CT Blue

First, let me register a protest against the Governor of Illinois. He could have made life a lot easier had he been named Smith. I fear I shall never get the spelling right. I realize I lack standing to make such a complaint, but there it is.

But spelling’s not my subject; only my intro.

As others have observed, there are a lot of people who are in a hurry to make us all forget about the past eight years. One tactic is to pick up where they left off: manufacturing scandals. This is not to say that Blagojevich is not a scandal, but the press, with Republicans cheering them on, is not content to go after such an easy target. No, they will pick their other targets, evidence be damned. In this particular scandal it may very well be that the biggest loser will be Jesse Jackson, Jr.,who may very well be guilty of nothing more than being a politician:

It’s looking increasingly like Rep. Jesse Jackson, Jr., was truly uninvolved in Rod Blagojevich’s alleged Senate-seat-for-sale scheme, other than expressing the usual interest in getting the appointment. Most telling was the report from Jackson’s lawyer today that the feds called Jackson as Blagojevich was being arrested to give him a heads up that the arrest was happening and that Jackson might see his name in the news.

I don’t do criminal law, but it seems highly unlikely that Jackson’s lawyer is lying. The Feds would slap him down too quickly. It also seems highly unlikely that Jackson would have gotten a heads up like that if he were a suspect. I assume they’d rather let him dangle.

But it gets worse. At least there is some reason, from perusing the indictment, to suspect that Jackson may have been involved, and it’s still possible that he was. Our newly vigilant press corps, so somnolent over the past eight years, now sees evidence of Obama’s guilt (or “taint”) where no reasonable person could discern it. At the Washington Monthly, Steven Benen notes that Time Magazine finds bad news for Obama stemming from the fact that Fitzgerald said Obama was not involved.

…Fitzgerald held a press conference on Monday, and presented the case against the governor. Reporters asked about Obama, and he said this doesn’t involve the president-elect. According to Time’s report, this is bad news for Obama. Why? Because Fitzgerald answered reporters’ questions and said Obama isn’t connected to the case.

In what universe does this make sense?

First, Fitzgerald didn’t “go out of his way” to talk about Obama. Reporters asked, Fitzgerald responded. …

The last quoted sentence responds to Time’s claim that Fitzgerald had to “go out of his way” to “distance” Obama from the case.

As I understand it, prosecutors are not in business to clear anyone. They bring charges against people they believe to be guilty. They are not empowered, nor are they in the habit of, pronouncing that any particular person is guilt free. The most they can say, as Fitzgerald said, is that a particular person is not named in an indictment, or that there is no evidence tying him or her to wrongdoing. Had the reporters asked Fitzgerald the same question about George Bush they would have gotten the same answer.

We expect the folks at Fox, and on the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal, to leap large logical impediments at a single bound. But it is disheartening when the press as a whole follows their lead. This is the press corps that resisted even recognizing the criminality of Libby, Cheney, et. al. with regard to the Valerie Plame incident (even after the guilty verdict), yet they seemingly have no trouble coupling Obama to a crook he has been consciously avoiding for at least a year. He was, for example, conspicuously absent from the list of governors who spoke at the convention.

Guilt by association has survived the campaign. Back then, Obama was guilty because he had been in the same room with Bill Ayers. Now he is guilty because he is from the same state as Rod Blagojevich. We are on the brink of a Depression. Global warming may be reaching a tipping point. We are involved in two military conflicts. We can’t afford to have eight years of the kind of fake scandals that plagued Bill Clinton, but that seems to be exactly what we’re likely to get.