Blago’s Football: if you’ve been hiding under a rock, perhaps you’ve missed the single greatest passage to appear in an American newspaper in the last 10 years, maybe forever. It’s in a piece entitled, “Two Sides of a Troubled Governor, Sinking Deeper,” by Monica Davey in the New York Times. It concerns the disgraced Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevitch, the man who is under investigation for trying to sell Pres-Elect Barack Obama’s vacated Senate seat. The piece talks about the Governor’s egomaniacal and narcisstic demands, which were at odds with his everyman public persona.
The passage reads:
And yet, Mr. Blagojevich, 52, rarely turns up for work at his official state office in Chicago, former employees say, is unapologetically late to almost everything, and can treat employees with disdain, cursing and erupting in fury for failings as mundane as neglecting to have at hand at all times his preferred black Paul Mitchell hairbrush. He calls the brush “the football,” an allusion to the “nuclear football,” or the bomb codes never to be out of reach of a president.
Seriously, just read that paragraph over and over. You don’t even need to read the rest of the article. This is what perfection looks like.
Bush got shoe-ed away. Lame duck loser—i.e. Georgie W. Bush Jr.—went to Iraq this weekend for a non-victory lap and thought he was going to come away with some sentimental fluff pieces about how he really cares. Instead, he got a different sort of photo-op: an Iraqi journalist—and now, hero to the world—threw his shoes at Bush during a small press conference. Bush—like he’s been doing for the duration of his two terms—ducked. Lame.
The world’s biggest Ponzi scheme just got worse. Bernie Madoff, the Wall Street legend who bilked “hundreds and possibly thousands and include major banks, hedge funds, charities and pension funds” has ripped off everyone from bank HSBC, a Steven Spielberg foundation, and Mort Zuckerman. His ponzi party was brought to an abrupt halt when he admitted to two employees that his fund was “just one big lie,” with “absolutely nothing” left and that he planned to distribute the remaining $200 million to family and friends before turning himself in. The whistle was blown before he got a chance to do that.
Senator Kennedy, the sequel. It looks like Caroline Kennedy has tossed her hat in the ring for Senator Hillary Clinton’s seat in New York. The New York Times points out that she would be filling a seat once held by her uncle, Robert F. Kennedy. Should she get the post, this could be an interesting political play. Imagine a day, 8 years into the future, say, and we’d have another possible female presidential candidate with even bigger name recognition than Clinton.
Tags: bernie madoff, blagojevit's nuclear football hairbrush, bush ducks shoes, caroline kennedy, caroline kennedy for president, iraqi journalist is a shoe-in for hero, new york senate, steven spielberg, world's biggest ponzi scheme