Okay, that was lame; I’ve just always liked that Val Kilmer quote from Tombstone.

And speaking of lame, here’s Huckabee’s pronouncement that cigarettes used according to the package directions will kill you and secondhand smoke is “deadly” as justification for his ridiculous blanket smoking ban, fact in Arkansas and projected fact in the country at large if he became president. Mary Katharine Ham and Tom the Funkypundit both take him to task for presuming to dictate choices of the individual, MKH acknowledging smoking as a vice while she does so.

Being a nonsmoking bystander, I am far less supportive of the rights of smokers to light up wherever they please than the Funkypundit is. I occasionally choose to go to places I know will be smoking to have fun with friends, but that’s exactly the point: it’s my choice. Though in other places and on other occasions, it’s usually possible to choose to go elsewhere rather than endure smoke, sometimes it’s not, and those times are enough to make me fully supportive of the government banning smoking in property they directly own or control, such as airports or municipal beaches.

That said, though, I absolutely do not support the government declaring what shall not be permitted in privately owned establishments and am far more supportive of the rights of property owners to decide for themselves whether or not smoking is allowed in their establishments, according to what kind of an atmosphere they like and how it affects their bottom line. Even putting junk science aside, Huckabee’s employee-centric approach is laughable, arguing as it implicitly does that most people have no choice in where they work and no say in whether or not that workplace is smoke-free.

And there’s the problem with the nanny state that most of the more libertarian-leaning bloggers I read tend to overlook in favor of the “don’t tell me what not to do” approach (which, obviously, I mostly support as well): It promotes an utterly supine posture in the citizenry, a complete lack of ability to stand up for oneself, civilly but assertively and effectively, whether to the smoker next to you at that concert or to your boss about the clouds in the break room. Ask people for what you want. Now and then you’ll get it, and the other times won’t kill you. Literally won’t kill you.