Inside the minds of John Kerry and John Edwards
Wizbang blog
…is a very small, very dark place.
OK, now that the cheap shot is out of the way, it's time to get serious.
John Kerry and John Edwards are, at their core, lawyers and legislators. In essence, they are practitioners and crafters of law - creatures of law. Kerry was a prosecuting attorney, then a private-practice lawyer Edwards spent years becoming the most renowned personal-injury lawyer in North Carolina. Insurance companies used to hold seminars in "defending against John Edwards."
George Bush and Dick Cheney, on the other hand, have spent the largest portions of their careers in executive positions, both in government and in the private sector.
Lawyers tend to be reactive thinkers. They react to situations and challenges. They look for loopholes in the rules to give them the edge, and focus relentlessly on outmaneuvering their adversaries. They are champions of the great game.
Legislators think in terms of laws and consensus. When confronted with a threat, their instinct is to gather support and pass laws. In effect, they want to redefine the rules and coerce their opponents to play by those rules.
Executives tend to be more pro-active thinkers. They look ahead to future threats, and plan accordingly. They don't think in terms of winning and losing, but in terms of victory and defeat. Survival and destruction. They are warriors and leaders.
(Note: this is all grotesquely generalized, but I think it's symbolically true.)
This can be no better symbolized by Kerry's plan for dealing with future terrorist threats. Kerry wants to pump more money into hiring more paramedics, police officers, firefighters, and other First Responders. He is, in effect, expecting another attack. He is expecting to fail in preventing another attack.
Even before he went to law school, John Kerry was a lawyer at heart. When the mission of the Swift Boats changed from security to active combat, he discovered a rule that said anyone who received three Purple Hearts could request a transfer out of combat. Kerry's one-year tour was cut short after he received his three Purple Hearts (one which was treated with a Band-Aid, and none of them required any hospitalization).
This is a continuation of the Clinton policy, when we had two other lawyers (Bill and Hillary) running the country. They treated the war on terror as a matter of law. They fought the terrorists with police, with the FBI, with prosecutors, with judges. They passed more and more laws to punish those terrorists when they were caught.
President Bush broke this model. He realized you don't fight wars with handcuffs, with warrants, with juries and big public trials. You fight wars with warriors. He unleashed the armed forces against those who were doing war against us, and started crushing them.
We are a nation of laws. That is a great thing, something which we should be rightfully proud of in this world of tyrannies and dictatorships and anarchists. But we have gone too far. We have allowed the practitioners of law to become the makers of law and the executors of law. We have allowed them to take the majesty of the law and twist it, raise it out of the grasp of the common person. They have insinuated themselves into nearly every aspect of our lives. We run to lawyers whenever we think we might be in trouble. We hide behind them. We hear their ads on the radio and watch their ads on TV - there's even one in Massachusetts who openly brags about his ability to defeat drunk-driving charges. We even have bumper stickers that brag that "my lawyer can beat up your lawyer."
It's gotten very bad, and I don't know how much worse it can get. I have absolutely no desire to learn just how bad it can get. But I do know that it won't get much better if we put two more lawyers in the White House. |
