This was posted by Charles Pierce on Eric Alterman's website.
"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."
This comment was added by www.bartcop.com, "I guess if that happened to Tucker Carlson's daughter, he'd say, "That's OK, I don't want to sue over something this trivial."
Posted by brettdavey
at 4:12 PM EDT
Updated: Friday, 16 July 2004 4:13 PM EDT