Willing to kill innocent Americans

The NY Times reports that following a successful case proving tobacco companies conspired to hide the risks of smoking, a high-level Bush Administration official ordered the government lawyers to reduce the requested damages from $130 billion to $10 billion, money that would be used to for future stop-smoking campaigns. The official ordering the change, Robert D. McCallum, is a close friend of President Bush, and McCallum's prior work was at a law firm representing R. J. Reynolds, one of the tobacco companies being sued. There's no question in my mind McCallum is helping the opposing party in this case at the expense of his own client - the US government and the American people.

McCallum personally and those above him in the chain of command will be responsible for the deaths of more innocent Americans that Bin Laden. And I do mean innocent, from second-hand smoke, fetal death, and smoking-caused fires.

Their pretense at morality is gag-inducing.

UPDATE: Pretty amazing demonstration of Lakoff's concepts over in the comments to a Volokh Conspiracy post on the same subject. Commenters there see an ethical violation OF THE HIGHEST ORDER, they say - that someone leaked the internal memos to the media about their boss. As for the strong possibility that McCallum betrayed his client, his country, of billions of dollars and is potentially responsible for thousands of deaths, that just bounces right off their mindsets and is dismissed.