Pardon Me

I keep waiting for Trump to be chastened by the aftermath impeachment.  I don't expect him to stop acting like an autocrat, but I do expect enough people to to be so outraged that it actually affects his standing in the polls.  But Trump's approval rating is actually holding steady and in some cases ticking upward, and even his recent pardons apparently won't have a detrimental effect on his Presidency.  He commuted the prison sentence of former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich, who'd been serving time for trying to sell President Barack Obama's vacant Senate seat, and set him free early, and he also pardoned his fellow eighties robber baron Michael Milken for violating securities laws and pardoned former New York City Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik for ethical violations. He gave pardons to eight other individuals, too.  Trump's message is this: If you're guilty as sin of a crime, and he likes you - or if he doesn't like Obama and your special crime adversely affected the forty-fourth President - you get out of jail free.  Like Roger Stone, who is expected to be sentenced today.

And if you're railroaded and he doesn't care about you, well . . . 

Justice is blind, but I sure hope it ain't deaf.  Because these transgressions are screaming for retribution against Trump,.  Something has to be done.  Right now, the only thing that can be done is elected a Democratic President in November, and at this point, at this writing . . . I don't think that's going to happen.

Justice in America . . . :-(  

Burris In the Saddle

Why does the continuing saga of Roland Burris feel less like a Shakespearean tragedy than a second-rate Second City (double word usage not intended) repertory skit?

Burris, the newly appointed Democratic senator from Illinois, testified last month that he had no contacts with ousted Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich. Now it turns out that Burris in fact talked with Robert Blagojevich, the governor's brother, about fundraising for the governor, but he said he never did anything of the sort. Then it turned out he tried to do fundraisers for Blagojevich but couldn't get any started.

Would we even be having this conversation if Blagojevich hadn't played the race card by making this appointment? Burris's enormous ego has been clashing with his utter cluelessness of late, embarrassing a state that thought it had put this latest wave of corruption behind it. I've concluded that Burris himself is innocent of wrongdoing, but his ability to get so thoroughly mixed up in the Blagojevich clan's sliminess makes him seem like a bewildered fool who doesn't know what he's doing.

The irony here is that Illinois almost seemed doomed to be deprived a senator due to scandal, then they ended up with this joker. Meanwhile, in Minnesota, where elections are run more cleanly than just about anywhere else, Al Franken - an intentionally funny guy - can't get seated because of an ongoing recount made possible by that same sense of ethics.

Al Franken wrote for "Saturday Night Live" and worked with Second City alumni. And even he couldn't have written a sketch like the one unfolding in Illinois.