kitty of karma

Tonight’s Late Nite post is brought to you by the letter K.

‘K’ is for Kitty.

‘K’ is also for Karma.

And ‘K’ is for Killing Your Presidential Bid for ‘08, Senator Frist. 

It has been a few days since I spotted this uncredited editorial in The Tennesseean’s on-line edition, but I thought I’d share a bit of it with you.

Kitty-killer label litters Frist resume for president

There’s a potential pothole in U.S. Sen. Bill Frist’s road to the White House: He’s a confessed kitty killer.

He fessed up in his 1989 book, "Transplant," to adopting cats from shelters when he was in medical school, treating them like pets for a while, and then using them in his research experiments. Maybe in hindsight, Trent Lott should have seen it coming.

(snip)

Bet Frist wishes now he’d refrained from giving out too much information in his first book. He made his case in "Transplant" for saving lives by learning through experiments with animals while at Harvard. It’s the part where he kept them as pets first that is bothersome.

"Desperate, obsessed with my work, I visited the various animal shelters in the Boston suburbs, collecting cats, taking them home, treating them as pets for a few days, then carting them off to the lab to die in the interests of science. And medicine. And health care. And treatment of disease. And my project.

"It was, of course, a heinous and dishonest thing to do, and I was totally schizoid about the entire matter. By day, I was little Billy Frist, the boy who lived on Bowling Avenue in Nashville and had decided to become a doctor because of his gentle father and a dog named Scratchy. By night, I was Dr. William Harrison Frist, future cardiothoracic surgeon, who was not going to let a few sentiments about cute, furry little creatures stand in the way of his career. In short, I was going a little crazy."

Frist recently commented about the power he felt when holding the last beats of a dog’s heart in his hand. Good thing little Scratchy had a decent hiding place while Frist was in med school.

Oh, but come on.  There’s nothing creepy or gruesome about Little Billy Frist, is there?  Why you’d never think it to look at his often too-bright glassy eyes or hear him talk about himself in the third person like that, would you?  Why, the Senator who brought us Seersucker Thursday is just a normal Joe like you or me.  All you have to do is read that gorilla testosterone-soaked puff piece in the WaPo to know that.  When the Senator from Tennessee isn’t admiring his "hairy, toned biceps" in the mirror, drying his hair with a blow-drier like a girl, or doing open heart surgery on apes, he’s a completely normal garden-variety sociopath who lives behind an emotional "Great Wall" that has "kept him from having close friends".  (How the writer kept from calling this journalistic rim job "Gorillas in the Frist" is frankly beyond me, by the way.)

Ah, but you see, that is the very quality that makes Bill Frist such an asset to the the progressive movement, his utter cluelessness as to how actual humans think and act.  Ever since he diagnosed Terri Schiavo by video as "just resting her eyes", he has floated one craptacular idea after another, pitched innumerable public hissy fits, stamped his little tassel loafers, and taken effete Oily Southern Preacherism places it has truly never, ever gone before, all the while exhibiting a complete tin ear for the tenor of the times, and, to borrow a Bushism™, grossly "misunderestimating" the intelligence of the American people.

Who could forget the evangelical circle-jerk that was "Justice Sunday"? Or would anybody like a hundred dollar rebate to offset the price of, oh, one, maybe two tanks of gas?  How about this last week’s Senate debate about the Federal Marriage Amendment, which they knew wouldn’t pass anyway?  Mmmmm, Fristolicious!

Bill Frist may be the last person in America who doesn’t know that his run for the White House is as doomed as Britney Spears’s marriage, but let’s not tell him.  It’ll be fun to watch him flail around.  Still, if the specters of those dozens of murdered cats are the issue that finally brings Billy down once and for all, that’s fine with me.  It would have a certain pleasant karmic symmetry to it.  The only thing that would be better would be for him to wander into the wrong cage at the Washington Zoo and be eaten by lions.  Like a good Christian.

UPDATE: Commenter Kirk James Murphy, MD weighs in with a rather interesting point: 

Frist wasn’t lying his way into the animal shelter to publish for the good of mankind – he was doing it for the career of Bill Frist.

And the pets he went to such trouble to steal suffered his vivisection without any anesthesia – unless he violated the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs regs in place at the time and compounded his other felonies by procuring narcotics he would have been unlicensed to possess or use.

So which was it, Doctor – vivisection or narcotics violations?

 

 

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