In the future, donations to keep your favorite alleged criminal politician out of the slammer will be tax deductible. But until then, you'll just have to settle for the good feeling that comes with knowing that you financed a legal arms race that allowed an almost certainly guilty someone to file one ridiculous motion after another and eat up government resources until the president finally issued them a pardon or clemency.
This week, we have two new entries into the halls of helping politically well-connected SOBs get off scot free.
First, the Kerik Legal Trust. It's notable not just because it's financing former NYPD Commissioner Bernard Kerik's fight against his well-earned government indictment. Rather, it's remarkable because it's a triple oxymoron - Kerik and Legal and Trust are not really words that go together very well these days.
But Kerik's plea for bucks, or perhaps his lawyer's, was upstaged when we learned of the Alberto Gonzales Legal Expense Trust. This development was even more surprising because the former attorney general with the memory/honesty problems hasn't even been indicted for anything yet. Which I guess is why they kept the word "defense" out of the name. They'll wait until the government starts prosecuting the law-hating attorney to plug that name.
So, I say, why not me? With jokes like this, it's just a matter of time before I'm targeted in a "politically motivated witch hunt" by some overzealous prosecutor. Please send your checks to the Huffington Post.
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Our favorite Republican tweety bird co-host of The View, Elizabeth Hasselbeck, gave birth to a bouncing baby boy named Taylor earlier in the week. The blond talk show hostess explained how she's already moved politics into the boy's life:
Has the conservative Hasselbeck registered Taylor as a Republican?
"I delivered him on a treadmill while watching ... President Bush," she joked.
It's going to be a rough round of potty training....
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You've got to hand it to Mike Gravel. He has been bounced off the stage of future Democratic presidential debates. But he's not letting that get in his way.
The former Alaska senator already had a reputation for being something of a crazy old man, if an historically important one who got the Pentagon Papers out in public. But now he has managed to institutionalize the role of an old guy yelling at the television because the politicians are saying things that make him crazy.
It's not an alternate universe, it's an alternate debate, where the feisty Alaskan gives a live response to the other seven debaters as they parse and pose. So far there are no accounts of his alternate debate in Las Vegas, but the last one at Drexel University went like this, according to the school newspaper:
Gravel paused the debate to make his remarks, as if he was actively in the debate. At points, he let the video run and talked over the candidates.
And in that regard, it's just like my crazy uncle is running for president. I love you, crazy uncle.
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Finally, Hillary Clinton once declared that she was something of a "national rorschach test," that is, a person, "in which Americans see many things."
Well, if whoever is the national inkblot is also the person who is elected president, then I say Hail to President Obama!
Perhaps you did not read columnist Andrew Sullivan's love letter to Barack Obama.
(Perhaps you are fortunate.)
But there it is toward the end of the article, the projection of one Americans hopes and dreams and fantasies onto the senator like he was just some inky form to make sense of was piled in at the end of the article:
And there are times, I confess, when Obama's account of understanding his own racial experience seemed more like that of a gay teen discovering that he lives in two worlds simultaneously than that of a young African American confronting racism for the first time.
It's your turn now: imagine what you think Barack Obama's experience as a young man really represents. A factory worker in your favorite Bruce Springsteen song? A jazz singer who is trying triumph and hit that beautiful note that will fill the world with joy? A preacher who wants to give a sermon that will bring dogs and cats together in perfect harmony? A Mexican worker trying to cross the border to start a wealthy new life? The possibilities are endless. And you, too can be Barack Obama.