The Third Man
David Weigel | May 23, 2007, 9:33am
Michael Crowley of the
New Republic has read Bob Shrum's memoir, and the tear-stained reflections of the man who blew eight presidential campaigns are
chock-a-block with dirt on John Edwards. Short version: He's a lightweight. Long version: If you tied cement blocks to his ankles and gave him a medicine ball to carry, then chucked him off one of the Petronas Towers, dude would
float.
Shrum went on advising Edwards for several years, including as Edwards was contemplating his vote on the fall 2002 Iraq war resolution. In the one passage of the book already widely leaked, Shrum recounts how he and other political advisers pushed Edwards into a vote for the resolution that Edwards--and, even more so, his wife, Elizabeth--didn't want to cast. The episode didn't make Shrum look great. But the real damage is to Edwards, who comes across as a cipher taking orders from his handlers. As Shrum puts it: "[H]e was the candidate and if he was really against the war it was up to him to stand his ground. He didn't."
Something that wasn't widely leaked:
Kerry had qualms about Edwards from the start, Shrum writes, but grew "even queasier about Edwards after they met. Edwards had told Kerry he was going to share a story with him that he'd never told anyone else--that after his son Wade had been killed, he climbed onto the slab at the funeral home, laid there and hugged his body, and promised that he'd do all he could to make life better for people, to live up to Wade's ideals of service. Kerry was stunned, not moved, because, as he told me later, Edwards had recounted the exact story to him, almost in the exact same words, a year or two before--and with the same preface, that he'd never shared the memory with anyone else. Kerry said he found it chilling, and he decided he couldn't pick Edwards unless he met with him again."
Edwards is leading in Iowa, as is Mitt Romney on the GOP side (Wayne Allyn Root might be leading on the Libertarian side for all I know), so there's a trend: the guys tipped to win the first presidential contests are the ones best-known for their mall model looks and calvalcade of flip-flops. If there's a difference it's in the sanctimony Edwards brings to his changes of heart. Check out the first passage Crowley quotes, then check out
Edwards' statement telling Democrats what to do about funding the war.
Jeff Taylor had some fun with Edwards' Playstation 3 crisis back in November - his
original poor-little-rich-populist scandal, before the haircut.
John | May 23, 2007, 1:58pm | #
"Final thought for the thread: Just because John Edwards talks to uneducated, and perhaps even stupid, juries in terms they can understand does not mean his causes are not just. he would probably speak much differently to a jury if he knew it was all Reason commenters."
Bullshit. Edwards is a like sack of crap that did real harm. He convinced juries that children having cerebal palsy was the result of the doctors not performing c-section deliveries, which was a complete lie and Edwards knew it.
From the American Thinker
" One of Edwards' specialties was cerebral palsy cases. He would bring suit against physicians on the contention that their actions while delivering the hapless children induced the condition. The notion was that the doctors were guilty of a dereliction of duty that caused the babies to be denied adequate oxygen during the birthing process. If only these physicians had performed caesarian sections, claimed the trial lawyer set, the children never would have developed cerebral palsy. Now, these children were the perfect clients for a young, ambitious trial lawyer seeking fame and fortune: children born with among the worst of crosses to bear; children who could make virtually anyone's heart bleed.
But there was a problem. You see, the scientific establishment has determined quite definitely that cerebral palsy is rarely caused by doctors. In point of fact, the condition is almost always induced by a subtle infection in the womb or, perhaps, genetics. To quote Marc Morano of CNSNews.com, whose news outlet interviewed various experts in the field,
Dr. Murray Goldstein, a neurologist and the medical director of the United Cerebral Palsy Research and Educational Foundation, said 'The overwhelming majority of children that are born with developmental brain damage, the ob/gyn could not have done anything about it, could not have, not at this stage of what we know.'
Additionally, Dr. John Freeman, a professor of neurology and pediatrics at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Md., stated,
Most cases of cerebral palsy are not due to asphyxia . . . A great many of these cases are due to subtle infections of the child before birth.
