Blago Bobby Rushed them today. Heck, he could care less about being impeached. Losing the governorship is chump change against the possibility of spending years in the gray bar hotel. His strategy is to use the impeachment process to influence the potential jury pool. Thus, the hanging (read: lynching) metaphor.
Such a loaded word. Bobby Rush used it at the governor's last presser, and sent Senators Harry Reid and Dick Durbin scurrying away from their carved in tungsten statements of never seating Blago's Senate nominee. One day a Maginot Line in the sand-- you shall not pass-- to fawning photo ops with the luckiest politician in the country: Roland Burris. You would have thought he was Abe Lincoln by way of Thomas Jefferson with a dollop of Albert Schweitzer by the time Reid et. al., eating crow rather than become fellow lynchers, stopped enthusing about him.
All in twenty-four hours or so, all because of Blago being shrewd about the racial water we swim in and swimming laps around the Democratic Party's elite.
So just a few hours ago, in another Fellini-esque press conference with his improbable hair less stiff, but still leaving all of us guessing at what his forehead may or may not have tattooed on it, the governor did not reach for poetry, but channeled Blazing Saddles by way of the famous oration in Animal House.
Conspiracies, tax increases, the first amendment, the sixth, due process, fairness, Roland Burris, more amendments, the Tribune building's foyer, editorial boards, cowboys, cattle, horse thieving ... pan to a circus and grotesque clowns, cue the Nino Rota music and let your mind drift.
It was that bizarre.
But, he knows what he is about. Play the race card. Get ready for the Feds by using the senators. Don't worry about the new president and his Chicago staff; use them too. Either with implicit threats (I want to subpoena Rahm and Valerie), or to claim he did nothing nobody else doesn't do. Use the Democratic Party's key issues to claim justification for impeachable offenses that will resonate with potential jurors. You can never go wrong in today's America throwing out that it's 'for the children' like a metronome. Or, 'for the seniors.' Or, 'for women's health.' Or, to force government to act when held back by monstrous forces, i.e. constitutions, from 'helping the people.'
I wish now I had had an issue meter I could have clicked to keep track of the laundry list of emotional touch points. But, there was a method behind the madness. A calculated sardonic grin hidden as he sized up his audience for the second time.
Just one, he thought behind the thatch, just one potential juror out there, gimme one juror with a grudge, and impeachment be damned.