School For Corporate Criminals

Sometimes you see some interesting -- and nauseating -- things in other people's blogs. This is from blogger Roger Ailes (via Suburban Guerrilla) where he trashes conservative columnist Kitty Parker, partly for her writings about bloggers and other items, but also for her affiliation with Reid Buckley's Buckley School of Public Speaking which seeks to train corporate criminals executives about how to make make lemonade out of the lemons of catastrophies. (Reid is William F. Buckley's little brother and a conservative columnist himself.)

And what was the inspiration for The Buckley Method?

Have you ever grieved to see decent, gifted, hard-working people humiliated in public by jackasses? Have you been one of them?

In 1984, a toxic gas leak in Bhopal, India killed nearly 3000 [sic] people. The tragedy was terrible. So was the seeming incompetence of so many high Union Carbide functionaries, who where [sic] paraded before the camera. They appeared never to be able to get their stories straight.

As Reid Buckley watched these decent men squirm and fumble, he thought how unnecessary that humiliation was. He began testing a workshop to teach executives how to express themselves with poise under duress. The result four years later was the opening of the Buckley School.

We wrote quite a bit about Bhopal on the 20th anniversary last year, but Roger ably sums up all that is wrong at the Buckley School:

Pity the poor executives, whose humiliation was at least as tragic to Reid as the asphyxiation, blindness and sudden death of thousands of Indians exposed to clouds of deadly poison in their own homes. And to be humiliated by poor, non-Anglo, non-Christian corpses, no less. I guess Kitty considers helping corporate killers get their stories straight to be of more value to society than blogging.