Unintentional Comedy

We all know there are things in this world that are unintentionally funny.

There's the Chicago Cubs, who, for most of their history have been the loveable losers, getting jinxed by black cats in the on-deck circle or a fan dropping a foul ball that should have put the Cubs in the Series.

There's the decision by ABC to make a sitcom based on the Geico cavemen.

There's David Gergen and Dick Morris. Nothing's more unintentionally funny than their analysis.

The entire network of ESPN has become unintentionally funny. I mean, Rascal Flatts playing during Sportscenter? Spare me. My wish is that you shut those fat Yankees up. Give me the score and some stats.

Of course, most Democrats running for President are unintentionally funny (though they stay busy, inventing this here interweb, talking with a comatose Christopher Reeve, demonstrating their ability to speak different dialects of the English language, having "the audacity to hope"-whatever that means-or studying poverty for fun and profit).

So when I read this morning about the plans of the three Lt. Governor candidates in their choosing of Senate leadership, I got a good little chuckle. The story was in the Picayune Item, a small newspaper to be sure, but thanks to the Magnolia Report (an invaluable aid to this site) I got my morning laugh right after my bowl of Cheerios.

Anyway, back to the story. The humor is in the quotes of Mr. Franks himself. In another story, published in the far more widely-read Clarion Ledger, Mr. Franks promised a set of Senate Committee chairmanships that would "look like Mississippi," meaning black and white, Republican and Democrat. Now, anyone who's ever met Jamie Franks Jr. knows he's the most partisan Democrat this side of the Clintons and Kennedys. We are talking about a man who once remarked to me and several other students, "Republicans only care about people before they're born." I suppose the Democrats only care about you once you see one of their commercials promising big bucks in a lawsuit.

The likelihood of his appointing someone who's a Republican to a chairmanship is slim, but I guess it could be like the Clinton promise of a "cabinet that looks like America." That America, of course, didn't have a single Republican in it, apparently.

Of course, the CL left out one of the more "Huh?" moments of Mr. Franks standard stump. In the Picayune Item, he called out Tommy Robertson of Moss Point for his 'failure' to hike cigarette taxes while decreasing grocery taxes. Now, here's the thing about cigarettes: most of the people who smoke them aren't well-off. Most aren't well-educated. Mr. Franks needs to look no further than one of his own constituencies, Mantachie, where the opposition to a smoking ban led to comments from smokers that "Cigarettes ain't never killed nobody."

Now, here's the second part. The sales tax is the most fair tax in the world. Everyone pays it, nobody gets around it. You can get out of paying income tax (like, for instance, a certain Ketchup heiress). You can't get out of the sales tax unless you're in-between countries, and how many poor folks get a chance to do that? A person on public assistance is more likely to be a smoker. I can't tell you how often I saw, when I was a grocery clerk, a person get angry when they found out beer and cigarettes weren't covered on food stamps. Most people on public assistance don't pay income taxes. The sales tax is fair. This doesn't come from Haley Barbour; this comes from my father, whose politics are a lot closer to Mr. Franks than they are mine.

Of course, there are more people eating than smoking. So what does that mean, dear reader? That's right, decreased revenue! That means we're back in the situation we were in back in 1999, when we went from having a surplus in the last quarter of Fordice to being $29 in debt the next quarter under Musgrove.

I'm glad the Item gave us a chance to discuss the illogic of the 'tax swap,' but let's get back to Tommy Robertson for a minute. Was it Tommy Robertson who gave us a state sales tax? No, it was Gov. Mike Conner, a populist Democrat and one-time ally of Theodore Bilbo, whose populist Democrat credentials need not be listed. That's right, readers: What was good for everyone in 1932 according to the populist Democrats is bad for them now. Bill Minor won't tell you that in his history lesson columns for people he considers peons, but he's too busy with his crusade against those evil conservatives to bother with Democratic follies.

Who's the constituency for the tax swap? I don't know, but I'm pretty sure it's not located in Mississippi, unless you count the do-gooders in the ivory towers of the editorial offices of the Clarion-Ledger, the Daily Journal and the Attorney General's office. These are the same do-gooders who fell for the DDT scare in the '70s, and believed that banning DDT would improve life "for the children." Of course, thirty years later, there are millions of children dying of malaria in tropical countries without DDT.

But they had the best of intentions. And that's unintentionally funny. Unless, of course, your child dies of malaria.