Writing in the Campaign for Liberty blog, Anthony Gregory said in his article, When Hypocrisy Matters…

A little hypocrisy is ubiquitous in nearly any society, but the issue of government always raises the stakes and makes it all the more egregious. It may be an insult for someone to verbally criticize you for a vice, such as smoking, only to light up himself minutes later. But for the government to impose the will, the ethics, the standards of some politicians on you by force even as they do what they claim should not be done—that is a different, much worse form of hypocrisy altogether.

Which brings us to William Corr, Obama's choice for the second slot at the Department of Health and Human Services. Corr is an anti-smoking advocate and both he and Obama seem to support an agenda, to be carried out by the Democratic Congress, of "increasing federal regulation of cigarettes, raising taxes on tobacco products and approving an international tobacco control treaty," as the New York Times puts it.

Obama has gotten attention as the first open cigarette smoker to be elected president since Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and yet he seems to have no problem pushing around smokers, making their habit more expensive (tobacco taxes always hurt the poor the most), and even internationalizing an issue that should not even be dealt with at the national level under our Constitution. In a free society, tobacco, along with other drugs, would be handled locally, and ideally by the family and community, and not at all through the criminal justice and regulatory systems. Yet politicians who drink alcohol or smoke tobacco or even have tried illegal drugs think very little of taxing, regulating, harassing and even jailing their fellow citizens for doing the same.

It has long been frustrating to watch a politician who smokes tobacco or drinks alcohol champion the war on drugs, all to stem the tide of chemicals that don't kill nearly as many people as tobacco and alcohol do. Perhaps it is even more frustrating to see a president who smokes cigarettes wave the anti-smoking banner. Government crusades against drugs, cigarettes or other vices always fail to uplift the moral character of the people, but they are great ways to destroy liberty and personal responsibility and are reliable sources of high hypocrisy.

As I have repeated over and over again with countless examples, the war on smoking is not about health, drug abuse, or the children… it is all about money, control, and jurisdiction. Or, as Mr. Gregory puts it in this article, it's about destroying liberty and personal responsibility.

Barack Obama has assembled perhaps the largest concentration of collectivists in his cabinet and advisors that this country has ever witnessed. If you thought the erosion of liberty was bad under George W. Bush, hang on because you haven't seen anything yet.