Bad Manners, Hatred,

A War Record, Class Action

Editorial

We live in two Americas. An America of decent, hard-working, middle-class taxpayers. And an America of flabby corporate pimps like Dick Cheney, whose jowls flap like the biceps of lambada dancers at an AARP picnic. —John Edwards

Just because I’m a billionaire doesn’t mean I don’t know a cheap tramp when I see one. Especially one whose fat librarian fanny blocks the view of everything else, including a brighter future for this country. —Teresa Heinz Kerry

*****

The presidential campaign against President Bush has been based on hatred, which is a repudiation of intelligence. Jonathan Chait wrote in The New Republic:

I hate President George W. Bush. I hate the way he walks. I hate the way he talks. And while most people who meet Bush claim to like him, I suspect that if I got to know him personally, I would hate him even more.

 President Bush is a simple fellow with clear, traditional beliefs, not sophisticated in the popular sense -- known often by hypocrisy, with subtle opinions, ready to compromise and swing this way or that. He is intelligent, with a clear sense of right and wrong. Worse, he favors the individual over the government, the great importance of business, and personal responsibility. In personal and group behavior his attempt is to bring us back to our basic traditions. John Gibson writes,

George W. Bush is pro-death penalty, pro-gun ownership, and anti-abortion; he is also pro-tax cuts, anti-big government, and emphatically Christian. He is everything Europeans scorn, disapprove, and hate.

Being un-European rouses the ire of Mr. Bush’s critics. While the Democratic Party has been making patriotic noises lately, sounding like Republicans, even calling on God to bless them and our country, they are without clear beliefs, willing if not anxious to discard traditional morals, extending the power of government, regulation of business, taxation for the redistribution of income. They promote the welfare state. They ape Europe.

Bush hatred in the Democratic Party and the United States is the same as Bush hatred in much of the world, and particularly among the politicians of Germany and France. As Germany and France continue to centralize their countries, expanding the welfare state as a fundamental article of political practice, they become poorer by the year. German workers were once dedicated workers who produced the best machinery in the world. That honor is a memory. The chief honor must go to Japan, where work is honored.

I have lost my respect for Europe and its culture, and I have little patience with their description of us as ignorant cowboys, illustrated chiefly by President George W. Bush. Europe has been uncivilized since the glory of Greece and Rome, fighting and killing each other for two thousand years. Europe has produced some splendid musicians artists and intellectuals. We thank them for helping to clarify intellectual confusion that multiplied in their war-filled history, and which eventually allowed some clarity, but I am not convinced Germany or France or much of Europe have any serious beliefs. They initiated in the last century two world wars and gave birth to Communism, Nazism, and Fascism. We saved them from themselves and paid for their reconstruction. Now they are slipping back into centralization and resent that we shall not submit to their international judiciary. Their resentment of us is partially at least due to our replacing them as the central power in the world. They show us beautiful old buildings, built on the backs of peasants, and try to overwhelm us with a specious claim for leadership. They argue from vanity.

Freedom in the modern world, and the central debate in political thought, results from the struggle of the United States against Britain to become an independent Republic. Our War of Independence, the Constitution, and the Federalist Papers which explained that constitution set the standard and gave the foundation not only to ourselves but to the world at a time when Europe remained without clear ideas. We explained how freedom could function. We emphasized the fundamental nature of contracts. We became and remain the intellectual leader of the world.

*****

Senator John Kerry has been nominated by his party as their candidate for president of the United States. He announces miraculous though obscure cures for what ails the United States and he does so with the oft-repeated picture of himself as a decorated war hero. He is surrounded by a handful of Vietnam veterans who echo Senator Kerry’s description of himself. Another group of Vietnam veterans who served with Kerry do not agree with the image Senator Kerry gives of himself. They have published a well-documented book that describes in detail Mr. Kerry’s war record.

John E. O’Neil, co-author of Unfit for Command, replaced Kerry as commander of Swift Boat PCF in 1969 and has been confronting him since 1971. Senator Kerry served months of a one-year term. He left early because of his third Purple Heart wound. None of his wounds required hospitalization and some of them were self-inflicted. Jim Rassman, a part of Kerry’s promotional group, spent only a few days with Kerry and was pulled out of the water by Kerry when he was knocked off the boat. Admiral Roy Hoffmann, who commanded swift boats in Vietnam, said “I do not believe John Kerry is fit to be commander in chief of the armed forces of the United States.”

When he left Vietnam he became a leader of the antiwar movement and claimed the leaders of the United States were war criminals. He was a spokesman for the Communists of North Vietnam in their attack of the United States. He threw away the medals he claimed to have won though he changed that account to only throwing away his ribbons.

On the Dick Cavett show in 1971, Kerry said,

I did take part in free-fire zones. I did take part in harassment and interdiction fire. I did take part in search-and-destroy missions in which the houses of noncombatants were burned to the ground. And all of these acts, I found out later on, are contrary to the Hague and Geneva conventions and to the laws of warfare. So, in that sense, anybody who took part in these, if you carry out the application of the Nuremberg Principles, is in fact guilty.

