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After we saw a sign one day in the local Safeway that
promoted a sale on Potatoe Chips,
we figured that
James Danforth Quayle, like many others of us who are
unemployable in civilized regions where they perform
extensive background checks and rigorous applicant testing,
was hiding out up here in the mountains.
But the former vice-president was instead sequestered in Paradise Valley, Ariz., where he apparently worked with a think tank to contrive a threat that he could run against.
As I have often observed, the way to wealth and power in
America is to invent a disease and sell the cure. In
commerce, the classic example is Listerine -- the
Warner-Lambert company fabricated a disease called
halitosis,
used ample ad money to scare people into
thinking they might suffer from this dread affliction, then
sold the mouthwash as the cure.
In politics, the first thing is to come up with a threat to the American Way of Life -- welfare mothers, flag-burners, public transportation, environmentalists, feminists, wolves, nattering nabobs of negativism, etc. The candidate then raises the alarm about the alleged threat, and after a sufficient interval, proposes himself and his policies as the solution.
Quayle's advisors had to labor mightily to find a threat that no other candidate had exploited yet, but to their credit, they found one: lawyers.
In the Quayle analysis, America suffers from poor values, and lawyers are the reason for that.
We can agree for the record that America is healthy
economically,
he told the Commonwealth Club of
California on May 19, but something is fundamentally
missing in our culture.
We suffer from school shootings; a culture of death
from abortion to euthanasia; one third of our children born
out of wedlock; a 50 percent increase in teenage drug use
over the last five years; teen suicide occurring at a rate
far higher than a generation ago.
Obviously, those are not good developments, and in
hearts we know that the answer to tragedies like Littleton
is in changing the culture. Today I want to focus on a
sector of our society that has been largely exempt from the
discussion, but must be part of our effort to reverse the
cultural decline: the legal system, and, specifically, the
legal aristocracy.
In my experience, the legal aristocracy
generally
functions to make sure that people with money get to keep
it, no matter how they got it. The side with the better
lawyers almost always prevails, and since the better
lawyers cost more, the side with more money wins -- truth
and justice are not factors worth considering in most
American jurisprudence.
But that's not the legal aristocracy
that worries
Quayle. He wants us to fear the legal aristocracy that
has, big by bit, undermined parental authority over
children, weakened discipline in the schools and obstructed
the moral education of the young.
But is this all lawyers? When my kids were little, there was a huge American marketing machine trying to sell my kids stuff I didn't think they should have, thereby undermining my authority -- but Quayle didn't mention the junk-food industry.
Discipline in the schools? Didn't a fifth-grade girl have to hire a lawyer because the school refused to take any disciplinary action against repeated physical sexual harassment? Where was she supposed to turn?
And has any lawyer ever tried to keep parents from
performing the moral education of the young?
Just
where parents might time for this, when both are working
two jobs to stay afloat so they can buy more stuff from
Quayle's campaign contributors, is a question that Quayle
didn't bother to ask.
The oddest thing about this attack on the legal
aristocracy
is that Quayle is a lawyer who once
practiced in Huntington, Ind. While in law school, he met
another future attorney, Marilyn Tucker, and they practiced
together.
He's not taking cases these days, but her official
campaign biography says that she is currently a partner
in the Indianapolis-based law firm of Krieg, DeVault,
Alexander & Capehart, where she practices corporate
law, emphasizing mergers and acquisitions, international
law and health care law.
Corporate law? Mergers and acquisitions? International
law? A partner in the firm? That sounds like legal
aristocracy
to me.
And Dan Quayle is running against it. Bob Dole, a
lawyer, just went to family woodshed
because he said
he might contribute to the John McCain campaign -- even
though wife, Elizabeth, another lawyer, is running for
president.
If they're all so worried about morality in government,
they might consider something else that Bob Dole once said:
When these political action committees give money, they
expect something in return other than good
government.
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