Don’t think that Blawgletter doesn’t remember that weeks ago we pronounced the current occupant of the U.S. Attorney General’s office legally dead — after he rejected our advice for testifying before the Senate. So how can Fredo get into more trouble?
Blawgletter rejoices that you asked the question. It means that you’ve honored us with that most valuable commodity — your kind attention.
The latest news merely supplies the context for our figurative answer. It tells of Fredo’s late night visit, on March 10, 2004, to the hospital sickbed of his predecessor, John Ashcroft, who hovered near literal death. Fredo’s mission? To induce a possibly dying man to abjure his top aide’s refusal to pronounce legal a domestic spying plan that he considered illegal. The aide intervened, and Mr. Ashcroft demurred.
All of which summons a dim memory from an epic poem that Blawgletter could never quite finish — Dante’s Purgatorio, the second part of Divine Comedy. In that poem, people who died without expiating their sins (but who didn’t quite qualify for the Inferno) landed there. Penitence could yet occur. But, boy, it hurt!
Blawgletter chooses, metaphorically, to place Fredo, post-death, in that place, where hope still abides. But let us hope he at last sees that his mortal legal coil has already shuffled off. And that he must now repent, in a dramatic and painful way, to salvage what he can of his post-AG afterlife.
Barry Barnett
