Wham Bam Thank You Pat!

That was the sound of me falling under a flu bug, and I did have a flu shot as usual. What was unusual was to feel the symptoms again as I've managed to avoid flu since beginning the shots in my first year of teaching. School is a hot bed of germs, and you need to have Purell containers at every door and water fountain.

So home in bed, and through a feverish haze, I saw the the Patrick Fitzgerald press conference in real time and it deserves all the theatrical referencing it has been getting in blogs and cable. Beyond theatre of the absurd, more like Marat/Sade meets Mamet. Patrick Fitzgerald -- wow I really dug him in the Plame/Libby Affair, but didn't like the way it ended at all! So cool to see him back in action. He had a really interesting gang of agents there standing behind him: a guy with no hair who didn't say anything and didn't need to, the tough looking blond woman, and the fellow who did the actual arrest.

In the following clip, we can observe Fitzgerald's exceptional performance skills. The delivery is simply perfect -- no glazed teleprompter stare, rather notes in hand, but mostly spoken straight out to the entire audience. He is looking at the room as he's reading the lines with all the
"bleeps." Wouldn't you have loved to see the reactions on the faces of everyone in that room? He also includes the viewing audience. There's something endearing in the way he continually explains to us that the bleeps are not actual bleeps. I imagine many regular daytime television viewers would not react well to the actual words used by the governor of Chicago.

Odd thing about that governor -- I can pronounce his name when I hear it spoken, but I can't when I'm looking at the way it is spelled. Blagojevich. Blagojevich. A difficult name to launch out of one's mouth but Fitzgerald has it down cold. Just a couple tongue trips which is remarkable reading from a document in front of the media mob.

As for Blago, he's got to plead insanity and go rest his delusional mind. It's like his brain blew a bunch of fuses and he did everything opposite of the way it is supposed to happen. Finds out his phone is tapped and then starts spewing pay to play schemes. Great theatre, though.