The Select Committee of Ignoramuses

He plays a hero in Congress

I've been trying to dissect out what in particular so infuriated me about the select committee on Benghazi, and I think the buttons they pushed with me go back to watching personal injury lawyers play their cynical, corrupt games with respect to malpractice cases. 

These lawyers typically construct a "story" about what happened and what went wrong with a medical  case that has nothing at all to do with the actual medicine or science but everything to do with histrionics and "creating" a "story" which you can sell to the judge and jury, the "thirteen ignoramuses" of our medical jurisprudence system.

In essence, the conventional wisdom is a bad outcome can always be made the doctor's fault. So they bring some "train wreck" of a case and drop it at your doorstep and you are the one at fault.

Medicine and surgery, as they are judged by physicians and surgeons, are all about process: Did you follow the rules, proceed carefully, as you were trained?  If you did everything you were supposed to do--a pretty heavy burden to begin with--and things go wrong, it's not your fault. 

As one of my residents told me, pulling me aside after a patient with lung cancer filled up with fluid and had a respiratory arrest and then a cardiac arrest and refused to be revived despite all our efforts.  
"Look," he said, pointing his finger in my face, "You didn't give this guy lung cancer. You didn't sock his lungs full of tumor, and you didn't give him sub-pulmonic effusions. You tapped those effusions, as you were taught to do, and he got hypotensive, as patients sometimes will, and he stopped breathing, as people are apt to do under those circumstances and you zapped him and his v tach responded, which was very nice, but it did not last, so he went into V fib and asystole, which patients with all this shit will sometimes do. It's a bitch, but it's not your fault."

Of course, the personal injury malpractice lawyer will not see it that way. He'll read your chart notes and he'll spin a story for the jury that you stuck a big needle into this guy and then he died and it's your fault.

Peter Roskin, the Republican Congressman who did the stunt with the ripping up paper did all that. He is a personal injury lawyer who grew rich from stunts like that, collecting his share of ill gotten gains from such lawsuits.  And he brought all that to the halls of Congress, in an attempt to discredit Hillary Clinton. There was a bad outcome--the Ambassador died. Clinton is like those fat, rich, uncaring doctors who screw up and just go home for the night in their fancy cars to their fancy homes. 

Must be somebody's fault. We can usually vilify some authority who had responsibility for his care.  

This is the same man who calls climate change, "Junk Science."

The wonder is, he probably thinks he actually knows something about science and something about responsibility.

He goes to bed at night having convinced himself he is a hero.