Loosefish Chronicles

Dick Cheney suggested Tuesday that the U.S. will face successful terrorist attacks if the Obama administration doesn’t continue the Bush administration policies, suggesting the Obama team is already scheduling tea parties for terrorists.

Cheney suggested we could be hit with a nuclear or biological attack, or worse, an army of Dick Cheney clones.

In the course of his interview with Politico, Cheney said his next step will be to send out chain letter emails reiterating and expanding upon the virtues of the Bush Cheney years, and castigating Obama’s supposed romper room approach to keeping the country safe.

The Cheney chain letter will end by demanding the recipient to send the email on to ten friends within ninety minutes, or become a victim in the next terrorist attack.

In addition, the letter will provide the opportunity to gain “indulgences,” or guarantees of avoiding terrorist attacks on one’s own person by deleting unread all emails from anyone connected to the Obama administration, or from anyone questioning terrorism or excessive executive authority.

Though Governor Blagojevich may be giving poet philosopher kings a bad name, he is doing wonders bailing out the poetry business, as he quotes such poets as Kipling and Tennyson.

Soon, no doubt, poets will be more famous than movie stars.

One has to wonder, though, in the midst of all this international literary elucidation — is he saving his own native Illinois poet Carl Sandburg for the big finish, his final speech as he is dragged out kicking and screaming, pulling down walls and ceilings, to the sound of stand-up comedians chortling and guffawing?

Imagine, if you will, Governor Blagojevich giving this final farewell speech:

You know, politicians live in the real world. We are not just air-brushed commercials for shampoo and styling gel. I repeat, I have done nothing wrong. I will continue to fight and to fight. But here in Illinois we know that politics is not about sitting trapped in ivory towers like Rapunzel letting down her golden hair but about living in a “stormy, husky, brawling City of the Big Shoulders,” as Carl Sandburg wrote in his poem Chicago.

Carl Sandburg long ago told us how to answer such hypocrites, and so my final answer, as I defend my state and its people, is in his words, which I quote—

Rachel Maddow, of course, will then point out the parts which Blagojevich, as is his habit, left out—such as:

They tell me you are wicked and I believe them…

And they tell me you are crooked and I answer: Yes, it
is true…

Or how Blagojevich perhaps is not best represented as the man who gets the last laugh but, in keeping with another skipped line of Sandburg’s poetry, as the man “laughing even as an ignorant fighter laughs who has never lost a battle”—emphasis on “ignorant,” as in ignorant of that other literary reference, or life lesson, that states “Do not task for whom the bell tolls.”

As much as some are marveling at Blagojevich’s political saavy, he still doesn’t deserve too much credit.

Think chess, for a second. Granted, Blagojevich may have snatched Reid’s rook, but he had to sacrifice his queen, and he’s about to face checkmate (impeachment). The best he can pull out of his hat is a stalemate. All very titillating but this game is not being played at a grandmaster level.

Notice, for comparison purposes, that Blagojevich hasn’t even been able to take a pawn from Obama, at best making him jump his knight to the left instead of the right, but getting forked in the process.

One has to admit that Harry Reid is taking some hits in his rep. A lot of that dented fender, however, is his own doing, the way he frames matters. The basic trajectory, the daily twists and turns, is not something Reid could have directed much differently, but he could have better positioned his pieces.

All of that perspective may change as the circus moves on, more by circumstance than by Reid’s own framing of the matter, especially as Roland Burris now admits to reaching out to a Blagojevich confidant about the senate seat.

We’ll see.

The Answer with a Twist — Part IV

We’ve discussed some intricate constitutional issues regarding the Blagojevich-Burris-Senate ménage à trois, but now let’s zoom in on just Burris, his appointment.

There does not seem to be any foul play in Blagojevich’s specific appointment of Burris.

Seating Burris, then, with some appropriate pause for due diligence, seems legitimate. Emphasis on legitimate. The question of legitimacy is the only tenable issue. Neither Burris’ qualifications, nor his popularity (ability to win 2010).

One still could make a case, as we have done, that the Senate has the authority to make a judgment about the political process, separate from legal innocence or guilt, with just the benefit of the public facts (to be reviewed in any Senate process leading to a vote on the matter). One also could argue that the existing facts (the tapes) put any Blagojevich appointment in jeopardy.

While these arguments may be a sane place to start, the balance shifts, however, given the de facto vetting process this appointment has been receiving.

