Perjury or not, Burris shows he is at least a liar :: CHICAGO SUN-TIMES :: Mark Brown

I’ll leave it to the proper investigative bodies to decide whether Roland Burris committed perjury last month in testimony before the Illinois House impeachment committee. From a strict legal perspective, maybe he didn’t.

But I’ll tell you straight up, our new U.S. senator proved himself to be a lying little sneak.
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The word preposterous comes to my mind to describe Burris’ explanation — and accompanying performance Sunday — in which he basically says his previous failure to disclose relevant contacts with Rod Blagojevich’s inner circle about the Senate vacancy was simply a matter of everyone else’s failure to ask him the right questions or give him time to answer.

I was at that hearing, and I have reviewed the transcript. Burris had plenty of opportunity to tell the whole truth and, for whatever reason, failed to do so.

The senator now wants us to believe he never knew we might find it relevant that the governor’s brother Rob was putting the arm on him for campaign donations during the same period in which the governor is accused of trying to sell the Senate seat — and while Burris was practically begging everyone he knew for the appointment.

And he doesn’t want us to think his newfound truthfulness has anything to do with the intervening disclosure that some of Rob Blagojevich’s calls were caught on a wiretap.

Impeached former President BJ Clinton made the term “parse” unfortunately possible whenever one discusses what a politician says. Nobody ever applies the standard, “Would a reasonable person think he was a dirty liar?”

It must always be, “did his lie meet the technical legal standard for perjury?”

Burris is, as I pointed out, a lifelong product of the Chicago Grease Machine, just as is Barack Obama and his chief enforcer, Rahm Emanuel. For the grandees of this machine, truth and honesty are always secondary to the primary ethic of the machine, which is simple: Victory at any cost!

Burris got the Senate slot. That’s all he cared about. The truth be damned, and it was.

Why are you surprised?

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