Lie #46: Despite reeking of cigarettes, Obama claimed he had NOT smoked to ABC News; admits he smoked to NBC

Obama is Smokin'

ABC NEWS Jake Tapper

Last August, I ran into Sen. Barack Obama, D-Illinois, outside the Senate chamber in the Capitol.

This was before the Obama surge, before he had omnipresent Secret Service agents, back when you might see him strolling solo.

We chatted for a second, mainly about the Pakistan speech he'd recently given and about how the media had covered it. He was in good spirits.

As any close friend or family member can attest, I have an unusually keen sense of smell and immediately I smelled cigarette smoke on Obama. Frankly, he reeked of cigarettes

Obama ran off before I could ask him if he'd just snuck a smoke, so I called his campaign.

They denied it. He'd quit months before, in February, they insisted. He chewed nicorette.

But I knew what I'd smelled and I asked his campaign to double-check and to ask him if he'd had a cigarette.

They reported back that he had told them he hadn't had a cigarette since he quit.

And maybe that was true. Maybe I imagined the cigarette smoke. My olfactory nerve somehow misfired.

Except….last night on MSNBC's Hardball, Obama admitted that his attempt to wean himself from the vile tobacco weed had not been entirely successful.

“I fell off the wagon a couple times during the course of it, and then was able to get back on," he said. "But it is a struggle like everything else.”

Now I wonder about last August.

It's not a big deal in the scheme of things -- the war on Iraq, a major economic crisis -- indeed, it's miniscule. Hardly worth mentioning.

Except that I don't like feeling that I wasn't being dealt with honestly. And as much as citizens who are suspect of the media might scoff at such a notion, many of us consider ourselves to be your representatives to help make sure our leaders are telling us the truth, and leading the country down a path we as a nation are confident is the right one. (Corny, I know.)

This isn't the only time I've felt that way about the Obama campaign, of course -- its response to the Austan Goolsbee controversy was a profile in dissembling. (Not that Sens. Hillary Clinton and John McCain or their campaigns are entirely innocent in this area either. Or even that Obama is necessarily the worst offender.)

Still.

- jpt

Post Script:

Smoker, aged two, copies his new American hero?

Source Oxy Moran

Mom Ticketed For Letting Toddler Smoke

Lauren Leamanczyk

GREENFIELD - A mom has been ticketed for letting her 2-year-old son smoke.

According to a police report, customers and staff at the Ponderosa restaurant on S. 76th Street in Greenfield saw the woman and her aunt give the child a cigarette.

Corinna Kuhnke says her son was not in danger.

"I had a pack of cigarettes on the table at a restaurant and the kid picked up a pack of cigarettes. He picked up the pack of cigarettes and pulled it out," she said.

She denies that her aunt lit the cigarette, saying instead, "she lit a lighter but she didn't light the cigarette."

Other witnesses say the cigarette was in the boy's mouth and it was smoking.

According to police, Kuhnke's aunt says Kuhnke bragged to her that her son can "even light his own cigarette."

Not true, says the mother. She says she's not to blame.

"I wasn't at the table when it happened, for one, and the kid's two years old. A lot of two year old kids know how to do a lot of things," she told Lauren Leamanczyk.

Other disturbing details in the report include a family member telling police that Kuhnke keeps a rolled up dollar bill in her bedroom. When the boy sees a bill, he says "fix, fix."

The women are not being criminally charged. They have been cited for Providing Tobacco to Underage Persons.

TMJ4 Wisconsin TV Source
Photo Source Perez Hilton (may not be same kid)