Burris amply has demonstrated his willingness, and his qualifications seem in order. No revelations have surfaced about Blagojevich’s handling of this specific appointment, and, in this regard, Burris looks like he will stand up to scrutiny.

That said, the Senate’s responsibility is to do its best to judge whether or not the citizens of Illinois are being represented legitimately by Blagojevich’s appointment.

We have had some fun here with the theatrics, and Burris has provided some of his own, but give the man his due — he has stood his ground, and definitively demonstrated he can take the heat.

As for Blagojevich, he may have built himself a few bridges, but we find it hard to say he substantially has one-upped the Senate Democrats.

If Blagojevich is political toast, does buttering that toast make much of a difference?

Yes, as a result, the Democrats may worry a bit about 2010, but that’s a fair fight. By then, Blagojevich’s looking to be a few crumbs in the corner. If he gets himself acquitted and then somehow wins an elected office, well then, we deserve what we get, burnt toast.

UPDATE (12:17 p.m.): Looks like everything is on track. Reid and Durbin just had a press conference after meeting with Burris. Beyond all the distractions and theatrics, and peanut gallery rabble-rousing, this story is over, unless something real surfaces. They’re pretty much following the trajectory we laid out this morning, and putting it to the whole Senate fits the need to oversee Blagojevich. Think Law and Order, when a corrupt DA gets all his cases reviewed.

In the end, Blagojevich actually has helped the Senate Democrats, and even Illinois, as, short of a quick resignation, this scenario, with all its theatrics, is probably the quickest and least convoluted scenario for which Illinois could hope.

Perhaps Blagojevich deserves some pancakes with his toast for his final meal?

Question of the Day

Did anyone else wonder if Vice President Cheney was tempted to customize the oath he administered today to the senators of the new 111th Congress?

A signing statement perhaps? An asterisk or two?

“ I, (Name), do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States¹ against all enemies, foreign and domestic²; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same³; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion⁴; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter.⁵ So help me God.⁶

¹with due deference to the Executive Branch

²combatant and non-combatant, make-believe and detained on a whim

³unless I get a pardon

⁴though I may treat my mind as “Top Secret/SCI“^*

⁵except if I have a “different understanding”

⁶and by God, if the whole country disagrees with me, so?

^*SCI, by the way, stands for “sensitive compartmented information.”

The Answer with a Twist — Part III

The comedy of this Blagojevich-Burris-Senate ménage à trois starts with the protestations that this is just politics. Well, yeah!

This issue is precisely a political question, a question about the political process. As such, there are good arguments for the Senate being the judge of what constitutes a breach in the political process for seating its own members. There also are good arguments for going with the clean, sharp edge of limiting the Senate’s ability here to the legal frame, that they need to base their judgment on whether or not a law has been broken.

Amusingly enough, did you know that someone somewhere, once upon a time, invented these Supreme Court dudes for just this kind of thing? Go figure. Who knew activist judges had a day job?

Burris starts to veer off into comedy, for his own part, when he says he didn’t expect all this fuss, or when he tries to paint the Senate, or even the media, as standing in the way of a pure and pristine, unquestionable appointment. A politician theatrically proclaiming that the theatrics are everyone else’s fault starts to look more Shakespearean farce than Roman gravitas.

The more he plays that card, the more Burris risks looking like he is going in the opposite direction from Al Franken, who, for his part, has just about completed the trajectory from comedian to senator.

The Answer with a Twist — Part II

“It’s mine, it’s mine! My precious!” proclaimed Roland Burris today at Chicago Midway airport, more than embracing his appointment as junior senator for Illinois.

Well, okay, what he actually said, as reported by the New York Times, was:

“Why don’t you all understand that what has been done here is legal?” he said. “I am the junior senator from Illinois, and I wish my colleagues in the press would recognize that.”

He later added, “This is all politics and theater, but I am the junior senator according to every law book in the nation.”

So — let’s lay it out.

Yes. His appointment is legal. So what? That’s not the point. The Senate still gets a say, if it so judges.

The question at hand is whether or not the Senate can reject the appointment regardless, by way of having the final say on the integrity of elections and returns. The underlying question for now is about the Senate’s ability to say “thanks but no thanks.” Clearly, the Senate could reject an illegal appointment, but can they reject an appointment that they judge as being compromised? In other words, can their judgment be based not just on strict legal matters (e.g., convictions) but also on political matters, not party (which definitively would be excluded) but process?

