Enjoying Blago

Is it only me, or is there a wonderful lunatic charm to Blago?  I adored the way in which he appointed a megalomaniac black man to the Senate, forcing Reid either to seat someone he normally wouldn’t touch with a ten foot pole, or risk opprobrium as a racist.  Likewise, I really enjoyed Blago’s press conference today, in which he asserted his white knight status (and that despite the audio tapes), all the while castigating everyone else in Illinois politics.  If he’s going down, he’s going to take everyone with him — and since I have little respect for the Chicago political machine, including our president-to-be, I’m enjoying the spectacle tremendously.

Speaking of race relations, you may or may not have heard that, two nights ago, there was a big race riot in Oakland, California, stemming from the fact that a black man was shot to death by a policeman working for the Bay Area Rapid Transit district.  The real tragedy appears to be that the policeman simply got left and right hand confused.  He had a taser on one side of his belt and a gun on the other.  In the adrenalin rush of taking down a bad guy, he meant to tase and ended up shooting.  As someone who periodically puts dirty plates in the refrigerator and food in the dishwasher, I completely understand how those circuits can be crossed.

Accidental shooting or not, the grievance mongers were out in force in Oakland on Wednesday night, in full fledged riot mode.  What I found naively charming about the whole thing was that, this morning, Mr. Bookworm expressed surprise to me about the riot:  “I thought that, with Obama as the incoming president, we wouldn’t have these race riots any more.”  Yet another bill of goods the Democrats sold the voters, right?  Of course, you and I knew all along that the grievance mongers have too much invested in the anger of identity politics to give it up just because a vaguely black man got placed above his pay grade in the White House.