Respect Authority

I did a lot of things that were mostly right. 

And with that, now-former-governor Rod Blagojevich lost his job. What’s more, the Illinois legislature barred him from ever serving in public office again. Concluding months of media coverage on the second-slowest political train wreck of the century (the first being the entire Bush Administration).

But the real wreck wasn’t so much the taped conversations or the melodramatic U.S. attorney press conference, it was his refusal to resign while going on a quoting tour of British writers and appointing crazy blacks to the Senate instead… which sort of worked on me.  

Crackheadish rambling aside, he did have a point: he didn’t actually do anything, or rather he didn’t actually do anything yet — a technicality he maintained right up to the incredibly bitter, 45-minute end. Blagojevich’s final desperate “defense” amounted to begging legislators to put themselves in his shoes and spare him the embarrassment of having to tell his daughters that his gubernatorial career made Sarah Palin look competent… which, again, is bizarrely reasonable.

[nytimes.com]