Ejaculatio Praecox

Patty Fit always gets his man. Though the shit he's spewing is clearly a violation of ethics rules regarding extrajudicial statements and publicity. Don't ya think, jus' mebbe, that "Lincoln would roll over in his grave" might prejudice the fair application of justice?

Dude should have his fucking license yanked....but the rules never seem to apply to prosecutors.

-La_Rana

Just in time for Christmas, founding member of the Justice League of America, SHIELD, the United Federation of Planets, the Knights Templar, the Freemasons, the Elks, Rotary, and the United Nations, Patrick Fitzgerald, went and ran his mouth a little to soon. Don't countcher chickins b4 they hatch, bro. No wonder the governorfucker didn't resign. He and Lady McBlagojevich are cackling in the castle: They got nothin' on us! Perhaps we ought to rehearse how Patty Fitz froze a hack journalist in carbonite in order to prove . . . wait, what was that all about again? Something about a guy named MoPed, right? I can't remember. I think it was supposed to bring down the Bush administration, though. Yeah!

So it turns out that hazily speculating on pay-for-play political deals is even more uncertainly illegal than . . . pay-for-play political deals themselves. (What we have here, it seems to me, is a series of victimless crimes. - W. Sobchak) It's unclear, in the absence of an absolutely explicit quid pro quo, that promising campaign contributions, jobs, whathaveyou in return for political favors or appointments is illegal.

“This town is full of people who call themselves ambassadors, and all they did was pay $200,000 or $300,000 to the Republican or Democratic Party,” said Mr. Bennett, referring to a passage in the criminal complaint filed against the governor suggesting that Mr. Blagojevich was interested in an ambassadorial appointment in return for the Senate seat. “You have to wonder, How much of this guy’s problem was his language, rather than what he really did?”

In presenting his case, Mr. Fitzgerald said Mr. Blagojevich had crossed the line from deal-making to criminality, citing an example in the complaint in which the governor discussed with an aide obtaining a $300,000-a-year job from the Service Employees International Union in return for naming a candidate to the seat.

“We’re not trying to criminalize people making political horse trades on policies or that sort of thing,” Mr. Fitzgerald said. “But it is criminal when people are doing it for their personal enrichment. And they’re doing it in a way that is, in this case, clearly criminal.”

The last paragraph is some of the most hilariously cracked ethics I've run across. So. To. Get. This. Straight. It's ethical, say, to promise that you'll raise a hundred grand in bundled campaign funds for Senator Such-and-Such in return for his Yea vote on the Rape Wetlands and Kill Babies for America Act, but it's unethical for him to say, hey, if you raise me a hundred thousand in campaign funds, I'll get you a cushy Federal job. Um. So. Yeah.

Meanwhile, and for the record, it is equally unclear to me that Abraham Lincoln had any interest in political corruption, one way or other. The idea that opposition to the expansion of slavery in new territories is commensurable with campaign finance policy is probably one to be questioned.