Via Ezra Klein, this LA Times piece on what they call ‘legal urban legends’:

Merv Grazinski set his Winnebago on cruise control, slid away from the wheel and went back to fix a cup of coffee.

You can guess what happened next: The rudderless, driverless Winnebago crashed.

Grazinski blamed the manufacturer for not warning against such a maneuver in the owner’s manual. He sued and won $1.75 million.

His jackpot would seem to erase any doubt that the legal system has lost its mind. Indeed, the Grazinski case has been cited often as evidence of the need to limit lawsuits and jury awards.

There’s just one problem: The story is a complete fabrication.

It is one of the more comical tales in an anthology of legal urban legends that have circulated widely on the Internet, regaling millions with examples of cluelessness and greed being richly rewarded by the courts. These fables have also been widely disseminated by columnists and pundits who, in their haste to expose the gullibility of juries, did not verify the stories and were taken in themselves.

Read the whole thing.

Legal Urban LegendsPost + Comments (35)

Among the many other things I have learned from my so-called friends this week, along with the fact that it is perfectly acceptable to truncate, distort, and misrepresent whatever someone has said, as long as you are on the side of the Righteous®, is that there are people who don’t know why we are in Iraq.

Really. I am serious. Thousands of speeches, hundreds of thousands of news stories, millions of hourse of television news coverage, and all my liberal ‘friends’ don’t know why we are in Iraq. They ask over and over again in the comments:

Why are we in Iraq? Most notably, these comments were from people I had never heard from before, but in good faith, here is my answer to the question of the day, Why Are We In Iraq?®:

Why Are We In Iraq?

Monied coroporate interests, tired of the years of freedom, justice, and blowjobs of the Clinton Presidency, gathered together with the PNAC neo-con zionist cabal, stole the election in 2000 in order to install their candidate. They were engaged in only minor perfidy at first, looting the treasury, trying to end social security, women’s rights, and so on, until they hit the mother lode on 9/11, an attack they ignored and probably, in all truthfulness, knew about ahead of time and did nothing.

After 9/11, rather than heading to Afghanistan and deposing the Taliban and attacking Al Qaeda, they immediately launched an offensive to attack Saddam Hussein, a man they had armed to the teeth over previous decades. The point of this attack was to secure oil fields, enrich Halliburton with public treasure, and to fight a war for Israel.

There you go. That is Why Are We In Iraq?®. I don’t believe it for a minute. But many of you do. And so does Cindy Sheehan:

It has been two days since your dishonest campaign stole another election…but you all were way more subtle this time than in 2000, weren’t you? You hardly had to get the Supreme Court of the United States involved at all this week.

You feel so proud of yourself for betraying the country again, don’t you? You think you are very clever because you pulled the wool over the eyes of some of the people again.

You think that you have some mandate from God…that you can “spend your political capital” any way that you want. George you don’t care or even realize that 56,000,000 plus citizens of this country voted against you and your agenda. Still, you are going to continue your ruthless work of being a divider and not a uniter.

George, in 2000 when you stole that election and the Democrats gave up, I gave up too. I had the most ironic thought of my life then: “Oh well, how much damage can he do in four years?” Well, now I know how much you have damaged my family, this country, and this world. If you think I am going to allow you another four years to do even more damage, then you truly are mistaken. I will fight for a true vote count and if that fails, your impeachment. Also, the impeachment of your Vice President. The only thing is, I’m not politically savvy, and I don’t have a Karl Rove to plan my strategy, but I do have a big mouth and a righteous cause, which still mean something in this country, I hope…

The 56,000,000 plus citizens who voted against you and your agenda have given me a mandate to move forward with my agenda. Also, thanks to you and your careless domestic policies, I am unemployed, so this will be my full-time job. Being your political downfall will be the most noble accomplishment of my life and it will bring justice for my son and 1125 (so far) other brave Americans and tens of thousands of innocent Iraqis your lies have killed.

By the way, George, how many more innocent Iraqis are your policies going to kill before you convince them that you are better than Saddam? How many more of their cities are you going to level before you consider that they are liberated? If you really had any moral values, or if you were an honorable man at all you would resign.

And that isn’t the only time she has voiced her beliefs:

Am I emotional? Yes, my first born was murdered. Am I angry? Yes, he was killed for lies and for a PNAC Neo-Con agenda to benefit Israel. My son joined the Army to protect America, not Israel. Am I stupid? No, I know full-well that my son, my family, this nation, and this world were betrayed by a George Bush who was influenced by the neo-con PNAC agenda after 9/11. We were told that we were attacked on 9/11 because the terrorists hate our freedoms and democracy…not for the real reason, becuase the Arab-Muslims who attacked us hate our middle-eastern foreign policy. That hasn’t changed since America invaded and occupied Iraq…in fact it has gotten worse.