Freeman went on to say,
That is the cause of the premature labor and the cause of the [brain] damage. There is little or no evidence that if you did a [caesarean] section a short time earlier you would prevent cerebral palsy.
Moreover, this statement is borne out by the fact that even though births via caesarian section increased from six percent in the 1970's to twenty—six percent today, the incidence of cerebral palsy hasn't decreased one iota.
As I mentioned before, there are also experts who believe that the condition has a basis in genetics. In either case, however, it has nothing to do with the actions of doctors. And studies indicating this fact date back to at least the 1980's.
This didn't seem to matter to John Edwards, though. He forged on ahead, plying the courtrooms of America and manipulating juries, swaying them with magnificently articulated emotional appeals that were tailor—made to evoke in jurors judgment—clouding responses that would obfuscate the facts of a case. Edwards's usual spiel would go something like his emotional appeal in the 1985 case of Jennifer Campbell, cited by The Boston Globe in 2003. According to court records, Edwards said to the jury,
I have to tell you right now —— I didn't plan to talk about this —— right now I feel her [Jennifer], I feel her presence. [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.'
Ah, what empathy. Just what the world needs: another Southern lawyer, with grand political aspirations and the skills of a snake oil salesman, who feels our pain. That's twice in just over a decade — will miracles never cease?
Now, I want to make very clear what all this implies. John Edwards, while claiming to be standing up for the little guy, got rich peddling lies on the backs of the most unfortunate of children. In the process he fleeced doctors, thereby increasing their cost of practicing medicine which, in turn, drove up the cost of health care. So if you're grumbling about how expensive medical procedures and insurance premiums are, know that tens of millions of our health dollars are in the pocket of John Edwards.
From http://www.cnsnews.com/ViewPolitics.asp?Page=%5CPolitics%5Carchive%5C200401%5CPOL20040120a.html
Peter Huber, a lawyer and author of the book, Galileo's Revenge: Junk Science in the Courtroom, believes juries are typically manipulated with emotional arguments to aid the plaintiff's case.
"The jury sees the undisputed trauma first, the disputed negligence second, the undisputed cerebral palsy third. It is a perfect set-up for misinterpreting sequence as cause," Huber wrote.
According to Boisseau, the growing body of scientific studies showing that obstetricians are generally blameless in cerebral palsy cases has done nothing to alter the trend of multi-million dollar court settlements. Those settlements are reached, Boisseau said, even though "a lot of the plaintiff's expert science is unsupported, essentially junk science."
Many juries never even get to hear about the medical science or the origins of cerebral palsy because "90 percent of suits for obstetrical malpractice are settled" out of court, noted Freeman of Johns Hopkins Hospital.
Huber does not expect cerebral palsy cases to fade away, despite the growing body of scientific evidence exonerating doctors.
"Despite the almost complete absence of scientific basis for these [medical malpractice] claims, cerebral palsy cases remain enormously attractive to lawyers," Huber wrote.
The judgments or settlements related to medical malpractice lawsuits that focused on brain-damaged infants with cerebral palsy helped Edwards amass a personal fortune estimated at between $12.8 and $60 million. He and his wife own three homes, each worth more than $1 million, according to Edwards' Senate financial disclosure forms. Edwards' old law firm reportedly kept between 25 and 40 percent of the jury awards/settlements during the time he worked there.
According to the Center for Public Integrity, Edwards was able to win "more than $152 million" based on his involvement in 63 lawsuits alone. The legal profession recognized Edwards' achievements by inducting him into the prestigious legal society called the Inner Circle of Advocates, which includes the nation's top 100 lawyers. Lawyers Weekly also cited Edwards as one of America's "Lawyers of the Year" in 1996.
John Edwards is a shyster and a thief who caused real harm. As lawyer I would hope you would be repulsed by people like Edwards. He is just scum.
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