We'll come to Tennessee's pussy hunter shortly, but first a word about his
predecessor as Senate majority leader, that bruised son of Mississippi,
Trent Lott. How was Lott finally induced to quit the post he loved so much,
and from which vantage point he was able to guide so many millions to
public works to his home state?
A well primed Republican source confides to CounterPunch that Lott has been
promised the chairmanship of the new senate committee scheduled to oversee
the vast Homeland Security Agency now in process of formation. So Lott be
able to continue dispensing prodigious patronage of the sort that has
brightened the eroded downtown of Jackson, Miss, with a colossal new post
office I was able to admire last spring. We may expect numberless
counter-terrorism facilities, command centers and kindred porkodromes to
enrich the concrete pourers and building contractors of Mississippi.
As for Bill Frist, the millionaire Tennessee sawbones, everthing you need
to know about this unpleasing man was contained in one short paragraph of a
profile of Frist by Michael Kranish in the Boston Globe Sunday magazine for
October 27, 2002, covering the years when Frist was in Boston, first at
Harvard Medical School and then at Mass General.
"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 US 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 counselled 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.
As noted by Andrew Cockburn on this site, while serving as an ardent toady
of business, especially the health care and pharmaceutical cartels, Frist
projected a "caring" image, accepted without demur by all except his former
interns at the Vanderbilt Medical Center in Tennessee, where he amassed big
bucks as a heart/lung transplant surgeon. "He was a complete asshole,"
recalled one to Andrew recently. "Arrogant and unhelpful."
MORE ON...
http://www.counterpunch.org/cockburn1231.html
