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(Compiler's note: What we have here is a picture coming into focus of a number of what I call real "balls of slime." Read this and see what you think.)
As Democrats inside and outside the Obama camp struggle to circle the wagons around The One (Rush Limbaugh noted that, while Jesus walked on water, Obama seems to walk on cesspools), there are two critical questions that arise. First, why did Obama resign so early, and finally, why was U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald so uncharacteristically impatient to arrest the Governor of Illinois and his chief of staff? What was so compelling about this scandal that makes it different from the scandalous behavior of every big city Democrat machine in America?
Obama resigned his senate seat on Sunday, November 16th, just twelve days after becoming the presumptive president-elect and sixty-six days before his scheduled inauguration. His timing would not have been critical were it not for the fact that the Congress is attempting to deal with the greatest financial crisis since the Carter Administration and an automobile industry that is on the verge of total collapse. So why would Obama resign in mid-November, leaving his caucus perhaps one vote short of the super-majority required to overcome a Republican filibuster?
Had Obama waited until the last week of December to resign, Gov. Blagojevich could then have appointed a replacement just days or hours prior to the swearing in of the 111th Congress, giving his replacement seniority over all of the members of the incoming freshman class… but he didn’t do that. Why? Was there some inherent interest in giving the governor the maximum amount of time in which to “horse trade” for the appointment?
When questioned about the matter, Obama said, “I had no contact with the governor or his office, and so we were not – I was not aware of what was happening… ” This is in stark contrast to what Obama’s principle advisor and strategist, his alter-ego, the man who knows everything and makes no strategic mistakes, David Axelrod, had to say in a Fox News interview on November 23rd. Referring to Obama, he said, “I know he’s talked to the governor and there are a whole range of names, many of which have surfaced.”
In his response, Obama paused in the middle of a sentence to change the word “we” to “I.” Why? Was he demonstrating that he already understands the value of “plausible deniability?”
Is there anyone alive who truly believes that the junior senator from Illinois, who has just become the presumptive president-elect of the United States, would not have at least several conversations with a longtime associate, the Governor of Illinois, whose job it is to appoint his replacement? Is anyone truly that naïve? But then, after Obama was caught in what was clearly a lie, Axelrod attempted damage control, issuing a statement saying that he had misspoken in his November 23rd statement. He said, “They did not then or at any time discuss the subject.”
(There, there now… Daddy Axelrod has kissed the “ouchie” and it won’t hurt Obama any more. All the bad reporters and all the bad Republicans will soon go away.)
Then comes the question, why was the U.S. Attorney, Patrick Fitzgerald, so anxious to arrest the governor. Following the arrests, Fitzgerald said there were “a lot of things going on that were imminent… we were in the middle of a corruption crime spree, and we wanted to stop it.”
Those “imminent” things were, in order, Blagojevich’s appointment of Obama’s successor and Obama’s inauguration as President of the United States. So the question arises, what interest does the U.S. Attorney for Northern Illinois have in insuring that Barack Obama’s inauguration is not tainted by scandal? And why would Fitzgerald go out of his way to make the point that Obama, himself, was not implicated in the case? How about Obama’s closest aides?
If Fitzgerald had waited to spring his trap until after Blagojevich had made his appointment, knowing that the appointment process had been corrupted, how many more Illinois Democrats could he have sent off to prison? And how many members of Obama’s staff would have joined them? What is needed is an immediate subpoena of the telephone logs for the governor’s office, the governor’s home, Obama’s home, the Office of the President-Elect in Chicago, and all the appropriate cell phones. And since Fitzgerald has already demonstrated that he allows political events to influence his decisions, those subpoenas should be issued by an independent counsel.
Patrick Fitzgerald is not lacking in patience. On December 30, 2003, Fitzgerald was appointed special counsel, charged with determining who it was that had leaked the name of Valerie Plame, an employee of the Central Intelligence Agency, to columnist Robert Novak.
Shortly after his appointment, Fitzgerald learned that the source of the leak was Assistant Secretary of State Richard Armitage, a “rogue” political appointee and no friend of the Bush Administration. However, Fitzgerald was not satisfied with bringing his investigation to a quick conclusion; he was after bigger game… someone close to the president. His number one target was presidential advisor Karl Rove.
Finally, after nearly two years of grand jury harassment, demanding that Rove and Lewis “Scooter” Libby, the vice president’s chief of staff, recall precisely every word of conversations they’d had with reporters more then two years earlier, Fitzgerald used Libby’s “imperfect memory” to charge him with five counts of making false statements, perjury, and obstruction of justice. And when Texas Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchinson said, “I certainly hope that if there is going to be an indictment that says something happened, that it is an indictment on a crime and not some perjury technicality.”
In response, Fitzgerald said, “That talking point won’t fly… The truth is the engine of our judicial system. If you compromise the truth, the whole process is lost… if we were to walk away from this, we might as well hand in our jobs.” So where was Fitzgerald when Bill Clinton committed, not “technical” perjury, but actual perjury, and every Democrat in the United States Senate voted to let him get away with it?
On March 6, 2007, “Scooter” Libby was found guilty of four of the five charges. He was fined $250,000 and sentenced to 2½ years in prison and two years probation. The cost of Fitzgerald’s pursuit of Rove and Libby came to more than $1.5 million.
Now Fitzgerald has before him a far “juicier” case of political corruption, with much bigger fish to fry, and it remains to be seen whether he will pursue it with the same tenacity with which he pursued poor “Scooter” Libby. Fitzgerald can make by far the largest political crime bust in American history and, being a Chicagoan, he won’t even have to leave home to do it.
As Chicago Democrats gathered for a victory celebration at Blagojevich’s campaign headquarters on election night in 2002, he announced to the crowd, “Tonight, ladies and gentlemen, Illinois has voted for change.”
Seems I’ve heard that same thing in more recent times… either that or there’s one hell of an echo in here.
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