The Lawyers' Potty

I wasn't planning on blogging this weekend, with a pile of other things very urgently clamoring for my attention... especially some much-overdue one-on-one time with soon-to-go-off-to-university daughter-two Portia tomorrow.

And we had a little health-worry over Mother yesterday, one that saw her in the hospital for a few hours while her vitals were brought back down to less sweat-inducing levels.

Ah, well — the best-laid plans, etc.

Earlier this week, old arch-conservative friend Anon E. Mouse (whom I haven't raked over the coals here lately, given that I've got a much more troublesome target I still haven't finished up with) sent me an email that I thought at first was a joke. No, it wasn't — except of the bitter-laugh sort.

I got just a handful of words into it, then deleted it in annoyance. But unrelated online research put it back in my mind today, and I retrieved her broadside from my Recycle Bin and had at it; following is the email she sent... after I straightened out some lousy built-in formatting: 

-----Original Message-----
From: Mouse, Anon E. [mailto:AEMouse@SOL.com]
Sent: Wednesday, June 18, 2008 9:25 AM
Subject: FW: [Fwd: Fw: FW: The Lawyers Party]

Interesting perspective 

The Democrat Party has become the Lawyers Party. Barrack Obama and Hillary Clinton are lawyers.

Bill Clinton and Michelle Obama are lawyers. John Edwards, the other former Democrat candidate for president, is a lawyer, and so is his wife, Elizabeth. Every Democrat nominee since 1984 went to law school (although Gore did not graduate). Every Democrat vice presidential nominee since 1976, except for Lloyd Bentsen, went to law school. Look at the Democrat Party in Congress: the Majority Leader in each house is a lawyer.

The Republican Party is different. President Bush and Vice President Cheney were not lawyers, but businessmen. The leaders of the Republican Revolution were not lawyers. Newt Gingrich was a history professor; Tom Delay was an exterminator; and, Dick Armey was an economist. House Minority Leader Boehner was a plastic manufacturer, not a lawyer. The former Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist is a heart surgeon. Who was the last Republican president who was a lawyer?

Gerald Ford, who left office 31 years ago and who barely won the Republican nomination as a sitting president, running against Ronald Reagan in 1976.

The Republican Party is made up of real people doing real work.

The Democrat Party is made up of lawyers.

Democrats mock and scorn men who create wealth, like Bush and Cheney, or who heal the sick, like Frist, or who immerse themselves in history, like Gingrich.

The Lawyers Party sees these sorts of people, who provide goods and services that people want, as the enemies of America. And, so we have seen the procession of official enemies, in the eyes of the Lawyers Party, grow.

Against whom do Hillary and Obama rail? Pharmaceutical companies, oil companies, hospitals, manufacturers, fast food restaurant chains, large retail businesses, bankers, and anyone producing anything of value in our nation.

This is the natural consequence of viewing everything through the eyes of lawyers. Lawyers try to solve problems by successfully representing their clients, in this case the American people. Lawyers seek to have new laws passed, they seek to win lawsuits, they press appellate courts to overturn precedent, and lawyers always parse language to favor their side. Confined to the narrow practice of law, that is fine.

But it is an awful way to govern a great nation. When politicians as lawyers begin to view some Americans as clients and other Americans as opposing parties, then the role of the legal system in our life becomes all-consuming. Some Americans become 'adverse parties' of our very government. We are not all litigants in some vast social class-action suit. We are citizens of a republic that promises us a great deal of freedom from laws, from courts, and from lawyers.

Today, we are drowning in laws; we are contorted by judicial decisions; we are driven to distraction by omnipresent lawyers in all parts of our once private lives. America has a place for laws and lawyers, but that place is modest and reasonable, not vast and unchecked. When the most important decision for our next president is whom he will appoint to the Supreme Court, the role of lawyers and the law in America is too big. When lawyers use criminal prosecution as a continuation of politics by other means, as happened in the lynching of Scooter Libby and Tom Delay, then the power of lawyers in America is too great. When House Democrats sue America in order to hamstring our efforts to learn what our enemies are planning to do to us, then the role of litigation in America has become crushing.

We cannot expect the Lawyers Party to provide real change, real reform, or real hope in America.

Most Americans know that a republic in which every major government action must be blessed by nine unelected judges is not what Washington intended in 1789. Most Americans grasp that we cannot fight a war when ACLU lawsuits snap at the heels of our defenders. Most Americans intuit that more lawyers and judges will not restore declining moral values or spark the spirit of enterprise in our economy.

Perhaps Americans will understand that change cannot be brought to our nation by those lawyers who already largely dictate American society and business. Perhaps Americans will see that hope does not come from the mouths of lawyers but from personal dreams nourished by hard work. Perhaps Americans will embrace the truth that more lawyers with more power will only make our problems worse. 

Wait — Michelle Obama's running for office too? That's news to me, but she gets my vote. (And if she's not, why would her profession matter?).