Before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1971 Senator Kerry said that his fellow GIs had

. . . raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam . . .

He impugned the honor of his fellow soldiers by summing them all up as “war criminals,” thus encouraging savage personal attacks on soldiers returning home from Vietnam.

After the years passed and Senator Kerry’s behavior was questioned, he excused himself by claiming to have been little more than a boy at the time. I suppose that means that those in their late teens and early twenties should be excused from wickedness. Our judicial system does not rest on that premise.

Any excuse that his behavior was done in ignorance is negated by the common instruction of officers. Said one Vietnam vet,

It is hard for me to believe that during officer training for wartime that the requirements of the Geneva Conventions would have been glossed over or ignored. I think Kerry understood what war crimes were and what were not.

If Senator Kerry’s description of himself is correct, he is a war criminal, along with his fellow soldiers. If he was not telling the truth, he was a traitor.

*****

I have had little respect for trial lawyers since my friend, Dr. Openshaw, a well-known and respected surgeon, told me that he had difficulty making a living because of the cost of insurance. All doctors treat patients more than they need because trial lawyers are in the wings. Hospital costs are increased enormously because of trial lawyers, and so are medicines. I do not have any figures that estimate the increased health costs because of trial lawyers but would assume it is many billions of dollars annually. I would not be surprised if medical costs increased by one-third because of the fear of trial lawyers. I fainted recently and was taken to the hospital. The heart doctor gave a lot of tests, which must have been expensive, but he also told me to use my common sense in all physical activities. If it were not for trial lawyers, perhaps he would have been satisfied saying fainting is common and I should avoid tiredness.

When I came home from a recent vacation, I got an invitation to enroll in a class-action suit. The St. Croix Review can receive electronic payment through an organization known as PayPal. Roberta Toher and Jeffrey Resnick filed suits separately and then jointly claiming that PayPal was guilty of violation of consumer protection statutes. We have always found PayPal honest, and if they were not would have known about it and have ended any connection. It is possible a class action suit could bring in millions of dollars because of the fear of bad publicity but the only ones who receive payment are trial lawyers and plaintiffs. Organizations such as The St. Croix Review are present for decorative purposes and do not receive enough money to pay for postage if they were to enroll in the litigation. The excuse of trial lawyers, that they are working for “the little man,” is utter nonsense. The little man is the one hurt most.

Some lawyers look for those who take diet pills, of whom there are millions. The system organizes legal colleagues with an interest in the possible profit from the abuse of diet pills, share information, and gather the names of possible plaintiffs. They study medical journals for bad news and then take ads in large newspapers and journals with the hope getting useable plaintiffs.

On a recent conversation with my local doctor, I suggested he might be living in the glory days of his practice. Medicare has said obesity is a disease. Trial lawyers will recognize their prey and gather like vultures. Advertising reminds everyone they must lose weight and those who don’t or won’t do what is necessary or what they think is necessary will blame either the doctor or the medicine. Pharmaceutical companies are regarded as thieves for charging what they do, and here is a possible legal action that will bring them to their knees. No thought is given to the harm to medicine when the manufacturers have to pay millions of dollars because of trivial lawsuits.

Senator Edwards, one of the wealthiest trial lawyers in the country, is the Democratic nominee for vice-president of the United States. I concede that trial lawyers have served useful services in cases such as Firestone when that corporation was compelled to improve the quality of their tires, but I am not convinced Senator Edwards always acted honorably. His specialty was suing doctors for malpractice in babies born with cerebral palsy. He argued that the brain damage was caused by doctors during birth and the birth should have been by caesarian surgery. There is no way to tell if cerebral palsy is present before birth.

Edwards appealed to the emotion of the jurors. In 1985, alleging that a doctor and hospital had been responsible for the cerebral palsy of a five-year-old girl, he said

Jennifer’s inside me and she’s talking to you. And this is what she says to you. She says, “I don‘t ask for your pity, What I ask for is your strength. And I don’t ask for your sympathy, but I do ask for your courage.”

While it is possible that obstetricians make mistakes, such mistakes are rare; medical science says that the cause of cerebral palsy is genetic. Dr. Freeman, a professor of neurology and pediatrics at Johns Hopkins Hospital said, “There is little or no evidence that if you did a caesarian section a short time earlier you would prevent cerebral palsy.”

When George W. Bush was campaigning for governor of Texas, he pledged to change tort laws to end the “frivolous and junk law-suits that threaten our producers and crowd our courts.” Within weeks he signed business-friendly legislation capping punitive damages, limiting class actions to federal courts (which are more expensive and harder to navigate than state courts), and making it easier for judges to impose sanctions on plaintiffs who file frivolous suits.

President Bush would like to have legislation that made class-action suits more responsible, but that is difficult. Trial lawyers are probably the wealthiest minority in the country and can buy or block what they want or do not want.     *

“Congress may be going home for the holidays soon. How can you beat a Christmas gift like that?” --Bob Hope