Tuesday, December 9, 2008

If you pray, this is a good time for it

I didn’t think Barack Obama should be President. He’s inexperienced. He fostered a cult of personality. His most fervent followers are, let’s face it, unbalanced in the most literal sense. His campaigns against Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin were disgusting displays of misogyny. His behavior in the RFK/June imbroglio was disgraceful. He’s some weird combination of corrupt Chicago machine politician and unthinking radical socialist. Nonetheless he was elected. He is, as his very large and very stupid sign endlessly reminds us, “The President-Elect”. As I’ve said before, I sincerely hope Obama has a wildly successful Presidency because the country desperately needs one.

The Illinois Governor, Democrat Rod Blagojevich, is in trouble for allegedly trying to “sell” Barack Obama’s Senate seat. Some of the deals Blagojevich supposedly considered anticipated favors from Obama including one deal that involved getting the President-Elect to appoint Blagojevich Secretary of Health and Human Services. According to The Corner, Lynn Sweet has explained that Blagojevich talks a lot and there may be nothing much to any of the charges against Blagojevich.

If you pray, pray that Sweet is right. Or - since that seems too much to hope for - pray that Blagojevich was talking big about Obama and none of the Blagojevich scandal spills over onto the President-Elect. As disastrous as I believe Obama will be for the country, I believe a Constitutional crisis involving charges of corruption against a President-Elect or a sitting President would be even more disastrous. We would have another special prosecuter, another investigation that drags on and on and resolves nothing, another fertile field for every conspiracy theory under the sun: we’ve had more than enough of all of that in the past twelve years.

So pray fervently that Blagojevich is a braggart spinning stories to himself and a captive audience about deals Obama wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot pole.

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