A 30-second campaign ad by Dwight McKenna for Orleans Parish coroner

AD FOR ORLEANS PARISH CORONER HITS NEW LOW

Those of you who thought South Carolina politics were pretty rough have apparently never experienced Louisiana politics, where things can still get downright gruesome… literally.

In Orleans Parish, local surgeon Dwight McKenna, 68, is challenging 80-year-old coroner Frank Minyard, who has been the subject of much controversy in the four years since Hurricane Katrina.

And last week, McKenna launched a new 30-second campaign ad in a heated race for Orleans Parish coroner (yes, coroner) may have hit the all-time low for campaign advertisements.

The ad features a masked doctor and his hunchbacked assistant hovering around a cloth-draped corpse. The body has a toe tag that reads “DOA” on one side and “For Sale” on the other.

“We need a heart, a spleen and a liver for tonight’s sale,” the doctor says.

A narrator couches the situation by claiming that there were “body parts sold out of the Orleans Parish coroner’s office” which resulted in “lawsuits and settlements at taxpayer’s expense.”

Based on this ad, it’s only a matter of time before someone it this race turns up dead. Ba-dum-ching.

it’s also only a matter of time before Congressman Gresham Barrett’s team devise a way to steal the ad. No ba-dum-ching there, that’s just a sad reality.