Every so often a smoking ban, intended to keep the middle and working classes in line, embarrasses the elites who pass it.
The Culvers and Santa Claus.
Mrs. Culver is a hardened criminal who smokes.
Such was the case in Iowa recently when a teary-eyed Mari Culver prostrated herself on the altar of Public Health and begged for absolution. Her crime? Smoking in a car. Her punishment? Public humiliation.
Even in these decadent fanatical times a smoking offense doesn’t often make the news. Mari Culver’s notoriety is due to her being the wife of rootin’-tootin’ anti-smoking Governor Chet Culver who signed the statewide smoking ban that resulted in his naughty spouse being nailed by the law.
Generally those at the top of the pecking order, such as state governors and their spouses, are immune from the myriad nanny-state laws that the "little people" must obey. Gov. Culver’s smoking ban is so unpopular that alert citizens were quick to snitch on his scofflaw wife.
Mrs. Culver’s sin was to smoke in the state-owned vehicle in which she is chauffeured by a state trooper. This news report doesn’t note whether the state trooper survived the secondhand smoke assault. Certainly she does deserve condemnation, not for smoking in a government car, but for inflicting this repulsive mea culpa upon the public:
"Like many Iowans, I have struggled to quit smoking. I successfully quit last year, but unfortunately started again a few months ago. I did smoke in a state vehicle, which I regret, and I promise that it will not happen again."
No inmate of a Catholic girls’ school, caught smoking in the bathroom, could have groveled before authority more abjectly. No adult woman, mother of two and wife of a governor could provide a worse example of state-induced guilt and shameful self-hatred. By kissing the behinds of the public health con artists and pharmaceutical cessation drug-pushers, the governor’s wife is a terrible example for her children and a doormat on which her anti-smoking husband wipes his feet.
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