...and second thing, come for the clients.

You know the quote in the icon, from Dick the Butcher in 2 Henry VI, by some dead English guy.  Usually, I use it in fun when someone in Teh Profession- whether in my experience or in the news- does something that makes me cringe.  This time, though, it's aimed at a couple of "how dare you" moments that have made the news, here and in Rochester, in the past week or so.

The first of them, at least the older incident of the two, involves a New York State Senator from the Rachacha suburbs.  A Republican, as it happens.  You know, less government regulation, substantial tort reform to protect businesses from needless cases? Yeah, them. Anyway. Seems Jim was looking to buy a new-build house somewhere in his district, and instead of picking the model home, or making an appointment, he just wandered up to one of them, found an unlocked door into the cellar, invited himself in and fell down go boom going up a ladder to the first floor. The result was a broken leg and a chain of calls from the EMTs to the po-lice to the owner of the property asking them if they wanted Jim arrested for trespass. It would appear they said no, but Jim, knowing full well that the criminal (and related civil) statutes of limitations for trespass are shorter than the one for negligence, let almost three full years go by, when they couldn't charge him but he could charge them- and did, with a negligence lawsuit against the developer.  The lawyer who filed it is one I've dealt with only a handful of times, none of them especially pleasant, and while it's not one I would have accepted or recommended, hey, that's what judges and juries are for, right?

Apparently not. The Court of Public Opinion for the Fifty-Fifth District of New York convened, and within days of the filing, had rendered their verdict, sentence and warrant of career execution on the guy for daring to file a lawsuit. It made the headlines as far south as the New York Post, with the obvious Man Bites Dog angle played up. Tort Reform Republican Sues For Negligence Mwahaha. As soon as the shit got real thick on the fan, Jim withdrew the lawsuit, but the consensus on at least the standard newspaper message boards is that he should never get a Republican nomination again (and, given that redistricting will probably cost an upstate Senate seat or two, he might not even have a seat to be nominated for, some of his constituents sliding west to protect a n00b Republican just elected here by a couple hundred votes).

Is it hypocritical? Probably. Should it have cost him at the polls? Absolutely. Yet there's something nasty and slippery-slopish in people reacting with a demand for the withdrawal of the case from the courts. It would have cost the developer a pittance to file an answer, or move to dismiss, and when a judge agreed with the assessment of the COPO (55th Dist. 2011), I'd be fine with it.  This, though? Just a bad taste of "wrong" in my mouth, and I'm not referring to insufficiently beefy tacos.

----

Meanwhile, here in the 61st District of that Court, another story came to a similar ending, although it began much more recently, and ended much more tragically.

I wrote about it at the time it happened- a horrible case of mistaken identity, and intention, in the section of town just across Sheridan Drive from our home. An out-of-town visitor to a party got massively faced, wandered out of the party house, into a neighbor's home through (here we go again) an unlocked door, and wound up being shot to death by the owner, a (you got it) real estate developer.  Police chose not to charge him, saying it was in self-defense. I couldn't argue with that at the time- the burden of proof for a criminal charge is quite high, and there were no other witnesses to what happened other than the shooter, his wife, and his dog, and neither of the two latter ones could be compelled to testify to anything said.

Earlier this month, though, the widow of the deceased chose to file a wrongful death case against the shooter- and was just as quickly shot down in the COPO, even though her standard of proof might have been sustainable (it works that way sometimes- see People v. Simpson, cf. Goldman v. Simpson). Again, within days, the shouting was so loud (and perhaps threats, direct or indirect, levied), the widow withdrew her case before it saw a single beam of judicial light cast on it.

Only then did the paper report some of the shooter's words, which, I thought, only added to the strength of the widow's case. The family was upstairs when their dog alerted them to the intruder. From their room, the wife called 911 while the shooter, in his words, repeatedly told the stranger that they'd done so, and that they were armed, and to leave immediately.

Did he hear those words? We'll never know. The only words we know he probably heard were these, when the two finally came face to face at opposite ends of the stairs:

"I was crouched down with my gun, making myself as small a target as possible, and there was this man, just staring up at me," D'Amico recalled. "I yelled at him, 'Show me your hands so I can see that you don't have a weapon.' [Park] didn't say anything. He just stared up at me with this totally blank look on his face."

With his wife still on the phone with an Amherst police dispatcher, but police not yet present, D'Amico said he made a decision.

"I told myself, if this guy takes one more step toward coming up these stairs, I'm going to shoot," he said.

According to D'Amico, the still silent Park took a step toward the landing leading up to the stairs. D'Amico fired one shot, hitting Park in the upper body.

Park fell out of view, landing in the living room.

I just have to wonder- what if, instead of telling HIMSELF that last sentence, he'd shouted it to the intruder. "Show me your hands so I can see that you don't have a weapon" sounds really good on a cop show, but to a dazed and (sure, probably) drunk intruder it's probably a bit much to process. "I'm about to shoot!" is something even Lindsay Lohan could probably understand- and he never got to hear that, or a warning shot, or anything else that would've have saved his life without risking others.

(I know, the Nuts Running America tell us not to do anything other than shoot to kill, and only to shoot when you mean to kill. This is why I don't pack; hell, I can't clip a cat's claws without mixed feelings.)

Were I on the jury deciding this, it would be a tough call. I'd probably balance the intruder's drunkenness against the shooter's intentions and come up with a balance of responsibility. Instead, the COPO has returned us to the days of all-or-nothing tort law- where any culpabilty on a plaintiff's part is grounds for denying his or her entire claim. And much as I hate ambulance-chasers, I have even more hate for those who try to subvert the system by shouting people down in order to get them out. These may be the extremes of that movement, but it won't take much, if it catches on, to make any lawsuit filer a community pariah, in which case there's only one thing for people in my profession to say then:

Would you like fries with that?

"If she leaves after you've said it, you've said goodbye."

That's an approximated quote of the US Ambassador to Israel, Georgie Jessel, instructing Richard Nixon on the vagaries of Hebrew when preparing him to meet Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir for the first time. At least that's the way it was explained to my 10-year-old self by the legendary presidential impersonator David Frye.

His record album I Am the President, and its followup, Radio Free Nixon, were essential parts of my comedy immersion in the late 60s and early 70s. A few years ago, both albums came out on iTunes, and I pounced, to get the actual audio back onto my computer to match the memories of them still stuck in my head, 40-ish years later.

Frye was probably the finest contemporary imitator of the Big Dick back in the day; Rich Little later gained more fame, but his was a tamer, less pointed presentation. The Frye version was edgier, aimed more at the hypocrisy and smoke-and-mirror quality of his Presidency. As with Vaughn Meader, who was (in Lenny Bruce's immortal assessment) "screwed" by Kennedy's passing, once Watergate hit and carried Nixon away, Frye's career was pretty much over. He stayed marginally active even into the last Adminstration, doing Dubya and Cheney imitations which are still extant on Youtube, but neither his later efforts, nor any comic's impersonations of sitting Presidents, ever had the effect on me that Frye's did.

His repetoire wasn't limited to Nixon, and we still use the occasional catchphrase of his Nelson Rockefeller imitation, in a bit where he came back from South America as the Administration's ::koff:: "goodwill ambassador." After a bad day, I'll often say to Eleanor, as "Dick" did to "Rocky,"

Put down your crutches and tell me all about it.

I may also be the only person alive who remembers Frye's imitation of Nixon as the quintessential version of Paul Anka's "My Way," rather than Sinatra's.

David Frye passed away earlier this week at the age of 77. Let me make one thing perfectly clear: ya done good.