Frist v. The Kitties

Stick a fork in Frist, I think he's done. Unable to deliver on the nuclear option (a term coined by Trent Lott I belive, and not by the Democrats), and facing a great deal of criticism by the business leaders of the Republican party for jeopardizing other priorities, things are looking bleak for his Presidential aspirations. Apart from the fact the Senators make lousy presidential candidates, he has effectively alienated the supporters with money by going after the supporters that are increasingly out of the mainstream.

I began paying attention to Frist when it looked like he was the first definite Rep. to be thinking about 2008. A search in Lexus Nexus has turned up more evidence of just how bizarre our public leaders are. From the Washington Post, 24 September 1994, page A-10:

Critic of 'Bleeding Hearts' Exhausted Supply of Felines

by Al Kamen

"I was, for the first time in my life, making original discoveries. No one else in the history of man had ever done exactly what I was doing, and I would be able to report my findings to the scientific world in some respected and scholarly journal. The way I acted, you would have thought my project, really very basic, was some grand breakthrough. As I watched the little strip of muscle beat hour after hour through the night in the basement of the hospital, I felt quite pure, as if I were reaching out and touching some eternal truth of nature.

"But my experiments were brought to a halt when I lost my supply of cats. I only had six weeks to complete my project before I resumed my clinical rotations. 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."