Anyone watching the TV news on Monday was sure to have seen Gov. Rod Blagojevich from morning until night. On ABC alone, he started his media blitz with Good Morning America, ended it with Nightline and even went on The View in between.
Not only was his face and hair all over the place, even his name was properly spoken since he has now become an infamous household name.
Now I don’t admit to being a fan of the governor. I never voted for him and never liked him as a politician. And I am not a constitutional expert, so I can’t say whether or not the impeachment hearings currently going on in the Illinois General Assembly are fair or not.
But what I do know is this. In an earlier appearance on TV regarding the allegations against him, Blagojevich said, “I will fight, I will fight, I will fight.”
Apparently his fight includes being out of the state on the day of his impeachment and preferring instead to go on a number of interview shows.
Barbara Walters got so exasperated by the governor’s continuous line of, “They won’t let me bring witnesses” and not answering the questions, that she remarked to him “Why are you wasting our time?”
In every interview, in addition to the “not allowing witnesses” accusations, the governor said that without him at the helm, our evil state legislators would increase our taxes. To hear him make those statements suggesting he was our superhero in a suit was astonishing. All he was doing was with respect to the U.S. Senate opening, he said, was “leveraging the seat” in order to serve the people of Illinois.
He even admitted to having considered Oprah Winfrey as a replacement for Barack Obama. To toot my own horn, most readers of my blog know that I reported that over a month ago.
Anyway, Governor Rod also lauded himself for going around the legislators to get free rides for seniors and free medical screenings. But as anyone knows, there is nothing “free” in this society. Somebody is paying for those “free” rides, either in the form of higher fares or additional taxes. The same with the medical screening.
On all of the interviews, the one question Blagojevich successfully tap danced around was the one about his “selling the vacated senate seat” of Barack Obama. No matter how he tried to paint that the conversations were taken out of context, he couldn’t exactly paint a clear picture of what the context was.
Most amusing to me was his explanation of his foul language captured on tape. He grew up in a tough neighborhood. You didn’t say those kinds of words around your mother. But you did in the schoolyard, playing basketball or hanging out with the guys.
What a message to send. And just where did Blagojevich grow up? Cicero and Armitage, attending Foreman High School where he graduated in 1975. I can see all the schoolchildren now responding to anything said to them in the schoolyard with “effing” this or “effing” that, because our governor, who is trying to save his butt, has come up with the lamest of excuses.
How low can our governor go? Well, he somehow managed to bring the names of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Nelson Mandela and Mahatma Gandhi into this debacle.
As he sat in a cell in the federal detention center, he thought of them because he is an “innocent man, wrongly accused.”
Now I don’t know about his guilt with regard to selling the senate seat, but as to his personality, he is a snake oil salesman – properly exposed.
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