{"id":906,"date":"2021-05-07T00:20:29","date_gmt":"2021-05-07T05:20:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/kurmudgeon.net\/?p=906"},"modified":"2021-05-07T00:42:59","modified_gmt":"2021-05-07T05:42:59","slug":"the-case-against-hamilton-burger","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kurmudgeon.net\/index.php\/2021\/05\/07\/the-case-against-hamilton-burger\/","title":{"rendered":"The Case Against Hamilton Burger"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Upfront Disclaimer:\u00a0 This blog post pertains to the television program from the 1950s & 1960s starring Raymond Burr<\/a> and others.\u00a0 Not the books or any other television programs or movies.<\/p>\n

Ok, for those of you unfamiliar with the Perry Mason<\/em> television program<\/a> none of this will mean anything to you, so I feel no obligation to explain it all and provide loads of background.\u00a0 Cut your loses now and click on to the next post.\u00a0 For those of you who are familiar with the program this will make sense, though you may strongly disagree with my premise here.\u00a0 Hamilton is very popular among Perry Mason<\/em> fans, and for good reason, he does indeed have some endearing qualities, but that’s not what I’m kvetching about.<\/p>\n

Hamilton Burger is incompetent.\u00a0 There, I said it.\u00a0 In the series Hamilton Burger (played by William Talman<\/a> shown in the photo at right) is the Los Angeles District Attorney (DA) who almost always goes up against Perry Mason (defense attorney), and I claim is a very bad, a very poor, attorney.\u00a0 And that’s what fans will disagree with me about.\u00a0 But here’s my evidence, circumstantial as it may be…<\/p>\n

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  1. The premise goes that only a competent attorney could ever be a DA, hence Hamilton must be a competent attorney.\u00a0 But… he loses pretty much every case.\u00a0 Against Perry, at least, but isn’t that enough?\u00a0 No competent attorney would have that bad a record against a single adversary.<\/li>\n
  2. Maybe he wins against all the other attorneys, people say.\u00a0 Ok, then if his record is consistent, and he continually prosecutes innocent people against Perry, then he sends a lot of innocent people to prison when he faces others, and he would send a lot more if Perry weren’t so good.\u00a0 Hardly inspiring.<\/li>\n
  3. Even in the five or six episodes with a “guest defense attorney”, when Raymond Burr was out with a real-life injury, Hamilton still loses to every single one of them.\u00a0 Yes, it’s just a tv show, but c’mon…<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    Some like to point out Hamilton is interested in truth and justice and not winning… which highlights the “it’s only a tv show” aspect because real life certainly wouldn’t be that way, and it still doesn’t excuse his overall inadequacy as a prosecutor.<\/p>\n

    Some also like to speculate he wins most other cases, but we have no evidence for that.\u00a0 All we have to go by is what we see in the show, and it shows constant ineptitude.\u00a0 Sorry, I calls ’em as I see’s ’em.\u00a0 In other words, Hamilton Burger is… wait for it… irrelevant, incompetent, and immaterial.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Upfront Disclaimer:\u00a0 This blog post pertains to the television program from the 1950s & 1960s starring Raymond Burr and others.\u00a0 Not the books or any other television programs or movies. Ok, for those of you unfamiliar with the Perry Mason television program none of this will mean anything to you, so I feel no obligation […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-906","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-observations"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kurmudgeon.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/906","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kurmudgeon.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kurmudgeon.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kurmudgeon.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kurmudgeon.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=906"}],"version-history":[{"count":16,"href":"https:\/\/kurmudgeon.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/906\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":923,"href":"https:\/\/kurmudgeon.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/906\/revisions\/923"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kurmudgeon.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=906"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kurmudgeon.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=906"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kurmudgeon.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=906"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}