And if I have learned anything this weekend, it is that despite the fact that I disagree with Cindy Sheehan, because she lost her son, none of us are allowed to discuss her political opinions. They are, in the new political climate, simply known facts. And by noting that while she is a grieving mother, she has also become a poitical lightning rod, an activist, and the galvanizing symbol for anti-war groups, I have just “ripped off the nicey-nice mask he’s been wearing and lets the tentacles all hang out in a beautiful, unhinged rank against Cindy Sheehan.”

I have also learned that I am responsible for everything the ‘right wing smear machine’ does, that I am merely ‘reciting talking points,’ and that noting it is wrong for people writing and calling the wife and employers of someone who has used the phrase ‘media whore’ is actually defending the smear. I have also learned that an ‘intellectually honest conservative’ is someone who agrees with everything progressives say, and I have learned that the question ‘Why did you kill my son’ is a legitimate question that Bush should address.

But most of all, I have learned the power of political theatre, and the power of the left-wing echo chamber. I should have known better- Kos warned us all last year:

Man, the perils of the Internet blogging age. I blog a story seven hours late and feel horribly out of date… Good thing you diarists are on top of things. Still, I feel compelled to chime in on this brilliant political theater:

The story led most of the nightly newscasts, and don’t look now, but it’s the top story over at FoxNews.com.
So Bush ignores Cleland, and looks like a boorish classless ass by snubbing a war hero triple amputee. If Bush comes out and accepts the letter, he looks weak and outclassed.

The best course of action would’ve been to send a rep to invite Cleland, and only Cleland (no entourage or media) for a private meeting in the ranch. If Cleland declines, it is he who appears without class. If he accepts, Bush appears gracious, even with the opposition. Thankfully, Bush blew it.

Your guess is as good as mine as to who will be camped out in Crawford in 2006.

Does Cindy Sheehan deserve to be heard? Sure- she gave her son. But the pretense that she doesn’t have answers to her questions is absurd. Her questions, again:

“Why did you kill my son? What did my son die for? If the cause is so noble, why don’t you send your twins?”

Why did George Bush kill your son? He didn’t. Insurgents did. Or, as Michael Moore calls them, Iraqi “Minute Men”.

What did your son die for? For the country. You may disagree with the current mission in Iraq, you may find it valueless, but we are in it together, and Casey Sheehan, a volunteer who re-enlisted in the summer of 2003, believed in that mission. I wish he were still alive. I wish all of them were.

“Why don’t you send your twins?” Because it is a volunteer Army, and no one has been drafted and sent against their will (although, if you ask me, the stop-loss actions do smack of a back door draft, even if they have always been policy to ensure unit cohesion and peak fighting strength). If Casey Sheehan hadn’t been the patriot he was, he would still be alive.

So, in short, Cindy Sheehan has the answers she wants. She just doesn’t like them, and that is her right. While I understand her acting out in her grief, I refuse to excuse those using her as the galvanizing symbol for anti-war sentiment. If that makes me evil, so be it.

And one more thing, all of this public theatre, this public Chief Brody Slap and these silly cries for “Why Are We in Iraq” are serving no one any good. The important question is what is going on in Iraq and how we can end the insurgency, and if you read the news, it doesn’t look very reassuring:

The Bush administration is significantly lowering expectations of what can be achieved in Iraq, recognizing that the United States will have to settle for far less progress than originally envisioned during the transition due to end in four months, according to U.S. officials in Washington and Baghdad.

The United States no longer expects to see a model new democracy, a self-supporting oil industry or a society in which the majority of people are free from serious security or economic challenges, U.S. officials say.

“What we expected to achieve was never realistic given the timetable or what unfolded on the ground,” said a senior official involved in policy since the 2003 invasion. “We are in a process of absorbing the factors of the situation we’re in and shedding the unreality that dominated at the beginning.”

Administration officials still emphasize how much they have achieved despite the chaos that followed the invasion and the escalating insurgency. “Iraqis are taking control of their country, building a free nation that can govern itself, sustain itself and defend itself. And we’re helping Iraqis succeed,” President Bush said yesterday in his radio address.

Throw in the alleged chemical weapons factory find, the high death toll this month, the splits within the Iraqi populace about the direction of the country, and there are some real questions that need to be answered.

So, while Bush should have just met with Sheehan again and let her vent before this became a big story in the lazy days of August, excuse me for not reserving front row seats for this spectacle. And would the good folks at the RNC and PNAC send me the new talking points, because I am sure this post is going to get me accused of ‘smearing’ Cindy Sheehan. After all, I am responsible for everything Michelle Malkin, Mike Gallagher, and Bill O’Reilly say.

Joe Gandelman has more. As does Jeff Goldstein. And this progressive has no idea what he is stepping in.

Why Are We in Iraq, Cindy Sheehan, and Other ThingsPost + Comments (220)

Go read this if you have not had your fill of the Sheehan circus.

And for another persepctive, go read Arthur Silber, who supports Cindy Sheehan’s political activism.

What Jeff SaidPost + Comments (69)