The Triangle

Issue date: 1/23/09 Section: Ed-Op

Media Credit: Terrence Antonio James Chicago Tribune/MCT

Okay, you've got to love the hair. When you're as short as Rod Blagojevich, every inch helps, especially if it's black and wavy. And let's face it, since John Edwards imploded on us, which politician's coiffure has been camera-worthy? Certainly not Barack's skullcap curls or Biden's plugs.

Oh, yes, the two-term Illinois governor has been accused of trying to auction off Obama's senate seat. Now, there's nothing more common in politics than horse-trading over a political vacancy, and do you think New York's David Patterson isn't having the time of his life deciding whether a Kennedy or a Cuomo will get Hillary Clinton's senate seat? Though perhaps it will be neither, especially now that Kennedy has taken herself out of the running.

Ah, but we're talking about the throne-chair of The One here, and therefore not politics but lese-majeste. How dare anyone traffic in holy relics, and drag the White House into the sordid and potentially quite embarrassing details of a bargain-basement sale? (Exactly what did Obama's Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel talk about with Blago?)

Enter Patrick Fitzgerald, U. S. Attorney and insatiable headline-grabber. Fitzgerald, when last heard from, was throwing the Valerie Plame case, and letting Dick Cheney off a possible impeachment hook. Plame, as you will recall, was the CIA agent outed by the vice president's office as punishment when her husband, Joe Wilson, pulled the plug on the phony assertion that Saddam Hussein had been trying to buy uranium yellowcake in Niger to build a nuclear bomb. All that caper amounted to was the final justification for the Bush administration to inveigle us into the war with Iraq, which has now cost a million lives. Fitzgerald had a straight shot at Cheney; all he had to do was turn his chief of staff, Scooter Libby. Instead, perhaps having had a midnight call from Darth Vader, he settled for Libby himself.

So, when Fitzgerald (whose own hair is almost as bad as his cajones are weak) came forward to say he'd never seen a more heinous betrayal of the public trust than Rod Blagojevich's, I'd have to say he himself had the good governor beat by a mile. Not only that: by so characterizing evidence he'd yet to present in open court, Fitzgerald violated the Justice Department code of conduct for making a public accusation.

Now, I don't know what Rod Blagojevich did or didn't say in his wiretapped conversations (or on what basis the wiretap was authorized in the first place). It doesn't seem to have involved the direct solicitation of a bribe, for the grandstanding Fitzgerald would certainly have said so it if it had. And the governor has steadfastly maintained his innocence of any criminal offense. What is for sure is that the Obama administration wants the whole issue, and Blagojevich himself, to go away as quickly as possible.

Continued...

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