Conrad Black: Politico Prisoner

Nothing, it turns out, makes a chilly fall morning as downright toasty as a steaming heap of shamelessness. Thank you, Conrad Black.

Or shall we call him Lord Black of Crossharbour (much in the same way we used to call my cousin, Lenny, the King of Cross Bay Boulevard)?

Anyway, back to Black. Tina Brown's DailyBeast.com, not content with the traffic bump it got from Christopher Buckley's Obama endorsement, and hoping to be provocative, decided to expand its freelance universe to federal inmates. Black is serving 6 1/2 years in a lockup in Florida for fraud and obstruction of justice.

In these corners, it provoked mostly ridicule and sincere amazement that Black retains enough credibility for someone on the Web to publish his drivel. (Paying in commissary credits must be complicated, though. Exactly how much canned mackerel per word? A candy bar per page?)

His column's argument is that John McCain screwed the pooch (my words, not his, mostly because I don't know what the word farrago means) in his reaction to the financial crisis.

Is this a guy who should be handing out advice on relating to and leading other people?

This is a man suspected by the board of Hollinger, the publishing company he ran, of filching about $32 million in improper payments along with a few of his deputies; actually convicted by a federal jury of swiping $6.1 million; and quoted as saying he would "not reenact the French Revolutionary renunciation of the rights of the nobility" when criticized for passing to shareholders the bills for, among other things, a vacation to Bora Bora and a lavish birthday party for his wife at La Grenouille restaurant in New York.

In keeping with his character, Black doesn't propose how McCain could actually fix the economy. He suggests how McCain could sell himself to voters by pretending he knows how to fix the economy. Lord Black knows a bit about this, having pretended to his famously voluptuous wife, Barbara Amiel Black, that he was as rich and as smart as Henry Kravis.

Much like his op-eds in the recently bygone New York Sun--which he helped fund--Black's overwrought McCain Manifesto rambles from comparisons to Herbert Hoover to references to a raving King Lear to a potential political comeback worthy of Lazarus.

There is true genius here, though, in the writer's bio at the end: "Conrad Black," it reads, "has been engaged in a dispute with the U.S. Justice Department and the S.E.C. over the governance of his former companies for several years, and civil and appellate litigation continue. Currently, he is incarcerated in a federal facility in Florida."

At last. Understatement.

Dan Colarusso