First off, if the story of a five year old being pinned down and mechanically disembowled in a public wading pool while her father watched doesn't make you immediately both sick and furious, you're probably not a parent.
Unless, of course, you're Tucker Carlson.
Tucker Carlson has heard about Valerie's case. It's the one, apparently, that causes him to dismiss John Edwards as a "personal-injury lawyer specializing in Jacuzzi cases."
Umm... eew. Upon reading this, I was sure, or at least hoping, that there was a missing piece here. Did he really mean this case? Is this the sort of case that makes him dismiss John Edwards as greedy trial lawyer?
Yep. Indeed it is.
And there's Tucker Carlson again, this time on a
"Crossfire" episode last week: "My question is a very, very simple one. And I just want your honest answer. If [Edwards] is out to protect the weak, say, a little girl who was injured, terribly injured, in this Jacuzzi accident, why is it compassionate for him to take tens of millions of dollars of her settlement? Why doesn't he give that money back if he cares for the little girl?"
Yes, it would appear that this is indeed the case he's talking about. The "Jacuzzi accident." (Go to the article for debunking of the "tens of millions of dollars" crap. I've only got time enough for one pile of shit at once.)
Wow.
So, let's review.
Five year old girl gets stuck by a pool drain that is so powerful it not only pins her to the bottom of the pool, but slowly pulls out most of her intestines, foot by foot, while she screams and her father and others desperately try to figure out how to turn the damn thing off and free her before she dies. During the trial, it comes out that this is not the first such occurrence. Indeed, at least 12 other children suffered similar injuries from drains produced by manufacturer, none of which caused the company to make the damn modification -- about $1 per drain -- that would prevented those injuries. Oh, and the five year old, because she now has no intestines, will spend the rest of her life being fed intravenously.
Tucker Carlson hears about this, and his attitude is...
That ambulance-chasing bastard. How dare he sue that company.
Does that about sum it up? Am I being unfair? Well, tough, because here comes more.
According to Tucker Carlson, Republican, the entire experience of having your daughter being pinned to the bottom of a pool and disembowled by a faulty pool drain, after 12 other children were similarly injured, can be dismissed as a "Jacuzzi case."
You know what, Tucker? Go to hell.
And I don't mean "Go to hell" in a pissy little offhand way. I mean I hope you wake up tomorrow and find yourself in hell, with succubus Anne Coulter sucking your insides out through a straw inserted in your a--, while John Ashcroft belts out "Nearer my God to Thee" from a nearby Karaoke stage.
But let's give credit where credit is due. As the next paragraph of the above-quoted article demonstrates, Tucker is probably just an empty-headed tool. Because when you're on TV, you just repeat what you're told.
For six years now, Republicans have tried to minimize and demonize John Edwards as the worst kind of societal parasite: a personal-injury lawyer. North Carolina Sen. Lauch Faircloth ran anti-lawyer TV spots when Edwards ran against him in 1998. When Edwards began pondering a presidential campaign, then-White House spokesman Ari Fleischer was quoted as saying, "Bring on the ambulance chaser."
You heard it, folks. John Edwards is an "ambulance chaser", according to our Republican Administration. An American company should be allowed to make products that disembowel your children, as long as it allows them to make a buck. And anyone who tries to prevent a company from making a buck via injuring or killing children is a goddamn personal-injury lawyer. But corporate lawyers -- the ones who defend the companies against the evil five-year-old children in the world, are just fine with them:
Edwards' biggest legal contributors work at law firms mostly or represent plaintiffs exclusively. Bush's biggest legal contributors are affiliated with Blank Rome, a Philadelphia-based firm that boasts of handling "significant matters and transactions for a large number of Fortune 500 companies," and Vinson & Elkins, the Houston-based firm whose biggest client used to be Enron.
Yes, that's where the Republicans stand. And they're not afraid to say so. Well, they are, so they only say it in roundabout ways. It's not a case of a faulty pool drain nearly killing a little girl, it's a "Jacuzzi case". And Edwards isn't a good, nice lawyer, the kind we see at Enron and Citibank... he's an ambulance chaser, a --shudder-- personal-injury lawyer, one who preys on American businesses who just want to protect their rights to make an extra $1 in profit by disembowling your five-year-old children during their day at the public pool.
So, Ari Fleischer, let me welcome you to my Go To Hell list. See above.
But let's continue, because I'm in a really bad mood.
Former House Majority Leader Dick Armey, who now heads a conservative anti-tax group called Citizens for a Sound Economy, issued a statement last week in which he said Edwards represents a "well-connected swarm of trial lawyers who twist our legal system to pillage the productive sector for personal gain." But when asked whether CSE had evidence that Edwards had actually engaged in wrongdoing as a lawyer -- whether he had brought frivolous lawsuits, engaged in inappropriate forum shopping or committed any of the other abuses of which some lawyers stand accused -- CSE spokesman Chris Kinnan said no. "I haven't fully looked into that," he said. "Our focus has been on policy, and we wouldn't get involved in his personal history."
Jackass. Unmitigated jackass. I'll leave it to you to decide which of the two people named above is which.
And where does George W. Bush stand on this? Good ol' George, patron saint of underachieving supposedly-ex-drunks everywhere? We'll go to a must-read 2001 Washington Monthly, also about John Edwards as trial lawyer, for a nice two-sentence summary of his position.
As governor of Texas, Bush made "tort reform" one of his top agenda items. Quietly, in ways that have garnered little attention, the White House is laying out a strategy that in the coming months will seek to make tort reform a defining issue of Bush's presidency.
Yep. That's where we're at. Tort reform. Limits on punitive damages. Corporate lawyers good, lawyers for private citizens bad. If you're a Republican, that's what you support. For Republicans, having your daughter get her intestines sucked out of her body is a small price to pay... and a company that does it, in the natural course of trying to make a buck, should have to pay a small price.
Even if they let it happen twelve times before. Because to punish them for nearly killing children would send us down the road to communism, apparently.
So, George W. Bush. And the horse you rode in on, commonly referred to as "strategist" Karl Rove. And you, Cheney. And you, Bill Frist. Tom DeLay. Rush Limbaugh. And you, Instapundit, just because I'm tired of your completely amoral sniveling about, well, everything. And you especially, Tucker Carlson.
Go to hell.
Apparantly, being anti-child-killing-for-profit is now the "liberal" position in America. One open for mockery, if you're a Republican.
Fine. Bring it on.
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