Gore III And Limbaugh, And the Bias of the Press… Again.

Funny, how we’re not seeing much made of this, given what we saw aimed at Rush Limbagh just recently…

LAGUNA NIGUEL, California —FOX- ^[1] Al Gore’s son faces up to three years in prison if convicted on felony drug-possession charges and lesser offenses related to July 4 traffic stop in Orange County where he was found with 140 Vicodin pills, according to a report from the People.com Web site.

Al Gore III, 24, faces two felony counts of drug possession, two misdemeanor counts of drug possession without a prescription and one misdemeanor count of marijuana possession, the district attorney’s office said in a statement. Gore also was charged with a traffic infraction for allegedly driving faster than 100 mph.

…

In addition to Vicodin, officers found Xanax, Valium, Soma, and Adderall as well as a small amount of marijuana. A source tells People.com that police discovered 140 Vicodin pills on the former vice president’s son as well as dozens of others.

That’s quite an interesting mix we’ve got going here.  Somehow I have some difficulty imagining that he is using all that himself, although I wouldn’t put it past him.  But it does open the possibility that he’s dealing, seemingly.

I’ve seen it more than once in the last week, where those defending Gore… and his kid… from public opinion, have brought up the specter of Rush Limbaugh and his addiction to the prescription drug OxyContin, as a defense. Well, first of all, limbo are caught an awful lot more publicity out of that and Gore has on the this, his second arrest. All of it bad. More, Limbaugh was originally addicted to OxyContin as the results of treatments for a serious medical condition, treatments which were prescribed by a doctor.  These are claims that Gore III simply can’t make as a defense for his arrests.

But on that note, I noticed , about three hours ago:

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) — ^[2] Purdue Pharma agreed to pay out $634 million to defendants in its OxyContin settlement with federal authorities based in West Virginia.

Purdue acknowledged that staffers had violated prescription requirements for its OxyContin painkiller. The company also acknowledged that its “fraudulent conduct caused a greater amount of OxyContin to be available for illegal use than otherwise would have been available.”

The drugmaker also said that three “top executives” would be charged with felonies. The company said that it will also be charged with a felony.

The $634 million represents 90 percent of the profits for OxyContin sales during the time of the offense.

And this from TriCities:

ABINGDON -Tri-Cities.com ^[3] As demonstrators gathered outside, victims of OxyContin came from all over the nation to speak their mind at Friday’s sentencing hearing – and tell Purdue executives exactly what they think of them.

Here are some of their stories.

• Teresa Ashcraft, who lost a 19-year-old son to OxyContin, came from Florida to refute the claims of corporate spokesman, who she says blamed the victims for the drug’s effects. “Our children were not addicts. They were just regular teenagers,” Ashcraft said at the sentencing hearing for Purdue Pharma executives. “We have been given a life sentence due to their lies and their greed.”
• Donnie Trent, of Lee County, said he is a recovering addict who tried the drug and then struggled with addiction for five years. He said money needs to be spent on treatment, “because jails are not the answer to addiction.”
• Ed Vanicky, of Georgia, said he lost his wife to OxyContin. “She had been taking OxyContin as prescribed for five months, and it killed her,” he said, while Purdue executives “sat in their plush Stamford, Conn., offices watching the money roll in.”
• Lee Nuss, of Florida, showed the court an urn that contained the ashes of her only son, whose college fund ended up paying for his funeral. She said the death was part of a “legal genocide” of the nation’s youth and said in her opinion Purdue is “nothing more than a large corporate drug cartel.”
• Marianne Skolek spoke about her 29-year-old daughter Jill, who was prescribed OxyContin in January of 2002 and died in April of that year, leaving a young son behind. She called the executives “sheer evil.”
• Victor and Theresa Del Regno are a South Kingstown, R.I., couple who lost their son Andrew to an OxyContin overdose in 2002. Andrew was a college student who tried the drug at a party. “It will allow us to move on,” Victor Del Regno said of Friday’s sentencing. It was “Bittersweet,” he said, “but at least there was some justice.”

With all of this going on, the connections in Limbaugh’s case has not been made by the press, and the left. Not that I would have expected them to.  It doesn’t take a genius to figure out why; the truth simply isn’t in them.

They were willing to accuse, when the “Limbaugh’s addicted” ^[4] business first came along, so long as they could possibly damage Limbaugh, but gee, Guess what?  When it came out that the fault of the addiction was on the shoulders of the maker of this stuff, a fact established in a court of law, an admission of “we were wrong” was not to be seen from the press and the left, any more than was serious coverage of Gore’s kid, and his repeated arrests.

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Tell me again, the myth about how our press is not biased towards attacking those on the right and protecting those on the left.