Enough about Edwards already
OK, OK, we get it, Mr. Edwards is a trial lawyer with all the dubious ethics of the profession (dubious ethics surely being no bar to the political profession, no matter what your party membership), and other trial lawyers appear to love him to the tune of millions of bucks. We understand that, so can you lay off it a little now? I'm a foreign reader, because the U.S. is not alone, though it seems to be the worst afflicted, with a legal system run amuck. I am deeply and personally interested in tort reform; we all should be, right or left, red or blue, whatever. (I work in the fairly lefty social services sector, and insurance rates and liability fears are severely constraining what we can do to help our clients-- its an immediate and practical issue, not an ideological one.)
One of the sadnesses of the U.S. dominance of the global media, is that it gives the U.S.'s insane partisanship a global reach, so that issues get tagged and tainted. It is horrible that tort reform has become a partisan issue in the U.S.; both because it is corrupting the Democrats as they rake in litigator dollars, but also because the worth of the cause is being tainted by association with highly partisan and often dubious Republican partisans (i.e. just like Mr. Edwards), and we end up in a Monkey's Paw scenario where the solution may well be worse than the disease. (It's all rather like stem-cell research: for obscure technical legal and theological bases leading to political positioning, rational discussion of the topic is almost impossible now.) From my foreign point of view, a plague upon both their houses, but please, we have to keep the focus on the issue. So fair enough, your comment so far, but please do not become, or appear to become, a Republican front. Surely there must be some litigatory smirch on some Republican vests? -- Rob Bray, Calgary, Alberta, Canada