TIMING IS EVERYTHING:

Dr. Bill Frist: moral monster (Alexander Cockburn, 01/02/03, Creators Syndicate)

As for Bill Frist, the millionaire Tennessee sawbones, everything you need to know about this unpleasant man was contained in one short paragraph of a profile of Frist by Michael Kranish in the Boston Globe Sunday magazine for Oct. 27, 2002, when Frist was in Boston, first at Harvard Medical School and then at Massachusetts General Hospital.

"Frist is an animal lover who said his decision to become a doctor was clinched when he helped heal a friend's dog. But Frist now found himself forced to kill animals during medical research. And his new dilemma was finding enough animals to kill. Soon, he began lying to obtain more animals. He went to the animal shelters around Boston and promised he would care for the cats as pets. Then he killed them during experiments. 'It was a heinous and dishonest thing to do,' Frist wrote. 'I was going a little crazy.'"

So now the U.S. senate is going to be led by the cat world's answer to Dr. Mengele! A man who can do that is capable of any infamy. Can't you just picture this oily Tennessean cooing and clucking over the tabbies and tortoiseshells at the shelter, solemnly wagging his head as the shelter staff counseled him on proper cat procedures, then dragging the poor creatures into his lab and torturing them to death? I call on the Humane Society to demand that Frist publicly apologize for this appalling, indeed ineradicable stain on his character, and pay substantial reparations out of the vast fortune that has accrued from the Hospital Corporation of America, founded by his father and brother.

In a delightful bit of Internet irony, that story appears at Google News right now directly above this one, Sen. Frist aids victims at South Florida wreck scene (Sarasota Herald-Tribune, Jan 1, 2003):

Incoming Senate majority leader Bill Frist, a surgeon, helped tend to six victims of a rollover accident on a Florida highway New Year's Day, earning praise from paramedics for stabilizing some of the four survivors. [...]

An Isuzu Rodeo with six people aboard was heading west on Alligator Alley when it rolled over 3 to 4 miles west of the toll plaza in Broward County at 3:51 p.m., Broward Fire-Rescue Assistant Chief Todd Leduc said.

All six, including three children, were thrown out as the vehicle rolled. A 10-year-old girl died on the scene; another passenger died later at a hospital. Frist, 50, was driving east on the highway, the Everglades portion of Interstate 75, heading to a family vacation home in Fort Lauderdale with his two sons when he came across the accident minutes after it happened.

He stopped and went to work checking the victims. When paramedics arrived, he pointed them to the ones in the most severe condition. Frist helped paramedics and several off-duty firefighters stabilize the victims until they were transported to area hospital after about 30 minutes.

"Sen. Frist greatly assisted Broward County Fire Rescue. The Senate majority leader was really instrumental in helping us treat the victims," Leduc said. "We'd like to get in contact with him and recognize him for his efforts."

The Left is starting to resemble Christopher Walken's character in The Deer Hunter, only the gun is fully loaded. Posted by Orrin Judd at January 1, 2003 11:25 PM