Tuesday, December 9, 2008

Illinois Democrat Governor Charged With Corruption -- What Else Is New? Also -- Some Humor In It All

Illinois Democrat Governor Rod Blagojevich was arrested today on federal corruption charges. Coverge at the still-open-for-business Chicago Tribune here. Michele Malkin also has lots of coverage and opinion here, and she includes a link about this latest installment of the Name That Party Game. Local Illinois opinion at Illinois Review here, from Anne Leary at Backyard Conservative here, and from Dennis Byrne at The Barbershop here.

Jonah Goldberg, author of Liberal Fascism, sees the humor in this at The Corner blog at National Review online in a post titled The Blithesome Banality of Blago's Blunders (here):

... [T]here's something almost wholesome or nostalgic about Blogo's criminal misdeeds…. He's just a crook. A good, old-fashioned, crook. I know I'm supposed to be outraged, and in a certain sense I am. If he's guilty of all that's alleged, I hope they throw him in the stoney lonesome until the Chicago Cubs win the World Series or 2025, whichever comes second. But in another sense, this is just plain enjoyable. It's like when you watch "Cops" and the idiot burglar tries to hide beside a tree in the dark, even though he's wearing light-up sneakers. It's like when Dan Rather dares the world to prove he's a clueless ass-clown. It's just good stuff. There's no tragedy here. No wasted potential. No undeserving victims. No profound and complicated symbolic issues …. This is the sort of criminality we want the Feds to find, particularly in Chicago. Everyone gets what they deserve — at least so far — and all of the guilty parties are all the more deserving of punishment because they don't quite understand what the big deal is. I love it. More please.
And in the latest installment of another political parlor game, What Was He Thinking?, Blagojevich does seem to have been pretty arrogant in his conduct knowing full well that the Feds were on his trail.
Image from the Chicago Tribune

John Michael Greco