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Agitation One: So in the Sunday Tribune, the big page-one story on corruption in Illinois observes, “We’ve put an impressive collection of cheats and boodlers into public office over the decades, and the public outcry has never led to more than a token crackdown by government. So why should the curious case of Rod Blagojevich now make things different?”
What makes Blagojevich different, the reason he went so fast when he went, is that he — unlike George Ryan, say — was an incompetent governor who paralyzed Springfield and embarrassed millions of people who’d voted for him. He didn’t govern the Chicago way, or the Illinois way, or however you want to call it. He didn’t govern period. A brief can be written for Ryan as governor. The brief for Blagojevich has been written by Bill Powell, a guy who knew him growing up and says, in what might be construed as mitigation, that Blago’s actually a Nixon-worshipping Republican who wound up in the Democratic Party.
