Bill Frist would like to win the Presidency in 2008. This is not going to happen.
Bill Frist has garroted his own presidential hopes with his stupid lies about his stock transactions, his shameful duplicity in the Terri Schiavo affair, and his Machiavellian poll-driven machinations on stem cell research.
I have been toying with pasting old Bill with Terri and medical research for some time, but until today I didn’t think there was much meat to the whole HCA stock issue. After all, most Senators are rich fellows and the appearance of a conflict of interest doesn’t necessarily mean that voting on any particular issue is profit-driven.
Let me be very clear from the outset. I haven’t seen any evidence that even begins to support a conspiracy to inflate personal wealth through legislative fiat.
But…
The Senator from Tennessee made the front page of the Washington Post today. It seems that, taking a page from Bill Clinton’s playbook, he wagged his Monica finger and claimed that he did not know about his hospital stock. Set aside the lying for a moment - I can already here our conservative readers ginning up their “it was an honest mistake, and doesn’t really matter” talking points. Lying, whether it really matters or not, on something so easily tracked by reporters, using documents generated by your own people, is monumentally stupid.
Many folks are willing to tolerate duplicitous public officials - witness the left’s ontinuing love affair with Bill Clinton. They ought to have been troubled by the President’s distant relationship with the truth. But they should have been troubled to a much greater extent by what it revealed about his judgment. The guy with access to the launch codes is going to risk his political career on whether a childish intern will keep her mouth shut when grilled by a seasoned prosecutor? Republicans alarmed by Clinton’s judgment should be, if they are honest, just as alarmed by Frist.
In January 2003, after winning election as majority leader, Frist was asked on CNBC whether his HCA holdings made it difficult for him to push for changes in Medicare, a federal health program for seniors that added to the hospital company’s revenue.
“I think really for our viewers it should be understood that I put this into a blind trust,” Frist replied. “So as far as I know, I own no HCA stock.” He added that the trust was “totally blind. I have no control.”
Notice that this statement has two parts. He first says that he does not know whether there is any HCA stock. The second is that he has no control - the stock is “totally blind.” Both are parts are demonstrably untrue.
One suspects that the Elephant Echo chamber is begining to look for weasel room here. “Look!” shout the kool-aid drinkers, “he said ‘as far as I know.” They are right. There is a bit of vagueness here. But the fair-minded are asking themselves, “selves, why would he feel the need to add that weaselly language if he wasn’t lying?”
Because he knew that he was lying and in true Clintonesque manner, was already planning on parsing grammar if he got caught. The problem is, he can’t hold a candle to the master of weasel words. Bill’s weasel words, while ultimately futile, at least were hard to nail down. Frist was passing out hammers. To negate the weasel words, you would only have to produce a document showing that he did indeed know something about it.
Preferably a recent document.
Let’s go to the Washington Post, shall we?
Two weeks before that interview, M. Kirk Scobey Jr., a Frist trustee, informed the senator in writing that one of his trusts had received HCA stock valued at between $15,000 and $50,000.
Doh! Well, say the apologists, Frist probably deals with a lot of letters from his trustees on a daily basis. He probably just forgot the part about HCA. To which I reply: He doesn’t take special notice of the company founded by his father? The company that made him a multi-millionaire? And there is still the problem with the “totally blind” trust. If he gets “lots of letters” from trustees, the trust ain’t that blind, is it? Heck, if he gets just one notification - say the one that the Washington Post has revealed, the trust, at the very least, is not “totally” blind.
I don’t envy Frist’s spokesman. When your man is caught in a bald-faced lie, what do you do?
Shovel bullshit to the Washington Post, that’s what!
“He [Frist] could have been more exact in his comments,” said Bob Stevenson, spokesman for Frist. Stevenson added that Frist might better have said he did not know to what extent he owned HCA shares.
And Bill Clinton, rather than saying “I did not have sexual relations with that woman,” might “better have said,” “I tapped that intern ass. I had her every which way but Sunday. Hell, who am I kidding? I had her Sunday too!”
Come on, Bob! Your boy Frist wasn’t equivocal about his knowledge of shareholding. He said that he was unaware that he owned any. And to admit that he had some knowledge defeats the second part of his statement about the trust being totally blind.
I’m not the only person who noticed this:
Kathleen Clark, a law professor at Washington University in St. Louis, said she was surprised that Frist had ever claimed before this summer’s liquidation that he might have owned no HCA stok. “Did he say that? What was he thinking of?” she asked. “How did he know to tell the trustee to sell it [his HCA stake] if he didn’t know that he had it in the first place?”
When Bill Clinton’s supporters finally had to abandon their hero’s grammatical gamesmanship, their next line of defense was that the lie didn’t matter - lying about Monica was a private matter. This line of defense is not available to Frist partisans. Frist was talking about the matter in the first place because even he realized that presiding over legislation giving higher payments to hospitals was a conflict of interest.
Frist’s partisans might argue that the notification of $15,000 worth of shares was too small to indicate a conflict of interest and beneath Frist’s notice, even if it was his family’s company. $15,000 is chump change to a fellow like Bill. The problem with this line of argument is that it is standing on the railroad tracks and the document train is coming through. That trustee letter that was sent to Frist just two weeks before Frist went on CNBC and lied to the American public was just the tip of the iceberg. I’ll grant you that he probably didn’t pay much attention to the $15,000 - but only because he owned MILLIONS more worth of shares:
Disclosures by the trustees to the Senate and to Frist indicate that Frist and his family probably owned a great deal of HCA stock at the time. When Frist’s federal trusts were created in late 2000, the trustees disclosed that one trust alone contained between $5 million and $25 million in HCA shares and that each of seven other trusts held more than $1 million of the stock.
The last resort of a politician caught with his hand in the cookie jar is to seize the moral high ground:
Frist said last week he was not required to set up a blind trust after he went to the Senate, but he wanted to “apply the highest ethical standards I possibly could. I thought, why not raise the bar, why not do a good deed . . . and avoid any appearance of a conflict of interest.”
Oops! Frist just opened up the senate-rules-can-of-worms:
Senate rules prohibit any lawmaker with a blind trust from contacting his trustees unless the ownership of an asset poses a potential conflict of interest “due to the subsequent assumption of duties” by the lawmaker. The lawmaker can then ask the trustees to dispose of the asset.
Frist did not take on any new duties this year. But a Frist adviser said the senator had been thinking about selling his HCA stake from the time he was elected majority leader in 2002. Frist had not known that he could sell his shares until this spring, the adviser asserted, and so went ahead with the sale based on his nearly three-year-old wish.
So he did know he owned the stock (note that the aide is saying that Frist has been wanting to sell for three years - more info from his own camp that he lied in the CNBC interview), but didn’t know he could sell it? Cynical moonbats might question whether he held on long enough to take the gains generated by the new Medicare rules. I won’t go down that road - that would be a remarkably hard thing to prove and I am a believer in Hanson’s corollary to Occam’s Razor: Never attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence.
Maybe Frist didn’t know about Senate rules for selling stock. But he did know he owned stock and he did know that his trusts were not blind. And he was dumb enough to think that his own paper trail would sink him.
Bill Frist is too dumb to be President.
Part II: Schiavo and Part III: Stem Cells will be forthcoming
