How ugly with eCig war become?

I’m wondering these days if we’re destined to have a “war” of sorts between Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Jenny McCarthy.

The latter, of course, is the Playboy centerfold from the Southwest Side turned actress/model/activist /talk show host (for now) who seems to have found herself a new cause.

SMOKING, PARTICULARLY THAT of so-called Electronic Cigarettes. They’re a device that allow people to get their nicotine fix without generating the smoke that causes the stink that makes cigarette smoking so repulsive to anyone who has to be near an actual smoker.

During the past week, I have seen a commercial keep cropping up on television in which McCarthy touts the “blu” brand of e-Cigarettes. She claims she can now smoke without causing everybody about her to give her the “stinkeye.”

Her ad ends with her using a variation on what appears to be blu’s tag line; she’s, “taking back my freedom” to smoke in public.

As though the people who don’t want to have to cope with the health hazard of being exposed to smoking are the oppressive tyrants for trying to deny her some unalienable right to rot her lungs out with tobacco products.

I’M KIND OF offended at her perception of the issue in that fashion. But I know she’s not alone – there are too many people who think they have the right to force themselves on us – as though a bully thinks it is the “American Way” for them to bully other people.

Now what does any of this have to do with our less-than-beloved mayor?

Will he get into a brawl w/ McCarthy?

McCarthy’s commercial was what first popped into my mind when I read the news reports about the City Council’s latest cause – Aldermen Edward Burke and Will Burns will be pushing for an ordinance that will more strictly regulate the eCigs.

Based on the perception that young people are able to purchase them legally, and are using them as a way of developing a tobacco habit. As though this is the entryway to cigarette smoking.

UNDER THE ORDINANCE, e-Cigs would be regarded as identical to “tobacco products.” That would make them the same as cigarettes, and anybody using them to inhale nicotine would have to behave in the same way they do when the light up a traditional cigarette.

That means having to take the ugly habit outside – even though proponents of e-Cigs argue that their devices only generate a vapor that is odorless; rather than the smoke of a cigarette.

There’d also be regulations against selling eCigs anywhere within a 500-foot radius of a school building. That compares to current ordinances that prohibit traditional cigarettes from being sold within 100 feet of a school.

The measure, according to the Chicago Sun-Times, is to be introduced this week before the City Council, which also is considering a significant increase in the taxes assessed by city government on tobacco products.

ALL IN ALL, it is not a mindset sympathetic to people who have developed a nicotine addiction.

Seeing as though Chicago-area celebrity McCarthy (I’m really not sure how to accurately describe what the star of the “Santa Baby” films that we’ll get to see in upcoming weeks has become professionally) is now the public face of e-Cigs, will we get the sight of McCarthy at City Hall – prepared to tell off Emanuel (who has said he supports the proposed ordinance)?

Will she use the same vehemence that she has turned to in her claims that certain vaccines cause kids to become autistic to say that Emanuel should take his ordinance and stuff it?

Soon to make annual TV reappearance

Will Emanuel turn to his blunt-spoken way with words that he often used on political opponents of Barack Obama back when he was White House chief of staff to try to put McCarthy in her place?

I CAN’T ENVISION McCarthy butting out of a fight in her own home town. Nor could I dream of a situation where Emanuel would show some tact – even if he did manage to avoid offending the French when they spoke of what parts of Chicago (including McCarthy’s old Sout’ Side neighborhood) are best avoided.

All I know is that the fight, if and when it does occur, has the potential to get even uglier than a “Sox vs. Cubs” brawl.

  -30-