From the U.S. Constitution, Article I, Section 5:

“Each House shall be the Judge of the Elections, Returns and Qualifications of its own Members…”

[my emphasis]

If appointments fall under “Returns” and if the Supreme Court takes the word “Judge” as determinative, then we might consider the Senate to have the ability to make the final judgment about whether or not an appointment has been properly returned.

In such a scenario, as we’ve already discussed, one could conceive that the established facts (Blagojevich’s “talk”) would be enough for the Senate to make a judgment. The argument then would be over the scope and limits of that judgment, whether or not, for instance, it would have to be based on a conviction for an illegal act, or if it is enough for the Senate to say an election or return has been compromised.

Is the Senate limited by whether or not a law has been broken, or do they have a broader scope to “judge” the integrity of the process, the political process?

This question would be an intriguing exploration for the Supreme Court to be sure, but the players involved are more likely to make a deal of some kind first.

So, after all the slicing and dicing, what kind of fallout is Blagojevich leaving in his wake?

We seemingly elected Barack Obama, as a country, to some degree as a mandate against politicians who wear their self-interest on their sleeves. That’s one of the reasons that turning government into an amusement park for cable television, courtesy of Governor Blagojevich in reference to Obama’s senate seat, stands out so much.

How many voters, the more this goes on and on, start to think that a vote for the “Lizard People” might sometimes, in some situations, be a good idea after all?

Burris is betting that by 2010 he’ll be established, the dynamics will have changed, and he’ll have the statewide infrastructure and a leg up as the incumbent to win. He may be right.

If, on the other hand, he doesn’t rise above the sideshow of the moment, voters may remember him as being part of the mishegos. They may then choose someone else in 2010, a different Democrat, say, or a Republican, or maybe even a lizard.

The GEICO gecko, perhaps?

In today’s Washington Post, White House Chief of Staff Joshua B. Bolten and national security adviser Stephen J. Hadley ridicule the idea that Vice President Cheney was pulling the strings in the White House, calling such a notion “hooey” and “bunk.”

“What our critics don’t realize in their hyper-partisan conspiracy-minded attacks,” Hadley elaborated to a nonexistent Loosefish correspondent, “is that the vice president used a wireless modem. Hello! No strings to pull; it’s all wireless.”

Both men, affectionately called “Twitter and Tweet” by President Bush, argue that this state of affairs, technologically speaking, represents the true power struggle in the White House.

“Why do you think Obama is making such a big deal about keeping his Blackberry?” Bolten asked. “You think he wants Biden floating around stirring up all the real cauldrons of power, with a text here and a tweet there?”

These above-mentioned make-believe comments were offered up by Hadley and Bolten in order to clarify their “reality-based” interview with Michael Abramowitz in the Washington Post:

“One of the mythologies,” Hadley said, “is that it was the vice president that somehow was pulling the strings on foreign policy in the first term and made it very ideologically driven and that somehow in the second term, the vice president’s influence is in decline and, therefore, somehow the real Bush has come forward, and we have a more pragmatic foreign policy.”

“That’s just hooey — it’s just hooey,” the ever-polite Hadley concluded, with the strongest language he would muster for print. (Bolten chuckled and suggested earthier epithets, such as “bunk.”)

The Answer, with a Twist

Who should Lt. Governor Pat Quinn appoint to the Senate, if and when he gets the chance?

The answer is obvious — Roland Burris.

Let the U.S. Senate refuse Blagojevich’s pick, work out all the drama in the system one way or another, and then after Governor Blagojevich is impeached, or otherwise circumvented, let Quinn make the pick. At which point, if he picks Burris, Quinn would disarm Blagojevich’s political bomb, while allowing a respected candidate to serve.

Blagojevich clearly calculated that Burris would be hard to refuse, so don’t. Or rather, make it doubly clear exactly who is being refused. Quinn even could announce that if he gets the chance he would pick Burris.

Burris would then have a chance to prove himself for the 2010 election, without his term as an appointed Senator being swamped by Blagojevich’s bombast.

All the big guns could campaign in 2010, and the winner would be the winner, and Illinois politicians could stop looking like circling sharks, unseemly in their circumnavigation of this seat.

