Editor’s note: Michael Ackley’s columns may include satire and parody based on current events, and thus mix fact with fiction. He assumes informed readers will be able to tell which is which.
They tell me you are wicked and I believe them … – from Carl Sandburg’s “Chicago”
Three-term congressman, two-term governor, and soon, it appears, to be long-term convict, Rod R. Blagojevich is under indictment, and we must ask: Is this fair?
After all, it seems the governor of Illinois accomplished what few politicians have managed. He lived up to his gubernatorial campaign slogan: “Getting things done for people.”
The problem prosecutors have with this is Blagojevich seems to have gotten things done for people for a price. Usually, the price was a handsome contribution to his campaign fund.
But the governor wasn’t always after filthy lucre. All he asked of the Tribune Company – in exchange for a $100 million benefit to the publishing empire – were a few dismissals at the Chicago Tribune. Canning a couple of editorial writers – which the Tribune did not do – seems reasonable compensation for facilitating the sale of the Chicago Cubs and Wrigley Field.
What really exercised the U.S. attorney wasn’t so much that Blagojevich and his cronies strong-armed building contractors, a couple of hospital enterprises and various developers. It was that he was extorting (such an indelicate term) the president-elect of the United States of America. The governor is accused of trying to force Barack Obama to compensate him in some way for appointing the “right” Obama successor to the U.S. Senate.
… coarse and strong and cunning. Flinging magnetic curses …
Blagojevich is a Chicago/Cook County boy, but he’s a man of breadth and culture. He has a bachelor’s degree from Northwestern University and earned his law degree at Pepperdine, above sunny Malibu. However, the FBI’s wire taps and bugs showed him to be a real man of the people, competent if not entirely fluent in the art of profanity. His billingsgate leaned heavily and not very creatively on the F-bomb, which he applied liberally. (Obama, for example, is referred to, with tender affection, as that “motherf—er.”)
And they tell me you are crooked and I answer: Yes, it is true …
However, he proved to be a generous man, demonstrating an innate fairness. An FBI affidavit indicates he would help colleagues on the take, as long as he received a reasonable share. It indicates he bartered government contracts and government jobs, often with the help of influence brokers like Antoin “Tony” Rezko, the criminal whose assistance to the up-and-coming Barack Obama was never given due credit by the mainstream media. Rezko’s name shows up time and again in the federal prosecutor’s criminal complaint against Blagojevich. (It’s a real tribute to Obama’s moral agility that he was able to associate with a crook like Rezko and to help engineer Blagojevich’s election without getting his hands dirty. What a guy!)
Fierce as a dog with tongue lapping for action, cunning as a savage pitted against the wilderness …
But, seriously: Chicago/Cook County and Illinois as a whole remain in the thrall of corrupt machine politicians who can trace their lineage back to the 19th and early 20th centuries, when Lincoln Steffens was raking the muck for the articles that would become the seminal “Shame of the Cities.”
Steffens discovered, to his surprise and distress, was that as his revelations led to the election of reform politicians, his standing among the people declined. This was explained by one of his sources. The gentleman kicked Steffens, hard. Then he asked why the journalist’s head yelled when his shins were hurt. In Chicago, as in all corrupt, machine-run cities, it’s all about connections. If you hurt Blagojevich, you hurt a lot of little people who don’t mind the thievery of the powerful as long as they receive their small share – a blanket, a cheap apartment, a Thanksgiving turkey, a low-paying government job.
Steffens felt that the great sin of the strong and powerful, like the indicted governor, was that they had the capacity to do great good but sold out for dross. The state’s affidavit quotes many shockingly corrupt Blagojevich statements, but the most poignant quote shows that even in his depravity the governor recognized the potential he squandered.
He suggested forming a (high-paying) charitable organization “so I can advocate health care and other issues I care about and help them …”
It’s too late for the matters Blagojevich’s better side cared about. He seems destined to join Illinois’ role of prison-residing ex-governors: the bribe-taking, tax-dodging Otto Kerner; fraud, perjurer and thief Dan Walker; and Blagojevich’s immediate predecessor, contract manipulator George Ryan.
This kind of drama is bound to be repeated in the “Land of Lincoln” as long as the people can be bought for the crumbs of the political bosses’ ill-gotten banquet.
Bragging and laughing that under his wrist is the pulse
and under his ribs the heart of the people,
Laughing!
Laugh off the end of your career, governor. Laugh off the shame brought to your family. Laugh off the ongoing shame of America’s “Second City.”
Democrats’ seething hatred for America
Wayne Allyn Root