If reports are to be believed, Blagojevich is scum. No question about it, he is scum, who in no way deserves the honor of leading the state that gave us Lincoln and Obama.
And if I had to bet on it, I'd give pretty good odds that his tenure as governor will terminate prematurely, either through impeachment or because he resigns in disgrace.
And if there were any evidence supporting even the slightest hint of a whiff of a suspicion of any funny business in Blago's choice of Burris, I'd run, not walk, to the nearest soapbox to demand that our prennially spineless Democratic Senate contingent throw Burris out on his . . . ear.
And yet.
The fact is, Blago is the governor. And as the governor, he has the legal right -- you might even say, the legal responsibility -- to appoint Obama's successor. It is, as Pat Buchanan stated on Hardball, a matter of the rule of law.
Here's the thing about principles. If principles mean anything at all, then the time when they are the most important is when all of our emotions are screaming at us to do the very thing that those principles forbid.
I don't like it. If I were the Queen of the World -- and if the evidence really does show the level of corruption that they are saying it shows -- I would make Blago step down. That is what Obama advocated, and that is what Blagojevich should do.
But unless and until he is convicted, we can't make him leave. I think that's what is really sticking in everybody's craw. We are powerless to effect that desirable result right now; we must wait for the wheels of justice to complete their exceeding slow grinding.
And so we seek a proxy action that will allow us to feel as though we have some power in the face of evil: if we can't make Blago go away, we can at least punish him, or register our dissent against his corruption, by rejecting his choice for such an honored Senate seat.
But as they say in the Lame Duck President's home state, that dawg won't hunt. Because there is no legal reason to refuse Burris the seat to which he has been appointed.
You can't get there from here.
I'm sure that if they tried hard enough, the Dem leadership in the Senate could find some way to convolute the Senate rules into a distorted enough rictus that they could claim a justification for not seating him. I was a lawyer for eight years, and have studied theology, and from those two experiences I have learned that you can always find a way to justify whatever you want to do.
But even without the legal and spiritual background, I -- or anyone else in this nation -- could have learned that same lesson simply by watching what the Bush administration has been doing for the past eight godforsaken years.
In other words, finding and spewing forth apparent justifications for actions that really are not the right thing to do is something that Republicans specialize in.
And as much as I'd like to punish Blagojevich, that does not hold a candle to my passionate desire for the Democrats in power, especially at this turning point in our history, to scrupulously avoid behaving in any way that even remotely resembles the lying sacks of crap whose reign is nearly over.
We're better than that.