How Smoking Builds Highways

Reviewing the key points in the War On Smoking:

POINT ONE: Cigarettes are evil, because smokers smoke them and consequently become sick or dead.

POINT TWO: The tobacco companies are evil, because they make and sell cigarettes.

POINT THREE: Therefore there was a big settlement under which the tobacco companies, by way of punishment for making and selling cigarettes, agreed to pay more than $200 billion to forty-six states and numerous concerned lawyers.

POINT FOUR: The tobacco companies are paying for this settlement by making and selling cigarettes as fast as humanly possible.

POINT FIVE: At the time of settlement, states declared that they would use the money for programs to eliminate smoking which is evil.

POINT SIX: Perhaps you believe that the states are actually using the money for this pupose.

POINT SEVEN: You moron!

POINT EIGHT: In fact, so far the states are spending more than 90 percent of the tobacco-settlement money on programs unrelated to smoking, such as building highways.

POINT NINE: This is good because we need quality highways to handle the sharp increase in the number of Mercedes automobiles purchased by lawyers enriched by the tobacco settlement. So, to boil these points down to a single sentence: The War On Smoking currently is a program under which states build highways using money obtained through the sale of cigarettes.

Is everybody clear on that?

An excerpt from the book, Boogers Are My Beat, by Dave Barry, the Pulitzer prize winning humorist, whose columns appear in over 500 newspapers