Hair Trigger

I suppose I should have something more to say about the Blagojevich mess. Setting aside the thing itself -- which is a rewarding combination of high farce and low road -- it's the glee with which the right wing, with no evidence whatsoever to date, are trying to tar Obama with it. In numbers that reflect the recent election, lots of folks (those in the FOX hole) believe he must be implicated. Stories like this don't help.

The Associated Press, now run by a right wing hack, has, in the story linked above, left out what is the most salient point of all: the reason the Obama team is delaying release of the final report of their inquiry is that they were asked to do so by Fitzgerald!! You'd think a so-called news organization would have included that little datum.* Here's the full statement from the Obama team:

"At the direction of the President-elect, a review of Transition staff contacts with Governor Blagojevich and his office has been conducted and completed and is ready for release. That review affirmed the public statements of the President-elect that he had no contact with the governor or his staff, and that the President-elect's staff was not involved in inappropriate discussions with the governor or his staff over the selection of his successor as US Senator.

"Also at the President-elect's direction, Gregory Craig, counsel to the Transition, has kept the US Attorney's office informed of this fact-gathering process in order to ensure our full cooperation with the investigation.

"In the course of those discussions, the US Attorney's office requested the public release of the Transition review be deferred until the week of December 22, in order not to impede their investigation of the governor. The Transition has agreed to this revised timetable for release," said Obama Transition Communications Director Dan Pfeiffer.

Until I got to that last paragraph, I, too, thought the soup was a little thin. Maybe the AP didn't have enough cash on hand to pay their reporter to look at the whole statement. Maybe s/he spilled coffee on the page. But it reflects badly on them, and is emblematic of the whole right-wing response: outrage first, facts later. If at all.

It's a safe assumption that Obama knew Blago was being investigated. It's clear as the snow on my lawn that Obama is smart as hell. To think he or anyone on his team would offer the hairman of the board a quid for his quo is to ignore everything that's self-evident about PEBO. (I love that acronym, which I saw elsewhere.) If -- as likely as the sun rising in the West -- it's found that there are fingerprints, my outrage and my disappointment will know no bounds. But unlike Foxophiles, I'm waiting for actual information.

*Interesting: the AP article seems now (a few hours after I started writing this) to have been revised to include, in the second paragraph, the words "at the request of prosecutors." They weren't there originally, which explains the sentence which makes up the fourth paragraph, now no longer relevant: "The U.S. attorney's office did not immediately respond to a request for comment." And the gist of the article is the same: the Obama press release leaves out much -- ignoring the obvious reason why that is so.

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