Dr. Bill Frist, Moral Monster

by Alexander Cockburn

A well-informed Republican source confides that Lott was promised the chairmanship of the new senate committee scheduled to oversee the vast Homeland Security Agency now in the process of formation. So Lott was able to continue dispensing prodigious patronage of the sort that has brightened the eroded downtown of Jackson, Miss., with a vast new post office I was able to admire last spring. We may expect numberless counter-terrorism facilities, command centers and kindred porkodromes to enrich the concrete pourers and building contractors of Mississippi.

As for Bill Frist, the millionaire Tennessee sawbones, everything you need to know about this unpleasant man was contained in one short paragraph of a profile of Frist by Michael Kranish in the Boston Globe Sunday magazine for Oct. 27, 2002, when Frist was in Boston, first at Harvard Medical School and then at Massachusetts General Hospital.

"Frist is an animal lover who said his decision to become a doctor was clinched when he helped heal a friend's dog. But Frist now found himself forced to kill animals during medical research. And his new dilemma was finding enough animals to kill. Soon, he began lying to obtain more animals. He went to the animal shelters around Boston and promised he would care for the cats as pets. Then he killed them during experiments. 'It was a heinous and dishonest thing to do,' Frist wrote. 'I was going a little crazy.'"

So now the U.S. senate is going to be led by the cat world's answer to Dr. Mengele! A man who can do that is capable of any infamy. Can't you just picture this oily Tennessean cooing and clucking over the tabbies and tortoiseshells at the shelter, solemnly wagging his head as the shelter staff counseled him on proper cat procedures, then dragging the poor creatures into his lab and torturing them to death. I call on the Humane Society to demand that Frist publicly apologize for this appalling, indeed ineradicable stain on his character, and pay substantial reparations out of the vast fortune that has accrued from the Hospital Corporation of America, founded by his father and brother.

While serving as an ardent toady of business, especially the health care and pharmaceutical cartels, Frist projected a "caring" image, accepted without demur by all except his former interns at the Vanderbilt Medical Center in Tennessee, where he amassed big bucks as a heart/lung transplant surgeon. "He was a complete asshole," recalled one intern to my brother Andrew recently, "Arrogant and unhelpful."

Frist, Andrew writes, "has subsequently let it be known that as a transplant maestro he 'saw' indigent patients. 'The equivocation is telling,' says the former intern, himself now a distinguished practitioner. 'As far as we could see, the only indigent patients Frist saw were the ones he passed on the street on his way to operate on rich Saudis at the medical center."

If any further particulars are required to convict Frist, we need only say that he has been attracting the fawning attentions of U2 singer Bono. Bereft of his two prime hosts in Washington, former Senator Helms and former Treasury Sec. O'Neill, the appalling Bono has been calling on Frist and dining with Rupert Murdoch.