What Are They Thinking?
I woke up the morning of December 9th feeling fairly well rested. It’s been busy lately with lots of family issues and lots of work to think about. Despite all this I was preternaturally chipper. I had a nice light breakfast, which improved my mood, got out the door in plenty of time to beat highway traffic. My spirits quite high.
When I turned on the radio to learn that Rod Blagojevich had been arrested, I felt even better.
Missouri Republicans have not been embarrassed by one of our own in a while. Our politicians are unpopular with the local progressive press, but you have to go back to William Webster to find anyone busted for genuine graft. I’ll also note that our Democrat politicians are either really clean, or really slick. Whatever it is, it does not appear to be the kind of brazen harlotry we see up in Chicago. For that I find a new found sense of pride.
Blago was a uniquely repulsive kind of pol before he was caught on tape playing games with the funding of a children’s hospital. My antennae snap to full cover your wallet mode when a guy gets up and starts preening about he’s going to clean up, run the most ethical this or look out for “the little guy”. He had the whole populist progressive script memorized and at the ready to denounce greed and exult solidarity with this downtrodden group or that. He struck me as the political equivalent of a televangelist. Maybe it was the hair.
I am fascinated with the pathology of the corrupt leftist. Being conservative, I expect a member of the press to double check anything a conservative Republican says and assume that some rich greedy person put them up to it, in any case. Our motives are always either in service to some “big business” or out of fealty to our weird sky-god. Maybe the corrupt leftist knows he is going to be held to a different standard.
Perhaps the oilier champions of “the little guy” somehow feel that since they are such advocates that they do not have to be quite so sharp in the ethical department, or even the appearance of impropriety department. William Jefferson, Charlie Rangle are all hip-deep in scandals that were you and I involved would end in our incarceration. Barney Frank, Chris Dodd and Chuck Schumer continue to blithely lead their congressional committees despite taking millions in support from the very entities they were supposed to oversee.
Frankly, this level of shamelessness is alien to me, and I think it is to most Americans. Shameless Republicans are hounded by the press and their colleagues, judged not by their hearts but by their actions (which is fitting and proper). Shameless Democrats have to breach a much higher threshold before receiving such a full-court press from the press. Blago and all like him are seldom seen through a sufficiently cynical lens so long as they parrot from the progressive lexicon.
