Last week I met an old friend for lunch downtown…
I got there a few minutes early so I walked around the block, both to kill time and to see the old office building where I’d worked for many years. Now vacant, as I passed by I thought of all of the people I’d worked with there, where my former law firm had its offices for 60 years – especially those who had gone to the Great Bar Association meeting in the sky.
I thought specifically of the late William T. Smith, my law partner and KU Law School classmate. Bill used to joke about the phrase “pleading in the alternative.” That’s a legal phrase which means setting out multiple claims or defenses in a lawsuit, either hypothetically or alternatively, such that if one of the claims or defenses is held invalid or insufficient, the others would still have to be answered. The example he gave was that in a lawsuit alleging that I stole your bicycle, I could say; 1) I didn’t take it, and 2) If I did, it was broken!
I’m reminded of that kind of legal chicanery when I consider the lame arguments Planned Parenthood put forward the past two month after a series of videos were released by a pro-life group, the Center for Medical Progress:
A) The first category of arguments falls under the general heading; “We didn’t say what you heard or saw us say in those videos. Specifically, the videos were spliced and edited to make us seem to be saying certain things.”
Maybe when the Planned Parenthood executive in Los Angeles “joked” about getting “a Lamborghini” from selling body parts from aborted fetuses, she was actually saying something else. Maybe she really said, “I want a Bucatini,” while ordering lunch at an Italian restaurant where the videoed meeting took place.
B) The second argument is that; “You tricked us into saying those things!” We weren’t haggling over the price of organs with would-be purchasers, we were just discussing how we could best “pass along the costs” when making these “donations.” (If the costs are fixed and based on long experience, why do they have to be re-negotiated each time a new “donee” comes along?) Continue reading →
Here we go gang, it’s football time again! 
