JeffVrabel.com

(Gatehouse Media) – The word scandal gets thrown around a lot lately, and like all big, scary-sounding words, it’s most frequently used to describe things that are not actually scandals, or all that interesting, really. The thing with Anna Nicole Smith does not rank a scandal. Nothing Britney Spears does is a scandal. Nothing Patty Smyth does is a scandal, except for her ’80s pop band Scandal, which was actually quite honest: They shot at the walls of heartache with integrity and pride.

So I propose we preserve the word for actual events that qualify – luckily, there are two happening this very week. The first is out there in D.C., where attorney-general-for-at-least-
as-long-as-it-takes-me-to-finish-this-sentence Alberto Gonzales is thisclose to getting run out of town for lying about the firing of eight federal prosecutors because, if I’m reading this correctly, they didn’t like President Bush’s hair or something. The story is a little convoluted, but the short version if this: They asked Gonzales if he had anything to do with it, and he said he didn’t, and then they came up with a mess of memos that were all like, uh, hello? You totally did.

I’m maddeningly disappointed in Gonzales, mostly because even by non-Bush standards, this guy is a really sucky flunky. Memos? The attorney general left memos? You guys didn’t think of that? You could completely invent the rationale for a made-up war, but you can’t Empty Recycle Bin? Rumsfeld would have eaten this sort of thing up for breakfast, and had time left over for about ten “gosh golly”s to boot. Amateurs.

It’s safe to assume such details never eluded Conrad (“Connie”) Black, who I suppose I have to refer to as Lord Black of Crossharbour, or else he’ll release the hounds on me, or stand on a hilltop with a scepter made of lightning or something. Black is on trial downtown for helping to jack about $60 million from shareholders of his newspaper company, or companies. As the story goes, there were about 300 of them, all of which sold newspapers to each other, with all the cash profits going directly into a pool in Black’s estate that was shaped like a dollar sign.

If you haven’t heard about this, don’t sweat it, The Black/Hollinger scandal is a much bigger deal in Canada, much like the band Rush, meals made out of moose parts and the frequent willingness to try to get food to uninsured babies. Media moguls, here in America, are pretty much rightly considered boring, unless they’re somehow involved in Miss USA pageants. There’s actually already been a made-for-TV movie about the Black thing in Canada, and it starred Lara Flynn Boyle. She played an inanimate vertical rod. I’m not sure who played any of the people.

Anyway, this may be the reason why Lord Black is going out of his way to elevate his status from regular defendant to comical, General Zod-esque supervillain, such as issuing the James Patterson-worthy sniff that the trial “will have a surprise ending … a complete vindication of the defendants and the exposure of their persecutors.” This guy ran a newspaper, remember, when he wasn’t slavishly studying the thesaurus.

In the interest of disclosure, I should report that I have an elevated interest in this case because I spent several years as a peon in the Hollinger company, one of the many humans Black would have seen as coat racks, had he ever bothered to come to Chicago. The most descriptive anecdote of his stewardship of the company involved the company escalators, which, it’s said, were turned off to minimize electric bills. This is partially true, but it leaves out one important fact – the escalators didn’t have those guards that catch materials from being caught in the teeth as the stairs went under the mechanism. People were killed there almost every week, especially short people.

It goes on like this, mostly in a totally awesome assortment of useless expenses afforded the super-rich. There’s tales of Black using business cash to fly to Bora Bora, luxuriously remodel a plane, throw his wife a birthday party, have buffalo and bald eagles brought in for shareholders to hunt in the old pressroom. Ha! I’m just kidding, of course! About the buffalo and the bird, everything else is true. See, this is a real live scandal with some star power, and celebrity (Canadian celebrity, anyway), and garish exploitation. We should get the attorney general to look into it. Someone send him a memo.