America's Most Wanted: Who Is Joe Camel?

HALL OF PUNDITRY

America's Most Wanted: Who Is Joe Camel?
By John Calvin Batchelor

1. Joe Camel is now America's most wanted criminal. More than Tim McVeigh's accomplices, more than the Olympic park bomber, more than even druglord Robert Vesco, the U.S. Government -- in the guise of the muzzling Federal Trade Commission -- has moved to hunt down Joe Camel as a purveyor of "addictive and dangerous" cigarettes to children under eighteen. In rapid response, the Clinton White House declared its satisfaction with the FTC's ruling, adding, "The President has been working very hard to protect kids from the dangers of smoking. We're very happy to see any action that will help in that effort."

2. Vice-president Al Gore smokes a pack of cigarettes each and every day of his term in office. If he's reading this piece, he just lit one up to get to the next paragraph.

3. Joe Camel is doomed, and there's nothing we can do for him but watch the cartoonhunt and the rapid trial that will follow, knowing that in the death penalty phase, the jury will vote 12-0 for burning to the ground. Nevertheless, there is not even a debate here whether or not Joe Camel has surrendered his First Amendment right to free speech. The notion that the FTC can muzzle this unreal creature is unreal. So is a White House that joins in a decision so clearly in violation of free speech. There are no extenuating circumstances for which the Feds can deprive you or your advertiser the right to make your case in public. Let's go to the videotape. Search for the year 1776, and the dare of a bunch of crackpots to advertise treasonous conduct in the name of an unreal construction called "We the People." Repeat: No debate about Joe Camel's free speech. The censors at the FTC need a couple of hours in front of the American history channel.

4. Al Gore smokes more than a pack of American-grown tobacco on his bad days in office. He just lit another cigarette.

5. Tobacco is addictive and dangerous. Of course. However the major hooked and unrepentant addicts are the federal state and city officers who depend upon the cigarette, cigar and pipe tobacco tax to pay their bloated and heavily smoking workforces. Sin taxes are what's left the deficit comptrollers. Any alteration of the tax income from tobacco consumption directly and mortally threatens the lifespan of the state. The Hatch-Kennedy health scheme to raise cigarette taxes to siphon $30 billion into healthcare for children was not just a risk to the tobacco states such as Jesse Helms and Launch Fairlcoth's North Carolina, it was a major blow against every worthwhile state healthcare plan in this country. States depend on sin taxes for their general fund to offset medicaid and other welfare-class programs. The estimate that the Hatch-Kennedy plan would reduce the number of teenagers who start smoking by ten percent for every ten percent increase in cigarette taxes purchases sent a scare into the worthies from the White House to City Hall. Hatch-Kennedy died of second-hand hand-wringing.

6. Al Gore smokes two packs a day when he's on the campaign trail, and there's an estimate that his trail work for the midterm '98 elections will cut months out of his lifespan; and inarguably his run for the presidency in 2000 will inhibit his septuagenarian prospects.

7. Yes, it's true that the Republican Party's major corporate contributors now include Big Tobacco. Five of the '96 campaign's top ten gift-givers (aka bribe-makers, to call lobbying for what it is) were tobacco-related. And why? Because the Republican Party now controls the Congress -- meaning chairhoods of every subcommittee with its hand on Big Tobacco's throat. Once upon a time just three years ago this fact was exactly reversed, and the Democratic Party was the major recipient of Big T's bribes. You Dem partisans, don't play with history unless you want to get whipped again. The Democratic Party was built on Big T money out of the Solid South from its foundation under Andrew Jackson until its defeat in 1994. From the Civil War until the Crash of 1929, Big T. bought and paid for every Senator Foghorn who ever filibustered against Civil Rights or voted for isolationism. Your Clinton White House sucked deeply on Big T money to get elected in '92 and to run for more power in '94. The same DNC that shifted its cash-habit to China would gladly turn back to Mr. Philip Morris if he was taking its phone calls.

8. Al Gore's children suffer with their father's second-hand smoke each and every day. And Tipper Gore, with Al since Harvard days, has been exposed to more second-hand smoke than any other major political wife.

9. The last refuge of the political scoundrel is child care. The Clintonistas and their kindred have learned to cover their power grabs with ceremonial talk about protecting or educating or doctoring children . This is hooey on the same scale as the agitprop of the revolutionaries who once kissed the hem of the proletariat before they made their power grab for dictatorship. Tell me about yourself, don't talk about my children. Tell me what you were doing with that cigar in your hand, Mr. Clinton, don't tell me how you're going to keep a cigar from my child's hand.

10. Al Gore has no intention of not smoking a pack a day until the day his doctor orders him to stop or else.

11. Ban tobacco. Go ahead, make it an outlaw chemical. You will immediately overwhelm the coke druglords with tobacco druglords whose tens of billions from smuggled tobacco contraband will reawaken the defeated tobacco-growing Latin states. Replace the Gulf Cartel with the Cuban Cartel.

12. Al Gore, butt-fiend.

13. Or move tobacco regulation from the muzzling FTC or the forbidding FDA to the regulating EPA. Make tobacco an air quality threat, and let Al Gore's protege Carol Browner of EPA rule on where and when humans can make smoke. Once EPA establishes its authority to hire Tobacco Police, it can move on to the major air pollutants in our country: petroleum products. Ban tobacco today; ban the car tomorrow.

14. Al Gore is one of the biggest advertising threats to the welfare of children in his country. A cigarette-addicted presidential contender is a nightmare of smoke publicity. All Big Tobacco needs is one photograph of a puffing Al Gore, and it can make its case to teenagers that the government isn't serious about stopping anything that maintains the status quo.

15. The Clinton White House is serious about shaking down Big Tobacco for three goals. First, to siphon a large piece of the tobacco liability settlement (estimates up to $300 B) over to the trial lawyers who support the DNC. Second, to distract the public from the obvious failure of the White House to confront and defeat cocaine traffickers: the major drug threat to the nation's kids. Third, to paint the RNC as a Big T toady, part of the evil corporate empire that only the DNC can save America from.

16. Last puff: You support Big T each and every day you put money into your mutual fund or money market account, because I promise you the fund managers own a very healthy share of tobacco stocks. You want to ban tobacco, ban your portfolio folk from sharing in the smoky spoils. Also, have the architects of the Capitol building gouge out the tobacco leaves in bas relief on the columns outside the Old Senate Chamber. Go farther, defoliate the wild tobacco plants in Kentucky and North Carolina. Rename the Smokey Mountains.

17. Al Gore is Joe Camel.

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