Jonathan Chait Is Correct: “This Indictment Of Rick Perry Is Unbelievably Ridiculous” (With Bonus Detailed Legal Analysis!)

Patterico's Pontifications » Jonathan Chait Is Correct: “This Indictment Of Rick Perry Is Unbelievably Ridiculous” (With Bonus Detailed Legal Analysis!):

"Jonathan Chait — lefty leftist Jonathan Chait, I say! — admits today that the indictment of Rick Perry is absurd.
Don’t believe me?
In a post titled This Indictment Of Rick Perry Is Unbelievably Ridiculous (yes, that is really the title), Chait says:
They say a prosecutor could get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich, and this always seemed like hyperbole, until Friday night a Texas grand jury announced an indictment of governor Rick Perry. 
The “crime” for which Perry faces a sentence of 5 to 99 years in prison is vetoing funding for a state agency. The conventions of reporting — which treat the fact of an indictment as the primary news, and its merit as a secondary analytic question — make it difficult for people reading the news to grasp just how farfetched this indictment is.
The theory behind the indictment is flexible enough that almost any kind of political conflict could be defined as a “misuse” of power or “coercion” of one’s opponents.
To describe the indictment as “frivolous” gives it far more credence than it deserves. 
Perry may not be much smarter than a ham sandwich, but he is exactly as guilty as one."

and this:
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/08/15/what-the-hell-just-happened-in-texas-and-why-was-rick-perry-just-indicted.html