RE: Kurtz & Blago

Following up on Eric's post, here's more from Howard Kurtz:

I will say this: Barack Obama could have expressed a bit more disgust.

[...] the president-elect limited himself to such bromides as “sad” in discussing the Blagojevich scandal. Actually, it's more than sad. Based on the wiretapped conversations recounted in the criminal complaint, it's an outrageous, appalling and thoroughly disgusting glimpse of government for sale.

The governor of Illinois deserves the presumption of legal innocence, but not the presumption that he acted honorably.

[...]

By yesterday Obama's position had “evolved”: Blago should resign (though he said it via a written statement). Why did it take the president-elect 24 hours to reach that conclusion, when the facts haven't changed? Is that kind of excessive caution going to define his presidency?

Obama's call for Blagojevich's resignation came so early in the scandal, Howard Kurtz had to measure the time elapsed between criminal complaint and resignation call is mere hours, not days. And yet Kurtz thinks that represented “excessive caution” on Obama's part? As Kurtz notes, Blagojevich “deserves the presumption of legal innocence” -- yet Kurtz suggests Obama should have decided within minutes that Blagojevich should resign. That's nuts.

Furthermore, Kurtz seems to think the fact that “the facts haven't changed” makes Obama's purported delay in calling for the resignation all the more odd. It apparently hasn't occured to Kurtz that it could be precisely because the facts haven't changed that Obama called for Blago's resignation. In other words, it is possible that Obama waited a day to see if exculpatory facts emerged before calling for a resignation.

Given Kurtz's own history, he's lucky the rest of the word doesn't share his appetite for snap judgements about whether people deserve to keep their jobs.