Review session

Given the arrest of Governor Blagojevich it is time to review. During the course of the media reach around of Obama all year they neglected to inform the rest of America about how Illinois politics works - and how Barack and Michelle Obama may have involved themselves with those machinations.
Evelyn Pringle's article The Wizard of Oz is the primer. Here is another of her articles called Curtain Time for Barack Obama. Both are months old - and becoming more and more prescient by the hour. Neither Hilary Clinton or John McCain used the most damning information available to them about Obama. This I will never understand.

Also very good for reviewing the situation is Cannonfire - which I am riffing on here. He has Jesse Jackson Jr. as a possible co-conspirator. And connects the dots to Hunter Biden, the Vice-President elect's son. Cesspool comes to mind.

With that, a note about race. This blog and many others discussed early on just why Obama was bad for race relations in America. I pushed two reasons: 1. Obama, with the compliant media, weaponized race. If you criticized Obama you became a racist. I resented this deeply and still do. Much more importantly, it debased all real victims of racism. 2 . He was not who he said he was - which is now becoming clear. Obama was elevated far beyond what was justified given his resume and experience. This is precisely what white resentment feeds on. A national revulsion against Obama would give the worst racists among us cause to erupt. The fault for this lands squarely on the media for willfully ignoring the level of corruption Obama involved himself with. The ache for Obama to save us is still strong. But Obama's electoral enemies have been vanquished - he needed them to shine. The shine is fading fast. The damage done by Fitzgerald is to some of Obama's closest associates not him - so far. We will see if the levee has been breached. IT HAS NOT BEEN YET. I AM SPECULATING. Stand down, Pods.

My impression of Fitzgerald is that he goes as far as he can go while still winning. Hence Dick Cheney is still V.P. (Hard to believe...I'd almost forgotten the guy.) and Libby needed a pardon. The Chicago machine is good at protecting its arena. The world Cheney moves in is of a different order. Whether or not Obama has constructed a sufficient firewall should he need one remains to be seen. He may not need one.
However:
If BHO is in trouble Blagojevich has little reason to protect him now.
"...the FBI says it heard Blagojevich complain he has to give this "motherf***er [the president-elect] his senator. F*** him. For nothing? F*** him."

"The governor is heard saying he will pick another candidate "before I just give f***ing [Senate Candidate l] a f***ing Senate seat and I don't get anything."

This would appear to exonerate Obama in the short term. But Blagojevich and Obama did not meet a week ago. The relationship is long and deep. What Blagojovich has to bargain with now is information. That's it. And he does not sound like an adoring Obama Pod in the quote above.

Either this affair is going on the Whitewater track, that is sound and fury amounting to nothing until a man is entrapped into lying about a blow job - or the Watergate track...replete with a cavalcade of grifters and a lot of "plausible deniability." After one day it looks much more like a state level Watergate...but tackier. From here Illinois politics looks like a hybrid of Scarface, a used car salesmen convention in Reno, and a 30 year reunion of the Saved By the Bell cast.

The good people of Illinois need to stop paying taxes.

Obama is so good with a speech and a teleprompter - but like Bush anything outside a tightly controlled environment and he looks edgy. Yesterday his discomfort was very apparent.