Anyway, I sent the following email back to Ms. Mouse this evening — I'll let you know if she responds, and if so how: 

Oh, please! 

I'll always love and respect you as a special friend, Anon… and every so often I just have to roll my eyes. But keep the entertaining stuff coming anyway, okay? It's great blog-fodder, and sometimes this helps get my blood pressure and pulse elevated to more invigorating levels. 

First, the cheap shot: the author obviously doesn't know how to spell "Democratic", as in "Democratic Party", whose members are Democrats, but whose party isn't a Democrat. Brother. George "Duh!" Bush has this same problem. Maybe in the interest of similarly streamlining names we could sand a couple letters off the term "Repugnicant Party", too — oops; typo there, I'm sure; that should be "Republican Party". Let's be really nice and knock off the first two letters, moving the party up in the alphabet a couple notches in the process. 

So what is a "publican"? Hmm… Biblically they were the tax collectors who traitorously and greedily stole from fellow (Jewish, in this case) citizens on behalf of the power that had a stranglehold over the country. Yeah; that works for me.

(It's possible that some pro-business conservatives haven't heard about record billions in profits for tax-break-favored oil companies these last couple years… making earning an honest wage increasingly difficult for "real people doing real work", as that author refers to them: truck drivers, farmers (have you checked fertilizer prices lately, and do you know how dependent that industry is on petrochemicals?), and so on.)

And in England a "publican" is — I think — someone who owns a pub: "Come in, let me give you something addictive to make you even stupider while you try to forget all the problems that still exist in the outside world. Trust me." That'll work, too. 

Now, on the matter of lawyers: following the clear direction of that raving essay's shallow, partisan author, let's have a bit of a look at lawyers we should indeed be really disparaging and frightened of, and ought to disassociate utterly from, since lawyers obviously aren't "real people doing real work" (and I'll pass that term along to the attorney who won me custody of my daughter, and child support; might amuse him, too)

• Abraham Lincoln: sixteenth President, and member of the Publican party… uh-oh; throw away all your pennies and five-dollar bills;

• Hmm… so was our nineteenth President, Rutherford Hayes, who actually lost the popular vote and won by a single electoral in a heavily disputed election (sounds familiar);

• Our twentieth President, James Garfield —

• — and so was his successor by assassination, our twenty-first President, Chester Arthur;

• Our twenty-third, Benjamin Harrison;

• Our twenty-fifth President, William McKinley —

• — as well as his successor-by-assassination and our twenty-sixth, the vigorous and accomplished war-hero Theodore Roosevelt;

• Our thirtieth, silent Calvin Coolidge;  

Do you see a trend developing here? All these men were Repugnicants, and —excuse me; there I go again. I meant, all of these men were Publicans, and every one of them to a man was a lawyer.

Maybe I should chart this, and see which party's actually put more lawyers into the White House. (We could also look at lawyers thrown out of the White House, like Scooter Libby and Harriet Myers. And how about a particularly famous and successful Publican lawyer who took on and beat a two-term Publican president in legal matters, and forced him out of office: John Sirica?)

And this isn't all of our Publican lawyer-Presidents, either. But then, some might argue that Teddy was too progressive and liberal, and that may well be… maybe that's why I like him? So who was it that inherited the conservative Publican mantle from Rough Rider T. R. when the Publican party spun apart during the 1912 election? Well, well…

• Our twenty-seventh President, the most-definitely conservative William Howard Taft — whose continuing skills as a lawyer after his presidency eventually propelled him into the Supreme Court as the tenth Chief Justice, one of those "nine unelected judges" the author rails about.

Ah, Publicans and conservatives — and typical of the modern conservative, the author of that silly, shallow, partisan, divisive piece relies on folks' knee-jerk reactions… and fails to research and do his homework. (I'm assuming the author's a he; most women aren't that stupid.) Plus he's counting on his jittery-lemming readers to do no differently. Forward to the cliffs!

Sometimes these conservatives are their own worst ambassadors. They make my own work so much easier. With obviously no essential research and scarcely any thought of note given to that conservative's rant on "The Lawyers' Party", his piece calls for a very simple, shallow, and cheap-shotted response. So I'll just have to repeat a classic bumper-sticker that I just may sport this year: "Vote Republican – It's Easier Than Thinking!"

Boy, does that guy evidence the axiom!

Keep 'em coming, Mouse; this can be real fun sometimes!

Regards,

A. Gene Childe

I never did read Mouse's email in full, and don't plan to. But I do believe her author made some kind of grandiose claim about Publicans caring about people, or taking care of people. With Al Gore being a recent recipient (and not forgetting Democratic former president Jimmy Carter), could he please point out to me who is the last prominent Repugnicant to win the Nobel Peace Prize?

I did forget to point out another prominent lawyer in American history (pre- Publican Party, so perhaps he doesn't count): Francis Scott Key, who penned our national anthem.

Hello? Anybody?