Former Speaker’s “Sideline” Analogy Flawed
Former Speaker of the House Jim Black never ceases to amaze me. I still shake my head in disbelief that voters in his Southern Mecklenburg district re-elected him despite the swirl of investigation and … well… stench emanating from his office.
So, today, the Charlotte Observer has some quotes from the disgraced ex-Speaker’s interview on a Raleigh TV station.
Except one thing jumps off the page… Mr. Black does not seem to FEEL disgraced at all. Quite the contrary, in fact.
Former N.C. House Speaker Jim Black, recently freed from federal custody on corruption charges, told a Raleigh TV station Thursday that he did “not ever, ever do anything for money in my pocket.”
The 76-year-old Democrat served more than three years in federal prison after pleading guilty to accepting at least $25,000 in illegal, mostly cash payments from chiropractors.
Hmmmm… so it appears that the corruption charges – to which he pleaded guilty – weren’t REALLY corruption in Mr. Black’s mind, because he did not get any money in his pocket. OK, so where did he generally put those cash-filled envelopes that were handed to him inside the bathroom at an IHOP off I-85?
But this isn’t the worst of it.
“There are people who need you out of the way, want you out of the way, and there’s no way to be careful enough to not cross the line somewhere,” he said. “If the right people want to take you out of the picture, stepping on the sideline is absolutely prohibited. So, that’s just how it happened.
“If I could go back, I would avoid some of those times when I stepped on the sideline.”
So, some power brokers in the state wanted to force Mr. Black out of office. Fine. I’ll bet there might be some truth to that part. But what really got my blood boiling was the whole “I only stepped on the sideline” analogy.
At the risk of stating the obvious… the sidelines are OUT OF BOUNDS. That means it’s not allowed to step on the sidelines. In real life, we call these things “rules” and “laws.” So, in Mr. Black’s world, breaking the laws are not really corruption and he only pleaded guilty to the corruption charges just to get the investigation over.
Well, I guess that IS one way to end an investigation. But it seems odd that he’d sacrifice more than 3 years of his life just over some silly sideline infraction. Unless, of course, there was more investigating he didn’t want to go through. I mean.. more sideline stepping… of course.
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