UPDATE: Representative Danny Davis looks all the better for having refused Blagojevich’s offer for the appointment. Quinn could pick Davis, instead, to mix it up and reward a restrained senatorial-like decision, though he then would have to deal with Burris.

AN ASIDE (1/4/09): The following aside is more straight than “twisted.” Please pardon our appearance while we adjust our reality.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said today on Meet the Press that Blagojevich was making up names, and that he did not tell Blagojevich who to appoint or not to appoint. He also said he is an old trial lawyer who is always open to negotiation, and he mentioned that if Quinn wanted to appoint Burris, or anyone else, that would be fine. So, as we suggested above, if Quinn were to announce that he would appoint Burris, then Burris can stand down, and Blagojevich can be shut down.

The question here, best summarized by Nate Silver on fivethirtyeight.com, is not about Burris, but about the Senate’s ability to judge the process (elections/returns, with an appointment being part of a “return”).

Now, one might ask, does this need to be a legal question? In other words, Blagojevich has not been impeached or convicted, so isn’t he innocent until proven guilty? Certainly, in court.

But, could the Senate base its judgment about the appointment (”return”) on non-legal realities — specifically, that Blagojevich has not denied and effectively has confirmed that he actually said what he said on those tapes? Blagojevich called it “just talk,” and in court “talk” by itself is not going to be enough, but can the Senate say, talk of this nature is good enough to reject the appointment made by a governor so brazenly talking?

We would say, yes, the Senate has a constructive argument that would be worth exploring if they are pushed to it. One could make an argument that this power was meant to give the Senate supremacy over such external shenanigans, to maintain its own institutional integrity. Unless the Supreme Court says otherwise, as the Supreme Court doesn’t just trump the other branches of government in such matters, it also trumps us.

The distinction here would be that the Senate is acting to manage the integrity of the process, and basing their judgment on confirmed actuality (the tapes as confirmed by Blagojevich). If one allowed that that judgment is a judgment on a separate but valid track from any legal judgment, then that would fit within the Constitution’s mandate. In other words, the Senate is vested with the authority to judge this matter on its own but only with regards to the question of seating the appointed Senator, not with regards to any legal guilt.

The Supreme Court, however, could draw the line differently and say such decisions by the Senate must be based on judgments made by a court, not just confirmed facts.

So, just to keep our wry smiles in proper working order, the answer here would come down to the difference between a decision and a judgment!

UPDATE from Angelo St. Paul, our Non-Existent Fake Springfield Correspondent:

Roland Burris, during the last twenty-four hours, has made the media rounds, defending his appointment as legal, despite any “taint” surrounding Governor Blagojevich. By way of example, Burris, in our imaginary interview with him, suggested an analogy, stating that, “if a restaurant owner gets arrested for serving poison, you don’t fire the people he hired just because he hired them.”

Missing from that analogy, points out NBC Whitehouse Correspondent, Chuck Todd, according to the words we are sticking in his mouth, is the political awareness and context, which might recognize that regardless of who works at such a restaurant, NO ONE IS GOING TO EAT THERE.

There is a difference between what is legal and what is politically astute, after all, as a variety of imaginary commentators have noted, and voters may very well know when their “date,” so to speak, is acting a tad too desperate and needy—which observation only raises the question of what voters will do, even if Burris, a politician who despite his good name has failed to win multiple elections, makes it all the way to the 2010 Senate election for the Illinois seat.

“Burris may know the difference between poisson, the French word for fish, and poison, the English word for politically radioactive,” Vice-President-elect Joe Biden might have said if he had said it, “but while it is perfectly legal to stand next to a rotten fish, you don’t smell very good, and even if you are an honest fish yourself, it’s a tough sell. Mercury-free wild salmon and rat poison don’t mix.”

As for Governor Blagojevich’s claim that he is “required” to make this appointment, one fake commentator notes that Blagojevich had options, even beyond resignation—that if he truly was acting on behalf of the people of Illinois, he could have indicated, for instance, that he would sign into law, without threatening a veto, any bill the Illinois legislature wanted to write to allow Lt. Governor Pat Quinn to make the appointment.

“This is a very creative governor,” the fake opinion-maker added. “He has options inside of options inside of options. And he uses those options, as you can see, but only on his terms.”

“Apparently,” said an unnamed voter-off-the-street, “there are always politicians ready to step up, and do the hard civic duty of putting themselves first.”