Edwards « Bunker Mulligan

July 7, 2004

Edwards

Filed under: Politics — Bunker @ 5:53 am

I really didn’t intend to talk at all about Kerry-Edwards.

I wonder how long will it take for Clinton to say something about Edwards like, “He reminds me of me.”

And isn’t it a bit disingenuous for Democrats to talk about Edwards growing up poor then becoming a millionaire? I thought every program they pushed was because that is an impossibility in this country. Obviously he must have won life’s lottery because Democrats don’t believe anyone can make it on his own.

Comments (10)

10 Comments

Bunker…What the hell are you talking about? You claim you are a reasonable person, and then you make sweeping generalizations like that. See:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hasty_generalization

Comment by rfidtag — July 7, 2004 @ 8:37 am
I don’t need a dictionary reference to know what hasty generaliztion means.

Is my statement not correct? Does the Democratic Party not stand for giving the less fortunate a leg up? I feel that’s a pretty reasonable characterization. It is neither hasty, nor a generalization. It is a plank in the Democratic Platform every election.

Comment by Bunker — July 7, 2004 @ 9:17 am
Cite specific planks.

Comment by rfidtag — July 7, 2004 @ 1:49 pm
No, Edwards made his money by “chasing ambulances.”

Comment by birdie — July 7, 2004 @ 7:50 pm
Bullshit answer Birdie. I bet you have never even bothered to find out what kind of man John Edwards is.

Before entering politics, Edwards was a successful trial attorney who represented families and children that had allegedly been wrongly injured by negligent corporate manufacturers and municipal entities; Edwards made his personal fortune of millions of dollars in the process. The highlight of his legal career was a personal injury lawsuit against Sta-Rite, the manufacturer of a defective pool drain which seriously injured Valerie Lakey, a Cary, North Carolina girl, on June 24, 1993. Turning down all offers of settlement from the company, Edwards pressed the case forward until he secured a $25,000,000 award from the jury, the largest personal injury award in North Carolina history. Fellow lawyers and law students crowded the courtroom to hear Edwards’ closing arguments, while he spoke to the jury for two straight hours without referring to notes in an emotional appeal.

Drawing on his experience in personal injury cases, Edwards has characterized himself as a defender of “the little guy,” although his critics have alleged that Edwards only took on cases that he was sure of winning and that would result in substantial financial settlements. Scrutiny has fallen upon one of Edwards specialties, infant cerebral palsy cases, where scientific evidence has recently suggested that birth conditions only rarely cause the disorder.

Edwards and his wife Elizabeth have four children. Their first two, Wade and Catherine, were born soon after John and Elizabeth’s marriage. Just one month prior to the beginning of testimony in the Lakey case in 1996, Edwards lost his 16-year-old son, Wade, in an automobile accident; in remembrance of his son, Edwards wears Wade’s Outward Bound pin on his suit jacket. Following Wade’s death, Edwards and his wife chose to have children again; their two youngest, Emma Claire (1999) and Jack (2001) were conceived with the aid of fertility treatments. The Edwards family resides in Raleigh, North Carolina and Washington DC; Edwards also owns a beach home near Wilmington, North Carolina.

In December 2003, during his presidential campaign, Edwards (with John Auchard) published Four Trials (ISBN 0-74324-4974), a biographical book focusing on his legal career.

Maybe you should read up on him before you start throwing stones.

Comment by rfidtag — July 10, 2004 @ 8:47 am
rfidtag, It is good to see that you know how to plagiarize. I also found that online encyclopidia that you almost copied word for word: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JohnEdwards, it is good to know that you liberals still do not know how to think independently.

Comment by birdie — July 15, 2004 @ 6:28 pm
Wow. What a zinger…Sorry I forgot the link. I figured I could just google up his history from the same source I referenced earlier. I never claimed it to be my personal history of John Edwards. Yeah thinking independently means ignoring reference material to you right? I use encyclopedias, specifically wikipedia, because it is fairly balanced…Unlike you. But since you wanted some interesting independent perspective on John Edwards career, I give you blog about Tucker Carlson’s insight:

”

In 1994, an eight-year old girl named Valerie Lakey was playing in a wading pool. She got caught in a defective drain. Her intestines were ripped from her body by the suction. She is now 17. She will have to be fed through a tube, 12 hours a day, for the rest of her life. In 1997, John Edwards won her family a $25 million judgment, of which he took a portion. The judgment helped jump-start his political career.

On the first day of last year, as part of his opening comments on Crossfire, this is how the incident was described by Tucker Carlson, whom public and private broadcasting networks tumble all over themselves to hire: “Four years ago, he (Edwards) was a personal-injury lawyer specializing in Jacuzzi cases.”

Jacuzzi cases.

An eight-year old who got disemboweled.

Jacuzzi cases.

A child who’ll have to be fed through a tube for as long as she lives.

Jacuzzi cases.

Now, I know it’s a terrible thing when Whoopi Goldberg makes salacious fun of C-Plus Augustus’s last name. I know that society may simply collapse. But here is a professional communicator at the top of his profession who, because he couldn’t come up with anything else to say at the moment, smugly dispatches the tragedy of a child whose guts were ripped out. (Later in the same show, he told co-host James Carville to “Lighten up,” about his comments.) It was an interesting evening — not only should Tucker Carlson have lost every job in the professional media that he has, and not only did he lose forever any right to criticize anyone for intemperate speech, he at that moment should have been shunned by decent people for the rest of his sorry life.

Jacuzzi cases.
Christ.”

Oh, and here is the link to this one:
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/5418193?#040715

Comment by rfidtag — July 16, 2004 @ 8:29 pm
This is precisely my issue with personal injury lawyers. Was the Jacuzzi company negligent, or the kid’s parents? Was the drain defective because it wasn’t maintained properly?

As an engineer, I know it is impossible to design something to be idiot-proof.

I don’t think you’re fanatic for using an encyclopedia. I avoid issues where I need one. Actually, I once read an entire set A to Z, when I was about 10. What a precocious kid I must have been!

Comment by Bunker — July 17, 2004 @ 3:01 pm
I agree. Frivolous lawsuits are bad. But the people who should decide whether a lawsuit is frivilous or not is the Jury. Is the system flawed? Definately! But we need to stop calling every personal injury lawyer an “ambulance chaser”, because that is also unfair.

Comment by rfidtag — July 17, 2004 @ 8:02 pm
Never forget how John Kerry once described John Edwards

“In the Senate four years — and that is the full extent of public life — no international experience, no military experience…. When I came back from Vietnam in 1969, I don’t know if John Edwards was out of diapers then.”
-John F. Kerry during the Iowa Caucuses.

Comment by Jerry B. — August 9, 2004 @ 12:49 am