As we consider Blago’s criminal activities, we ought to think about other political wrongdoing. Glenn Greenwald writes in Salon:

The bipartisan Senate Armed Services Committee report issued on Thursday — which documents that “former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other senior U.S. officials share much of the blame for detainee abuse at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba” and “that Rumsfeld’s actions were ‘a direct cause of detainee abuse‘ at Guantanamo and ‘influenced and contributed to the use of abusive techniques … in Afghanistan and Iraq’” — raises an obvious and glaring question:  how can it possibly be justified that the low-level Army personnel carrying out these policies at Abu Ghraib have been charged, convicted and imprisoned, while the high-level political officials and lawyers who directed and authorized these same policies remain free of any risk of prosecution?

Greenwald has a decent point. But there is a difference between authorizing policies that can lead to abuses and actually carrying out abuses. Maybe I’m drawing a distinction without a difference. I’ll have to think about it some more.

I predict that Obama will irritate and eventually alienate much of the press. Just watch this exchange about Obama’s lack of transparency about Blagojevich:

Remember, Obama originally said “I had no contact with the governor or his office, and so I was not aware of what was happening.” That statement is certainly false. Rahm Emanuel had contact with Blagojevich and Emanuel is Obama’s Chief of Staff. Obama is just obfuscating and waiting to release the report during Christmas week when there will be little news coverage.

Emanuel knew what Blagojevich was up to and you have to image he told Obama. Wouldn’t you want your Chief of Staff that your Governor is up to no good? Emanuel and Obama probably didn’t do anything illegal. The real question is whether they did anything wrong. Obama claimed that he wanted to be transparent. This is a pretty un-transparent beginning.