This has been a dizzying week for deciding who is above the law or below it, with figures from Ted Stevens and Rod Blagojevich to the AIG bonus recipients parading before the public bench for reappraisal.
*The former Republican senator from Alaska gets a pass from a Democratic Attorney General on the grounds of bad behavior by prosecutors from the Bush Justice Department, which still faces unresolved accusations of firing eight federal prosecutors for not being political enough.
(Sarah Palin wants the Democrat who defeated Stevens to resign, but that idea has as much chance as the moose she shoots from airplanes.)
*The Disney World vacation of the impeached former Illinois governor is interrupted by news he has been charged with numerous counts of fraud and corruption, but only after successfully naming Barack Obama’s successor to the US Senate.
His indictment raises again questions about the part played in his case by the universally sainted prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, who went public with an inflammatory attack on Blagojevich in December but failed to charge him then. Was Fitzgerald’s move, an obvious attempt to keep the governor from selling the seat, proper behavior for a federal prosecutor? Does it open the door to others hounding elected officials in less cut-and-dried cases?
*From, of all people, Fox News’ usually rabidly wrong Glenn Beck comes a scathing interview with Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal pressuring him for legal reasons for his public hounding of AIG bonus recipients, laying bare blatant political grandstanding by Blumenthal and, to a lesser degree, New York’s Andrew Cuomo for political gain rather than duties of office. Beck wins that argument handily. Political piling on by officers of the law is an ugly sight, no matter who is at the bottom.