Back in the distant past when my Starter Wife and I were just starting the process of demarriage (if you want to see how much the State of Wisconsin values marriage you need to see how much it costs to get out of one) I went to a well respected law firm on the West Side of Madison to try to obtain representation.
I spilled my broken heart on the desk of a senior partner. Ahem. What I mean, of course, is that I dispassionately explained my side of the story in hopes that he would assigned some third-junior sub-lawyer to my case and allow me to come through the process with my dignity, if not my 401k, intact.
He listened to the whys and wherefores and asked many pointed questions about the who did whats and then gently slid my heart off his desk, onto the floor, and stomped that sucker flat. He would not, he said, be able to have his firm represent me because they were already representing the not-quite-ex wife of my nowhere-near-ex wife's new best friend and roommate. That, he said might lead to a conflict of interest and ethical law firms did not engage in such actions.
Along the way things worked themselves out okay. I found another lawyer with a good sense of humor. He listened to my lawyer jokes without billing me for the time and bought me a beer at The Great Dane when everything was said and done. (Done, anyway. It seems as if everything is never said.)
That lawyer came to mind over the weekend with the story, somehow overlooked in an election cycle in which nothing was overlooked, that The New sheriff, I'm sorry, the new AG was in the employ of a law firm in which he was switching sides. Now that he had been chosen by the good people of Wisconsin to serve as their bastion of moral uprightness and All Things Good his first proclamation of his sense of duty was to pay back his buddies and act against the wishes and interests of the citizens of the state.
In his campaign JBvH said he wasn't a politician. He's proved it with this fiasco. Even giving him the benefit of the doubt and saying that there is no quid for the quo in this case you would think that a man who rode to victory on the shoulders of those who saw influence peddling under the corner of every carpet would, at least, have the sense to take the oath of office before starting to sell out those whose hopes he was stomping.
It's been a long weekend and I'm sure that once all the turkey is digested that those bloggers who rode Jim Doyle for the last three months will be going after the hypocrisy of van Hollen's recusal refusal. I'm sure that will happen soon.
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1 comment:
You were better off with the second lawyer Jim. Who wants their Court Representative to be troubled with ethics, anyway?
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