For those who despair of the Democrats on national security, there’s always John Edwards. Here’s his recent statement on Iraq:
[T]he terrorist threat against America is all too clear. Thousands of terrorist operatives around the world would pay anything to get their hands on Saddam’s arsenal, and there is every possibility that he could turn his weapons over to these terrorists. No one can doubt that if the terrorists of September 11th had had weapons of mass destruction, they would have used them. On September 12, 2002, we can hardly ignore the terrorist threat, and the serious danger that Saddam would allow his arsenal to be used in aid of terror.
He’s both right and politically savvy – the unGore. Which, presumably, is a deliberate choice. (The same goes for Joe Lieberman, who’s just been given a whopping big excuse to dump his deference to Gore in the primary stakes.
MORE SMOKING FOR HEALTH STORIES: I’m no doctor and can’t vouch for these anecdotes, but they strike me as worth investigating, if only because they show that smoking cigarettes – though obviously harmful in almost all cases – is not invariably so. Here’s one:
For people with a genetic predisposition to Parkinson’s disease, smoking has also been found to have protective capabilities by inhibiting the production of the MAO-B enzyme and thus preventing it from prematurely breaking down the neurotransmitter dopamine which, at chronically low levels, leads to Parkinson’s disease. Since dopamine slows down the transmission of nerve impulses and coordinates muscle movement, a shortage of dopamine can cause an unregulated and heavy traffic of electrical signals in the brain and can over-excite the muscles and cuase them to spasm and lock.
And here’s another:
My Dad developed ulcerative colitis (related to Crohn’s), Wound up in the hospital for 2 weeks. A couple of days before they were going to removed his colon, we found some obscure study on the net indicating that nicotine was related to the problem. We insisted that the Doctor prescribe the patch. Dad was out of the hospital in 2 days………with his colon intact. Some have come to call Ulcerative Colitis the “non-smokers” disease, because smokers never get it. My father had quit smoking 5 years prior to his illness.
The Dish 