Bentley Coyote.jpg

Like Wile E. Coyote, Governor Robert Bentley always has 90 percent of a plan, and it always ends with the anvil on his head.

(Sarah Cole/scole@al.com)

This was no master plan. Gov. Robert Bentley is no genius. Rebekah Mason isn't, either. Don't give them credit. Don't even get mad about it, because none of this is going to work.

Remember, Bentley is the Wile E. Coyote of Alabama politics. With a new contraption from Rebekah's ACME mail order catalog in hand, he may think he's a mastermind with a bulletproof scheme. But he always has 90 percent of a plan and it's the last 10 percent of the plan that always gets him. Therein lies the flaw.

This one is no different.

Last week, the Alabama governor pulled a move that'd make any Alabama roadrunner sweat. With the stroke of a pen, he appointed his biggest political adversary and potential prosecutor, Alabama Attorney General Luther Strange, to the United States Senate.

Farewell, tall and dimwitted.

With one more stroke, he appointed Strange's replacement at the Alabama Attorney General's office, Steve Marshall, who had been a district attorney in Marshall County. While Marshall enters the office with lots of friends and peers singing his praises for being a good guy, his record prosecuting public corruption is tepid. Those cases in his district have been handled by the Attorney General's office, not the DA.

Welcome to the Gump, fresh meat.

In the middle of it all, Bentley gave what might have been his best State of the State address, while his love interest, Rebekah, watched from the capitol balcony with joyful tears in her eyes. Word in Montgomery was that she wrote the thing, so maybe she deserved her moment, too. It was their moment, before and above all the Alabama lawmakers who haven't got the stomach for anything but a free steak. If you added up the all vertebrae among them, they'd have less backbone than a squid. It seemed to be a masterstroke in Machiavellian politics.

At the moment, Bentley Coyote is walking on air, but if you've watched the cartoons, you know that's where the desperate, hungry pest always gets it. The roadrunner isn't the coyote's enemy. Gravity is. Any minute now, the governor will look down to see that nothing is holding him up, anymore.

No sooner had Marshall taken his hand off the Bible, than he told a room full of reporters and prosecutors that he would recuse himself if an investigation of the governor were indeed active.

That's the best news, and if Marshall recuses himself this week, we will have direct and irrefutable evidence on the record that an investigation is underway. (And if the Marshall denies there was an investigation, there just might be witnesses ready to break the grand jury secrecy law to call him a liar.) No one will be able to deny it.

Not the governor, who will have to answer questions about it again.

Not Senator Strange, who would be exposed as a liar and a crook.

Because here is the flaw in Bentley Coyote's scheme: If Bentley isn't indicted or if he doesn't recuse and defer to someone voters can trust, Marshall can kiss goodbye any hope of keeping that new office in two years. The only way Marshall shakes loose the label of being a Bentley patsy is by prosecuting the governor or clearing the way for someone else to do it.

The governor has made it politically untenable not to indict him.

It's possible that Strange could have indicted a lieutenant in the governor's administration -- like ALEA Sec. Stan Stabler, say -- and left things at that. He could have argued that the governor's behavior was tacky, if not abhorrent, but not necessarily illegal.

If Marshall tries any of that -- even if it is true -- no one is going to believe him.

The governor has traded someone who might indict him for someone who has to indict him.

Bentley Coyote pulled his foot out of the bear trap, and now he's stuck his head in it.