Republican Death Throes

I, for one, am totally comfortable with the Chicago-ization of American politics. When Kennedy became president Boston became the model. For Reagan it was Beverly Hills. Clinton put Arkansas on the map. Now it’s Chicago’s turn, and it’s long overdue.

I was born there under circumstances that would turn the stomach of any well-brought-up person and my life since then has been a total freakin scandal. But since I’m from Chicago I don’t care. As the current governor was heard to say over the wiretap, “Fuck ‘em!”

The ascendancy of Chicago politics to the national level is a dismaying development for my girlfriend, Magpie, who has been trying to gentrify me for years, to make me acceptable to the mid-Atlantic middle class, who are perfectly suited to a life of low-brow plebian somnambulance. Now I am backsliding to the animal I always was. Oh, I have manners, but there aren’t that many people I care to impress.

Don’t tell me that the considerations guiding Governor Blagojevich’s decision to appoint a new senator to replace Barack Obama are any different from what obtains in any of the other 49 states. It’s just that he stated them so poetically:

“Fuck ‘em!”

Who the hell are easterners to hold their nose (remember, the word Chicago is derived from the Indian word for stinkweed), when you consider what goes on around here, with McGreevey blowing guys in public toilets and Spitzer, whose alma mater, Paul Weiss Rifkind Wharton Garrison is famous for being a 50-story outhouse of perversity and deviate behavior.

Compared to those idiots, Blagojevich is a straightforward, normal American – he discussed horse-trading the appointment, which is normal politics.

This indictment against Blagojevich strictly refers to private internal deliberations he held with his political advisors and his friends. In no way did they catch him offering a quid pro quo to any outside party. Conspiracy, they call it. They are never going to find a jury in Chicago to convict him based on what I heard on television. This show trial, if the prosecutors have the nerve to pursue it, will be laughed right out of the courtroom.

As for trying to force Tribune owner Sam Zell to get rid of some of his writers, the Tribune has always been a reactionary, red-baiting piece of garbage wrapping. Who cares what happens to that rag? Zell needs help to keep afloat and he is looking to the state to help him. Why should his stinking rag of a scandal sheet be excluded from the bargaining?

The major question in my drunken mind is: what was the justification for requesting electronic surveillance of the Illinois governor anyway? Is this just a witch hunt by the Republican Justice Department and political elements of the FBI, like what they did to Clinton, to get something that might lead them to Obama? Are Republicans above that kind of behavior?

It sure seems to me that the Republicans are drowning and they are grasping at straws trying to keep afloat. People deserve to know the process set in motion to get a judge to authorize the surveillance warrants against a sitting governor with no past history of criminal behavior.

I don’t ever expect this case to ever go to trial. I believe that the wiretap evidence will be suppressed at the pretrial level.

Nevertheless, if these entrapment tactics are indicative of the Republicans’ desperation strategy to stay afloat, it looks like Whitewater and Monica Lewinski all over again.

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Posted on 12/10/2008 ( Permanent Link )
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