Risky Business
by Gary Phillips
Risk is a heck of a thing. Here I was enjoying the Super Bowl last Sunday along with 106 million others or thereabouts. As the two teams went back into the locker room for halftime, the Colts up 10-6, me and my buddy, the effervescent Bob Ward, a heck of a writer I might add, figured okay, the Saints have managed to stay in the game so far. This because of the strong leg of Saints’ kicker Garrett Hartley, who’d kicked field goals of 46 and 44 yards respectively. There was also the gutsy but futile call by coach Sean Payton where instead of kicking a field goal when they were a yard out from the goal line, they went for the touchdown and were stopped cold by the Colts’ defense. Yeah, we figured come the second half, our fear was Colts android QB Peyton Manning would simply pick apart the Saints’ secondary with his laser guided passes and methodically rack up points.
Only for the first time in Super Bowl history, after a halftime show where the energetic but somewhat off-key Who performed, the Saints did a risky onside kick to the Colts to start the third quarter. More importantly, they recovered the ball and then marched for 59 yards down the field, culminating in a touchdown by running back Pierre Thomas. This was by far not the end of the game, but proved to be a psychological turning point for a franchise where once upon a time its fans wore paper bags on their heads, so ashamed they were of their team. But as it turned out, the Saints had been practicing to do the onside kick at the start of the third quarter the previous week.
Doug Benc/Getty Images
Taking a risk sometimes pays off, and, well, sometimes you bomb.
While the Saints and Colts prepared for their contest, Governor Mark “Appalachian Trail” Sanford attended the National Prayer Breakfast last week. Supposedly a devout man, I wonder did he pray copies of his soon to be ex-wife’s book, Staying True by Jenny Sanford, miraculously disappear from bookstore shelves. His prayers went unanswered. I love the way Jan Hoffman in the New York Times described the book as an elegant evisceration of a memoir.
Of course the First Lady of South Carolina might have known something was up as, according to a question posed on NPR’s weekend game show, Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me, Mark Sanford had the word faithfully struck from their wedding vows twenty years ago. Jenny Sanford was also on NPR this past Monday morning, talking about why she wrote the book and life with cheap ass Mark. How once he gave her a birthday card with half a bike drawn on the inside and at Christmas, gave her another card with the other half of the bike drawn on the inside, When he gave her the bike, it was a used one. Damn.
If you’re going to fool around, you better be attentive and lavish with your spouse. But as one who writes such characters in my crime and mystery fiction, let me tell you love and lust makes you do goofy things. Risky things. Was the governor so missing his boo, his Argentinean bombshell last June, he just had to get down there to see her and couldn’t be bothered with devising a better cover story than hiking the Appalachian Trail—during Naked Hiking Day? Plus bugging out over a weekend that included Father’s Day when your image is the staunch family values elected?
“Gov. Sanford is taking some time away from the office this week to recharge after the stimulus battle and the legislative session, and to work on a couple of projects that have fallen by the wayside.” That was from an early statement released by the guv’s communications director when Sanford went off the rez.
Hilarious and pathetic in hindsight. Possibly GOPer Mark Sanford should have borrowed from the playbook of Dem John Edwards, for the jackass boys know how to do it up.
In a piece on Slate.com by Christopher Beam, referring to Andrew Young’s tell-all, The Politician, Young dishes on how he became the beard for Edwards, having to publicly lie that he was the baby’s daddy of Rielle Hunter’s (Edwards’ campaign videographer) child. A falsehood nobody in the media or public believed. But you gotta hand it to Edwards, he has ’em as big as grapefruits. The cat went on national TV and boldly challenged he’d participate in a paternity test. Bring it on, he essentially dared. The more the evidence mounted against him, the more Edwards seemed to believe, or at least projected, he was untouchable.
In Young’s book he relates that Edwards, like a gangster who makes sure to use prepaid cell phones, burners as they’re called, got himself a celly just to communicate with Hunter he nicknamed the Batphone. Young also set up three-ways, conference calls that is, that wouldn’t leave a trail since Elizabeth Edwards, the wife, would check his phone records. Edwards would also make sure to to use cash when he could and had money laundered as well.
Operating as if a horsey set Tony Soprano taking care of his gomar, via philanthropist Bunny Mellon, Edwards got her to dole out money to her interior decorator, who in turn would act as a pass-through and give this money to Hunter for living expenses. It appears that Hunter was not the only one to receive Edwards’ attention, as he would sometimes go out jogging at 2 am. But homeboy eventually got busted by Elizabeth, who answered the Batphone one night ringing in a bag of his, and heard Hunter on the other end.
I wonder if Sanford or Edwards ever saw the 1970 Italian political crime drama, Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion? I guess Republicans don’t go to art house movie theaters, but I could see John and Elizabeth on a date going to such a venue. The film, with a score by the great Ennio Morricone, is about a crypto-fascist police captain who murders his mistress, and makes sure the evidence points toward himself for his investigators to discover. Yeah, I did it, so what? What the fuck can you do to me?
You can almost hear a soundtrack by Morricone as the next pol or public figure unzips his pants, and lets loose with some risky business.
Comments
No comments.