Thursday, February 19, 2009

All Roland Burris had to do was tell the truth. Instead, he covered up a `crime' that wasn't there | Change of Subject

All Roland Burris had to do was tell the truth. Instead, he covered up a `crime' that wasn't there Change of Subject:

"I've heard it said that if leaders in the U.S. Senate had only known in early January the story that Burris is telling today, they never would have agreed to seat him. He wouldn't now be our temporary (I call him that not just to comfort myself, but because that's how the 17th Amendment refers to non-elected replacements) junior senator.

Nonsense.

Absent evidence of rank criminal behavior on Burris' part, any effort to keep him out of the Senate would have been blocked by the courts. His was a legal appointment, no matter how dismaying the circumstances. And the last thing the Democratic Senate majority needed in the run-up to Obama's inauguration and the fight over the stimulus package was a constitutional crisis with racial overtones.

He was safe. All he had to do was tell the truth—expansively, generously, perhaps even with a touch of humility and self-awareness, though no one was demanding miracles.

In our new, weekly podcast with WGN-AM morning host John Williams, my fellow columnist Mary Schmich said Wednesday that Burris 'misunderstood the moment' in Illinois when he used lawyerly evasions to offer fractional truths in his sworn testimony before the state House impeachment panel and in various affidavits. 'In this environment, [such deception] incites people in a way that it might not otherwise,' she said. 'It represents the larger problem.'

(Listen to and find out more about the podcast here)

Put another way, Burris testified as though he believed his most important mission after his appointment was to create distance between himself and our disgraced"

http://blogs.chicagotribune.com/news_columnists_ezorn/2009/02/all-roland-burris-had-to-do-was-tell-the-truth-instead-he-covered-up-a-crime-that-wasnt-there.html