize about fags!

Look, Hitchens hasn't been just a smoker and drinker -- he's made his heavy smoking and drinking into a trademark, almost as if he's boasting about his dance with death. I can't say that his behavior fills me with a sense of moral outrage, because just about every smoker I've ever known has engaged in gallows humor, a boastfulness/sheepishness about the habit. The same for heavy drinkers. But it's been a large part of his press persona, and now the press is, understandably, making note of it.

The proper comparison isn't Hitchens-as-substance-user versus any random person with a particular sexual history -- it's between Hitchens and someone who use his sexual history as branding. If Gene Simmons, whose boasts of having slept with 4,600 women are a key part of his public image, turns up HIV-positive someday, you'd better believe that will get a mention in the news stories. (I'm no Simmons fan, either -- I never liked Kiss and the guy's a boor -- but if he wants to have sex with ten times that many women and everyone's healthy and consenting, it's fine with me.)

Surber goes on to says this:

Smokers are seen as weak and self-destructive and somehow deserving of their cancers and emphysema. We have marches for breast cancer which kills about 40,000 Americans each year but not lung cancer which kills nearly 4 times as many Americans. The stats are here.

Federal, state and local governments rake in billions in taxes each year on smokers and yet very little money is spent on research into smoking-related diseases. If Big Tobacco is made up of ghouls, what sort of monster describes government?

Yup: As this guy and his ideological soul mates remind us on a daily basis, government is evil ... until they want something from it. Maybe Surber should change his name to Don Jindal.

And Don, now that we've discovered your newfound respect for government spending -- your newfound recognition that sometimes government can actually be the solution rather than the problem -- let's talk. You're right: We've set up a system whereby cancer research funding depends on which cancer's advocates can demand funding with the most passion. Isn't that sort of a marketplace-oriented solution, geared to survival of the fittest and nimblest competitors? If we actually had a system in which the government would, say, award money evenly per cancer death for the various cancers, wouldn't that be handing the process over to "faceless bureaucrats"?

Yes, states have been using tobacco settlement money to offset budget shortfalls, but in the time that's been going on, what contribution have you and your pals made to budget discussions? As far as I can tell, all you've done is demand more tax cuts, at every level of government, while largely punting on the question of how to offset those cuts (or arguing that tax cuts actually increase government revenues). Programs that citizens want have to be paid for, but right-wing propaganda pushes states to cut taxes; tobacco settlement money can legally be used for non-tobacco-related purposes by the states, so the states divert it ... no one could have predicted that.

In any case, thanks for the acknowledgment that government can possibly do good, Don. And Hitch, I hope you beat this so I can go back to despising you.