POLITICIANS TAKING MORAL HIGH GROUND? L.A., CALIFORNIA GO OVERBOARD ON ANTI-SMOKING CAMPAIGNS.

Byline: KIMIT MUSTON Local View

I can tell you with confidence that not since Carrie Nation brought her ax out of Kansas and turned the Anti-saloon League into the WCTU, and not since Kevin Costner uttered the line, ``Let's do some good,'' has a less likely group of reformers ever taken up a social banner and nailed a sinner to a briquette.

Who am I talking about? What great social issue is being championed as you read these very words?

The California Legislature is contemplating making it illegal to smoke tobacco in your car if your children should be in the car with you. And the Los Angeles City Council has already made it illegal to smoke tobacco on local beaches, kids or no kids.

Hallelujah! We are saved from ourselves, yet again! And by politicians, yet again. Who would have ever thought they would be the ones to lead us to the moral high ground? I guess they know the way because they've spent so much time looking up at it.

And that these two particular bodies of politicians should be passing regulations to house-train their own constituents is particularly amazing. These guys can't balance a checkbook. They can't meet a deadline. And yet they find time to impose ethics on their obviously feeble minded constituents who are unqualified to run their own lives.

The anti-smoking campaigns passed the point of being a health issue some time ago. They're now more about cultural and social cleansing. The U.N. should have a bureaucracy to defend smokers against this kind of abuse.

I'm not promoting the use of tobacco. It's a filthy, disgusting habit, unhealthy and, I suspect, the product of a curse uttered by some Native American while watching white men selling time-share condos on his happy hunting grounds. But picking your nose is also disgusting, and it spreads germs. Why are we letting fathers drive around town picking their noses with their children in the car? Yuck. That's visual pollution if nothing else.

Is smoking unhealthy? Good Lord, yes. Did the tobacco companies lie to us? Absolutely. During World War II, Chesterfield cigarettes used the slogan, ``Not a cough in a carload.'' That, it turns out, was not true.

However it is also not true that cosmetics will moisturize your skin, since your skin is dead tissue. It's not true that shampoos will give you healthy hair, since the hair you're shampooing is dead tissue. But if you think the LAPD should sweep the beaches for smokers, if you think the CHP should assign officers to look for people puffing while car-pooling, then what you've got between your ears is dead tissue.

The police are shorthanded enough dealing with serious crimes like drunk driving, murder, and bootlegging DVDs. They have no resources to waste dealing with yuppie-collar crimes.

And secondhand smoke on a beach? In the face of the average 20 mph ocean breeze most smokers can't suck the fumes into their own lungs, let alone pollute anybody else's. And I suspect that on an average beach you inhale a lot more aerosol-ed sea gull poop than tobacco byproducts. How come sea gulls are legal?

The law allows ships docked in Los Angeles Harbor to run their huge diesel engines day and night to provide electricity for the crews. What do you think causes more cancers, that old guy in the Speedo smoking his cigar or a freighter idling for 48 hours?

And for heavens sake, do we really need another illegal drug? We can't keep track of the illegal drugs we've got now! Maybe it takes less than a village to just say no. In my lifetime, the War on Drugs had been an expensive total failure. Some frustrated citizens are reduced to embracing legalization the way Nixon embraced Vietnam-ization. And for the same reasons. But here come the yuppies, wiping out nicotine with a mere wave of their magical purity laws.

God love Carrie Nation. Her heart was in the right place. But she lost because what she did made Al Capone very rich. Tobacco is a weed, folks - just like that other weed that grows almost anywhere. Five more years of this idiotic PC cultural enforcement and every college student in America will have a Phillip Morris plant in his dorm window, right next to his Mary Jane.

Just leave the poor smokers alone. They'll die out eventually. Then you can dance at their funeral.