I’ve been a fan of Celebrity Apprentice (CA) since it came on the air. Even though I am rarely home to see it on Sunday night, you can be assured that I will catch it over the Internet the next day. What makes this season’s episodes of CA even more fascinating is the appearance by former Gov. Rod Blagojevich.
Now I’ve never been a big fan of Blago. He was always a sleazy character in my book. But because I really didn’t know him, CA gave me the perfect opportunity to see him in a different light. Unfortunately, my hopes quickly fell short as Blago’s first words on the show were that he is “an innocent man wrongly accused.” Now Blago has all the rights that the constitution gives him to profess his innocence. But would he be a real “team player” or was he using the show to promote his legal troubles.
The latter appears to be his motivation. In the very first episode of CA, Blago is supposed to be working as a waiter and allows food to sit and go cold while he busily professed his innocence to customers. The second and third episodes of CA also showed Blago in a poor light. Again too much emphasis on his legal woes and not enough attention paid to the tasks he needed to be completing.
In the third episode, Blago is given a laptop and he is so technically challenged that he doesn’t even know how to turn it on. Last Sunday was when he doomed himself. He was given a Blackberry and was incapable of sending a text message. Funny and yet … sad. While holding the position of governor of this great state, he made decisions which affected all of our lives. Yet he lived such a privileged lifestyle that he didn’t ever have to practice what he preached. He had others to do it for him as he would often say.
As I pondered Blago’s incompetence with text messaging, it made me think about our current governor, Pat Quinn. It was fun to have Quinn as the second in command. His quirky nature was easy to dismiss. It is not fun to have Pat Quinn as governor. All Quinn has talked about since being appointed governor is increasing taxes. It is very easy to solve the fiscal problems for this state by asking the taxpayers to pay more. It takes a real leader to come in and look at the state’s budget and slash waste and fraud first before asking taxpayers to pay more into an insatiable system.
The fiasco about who will be Quinn’s running mate has forever tarnished him. Hynes, Duckworth, Garrett before finally settling on Sheila Simon. I too, am one of the angry African American voters who didn’t like the way Art Turner was summarily overlooked in the process. My anger runs so deep that Quinn has forever been renamed by me to be Quinn-Ain’t-Our-Friend.
I went back and looked up that Harold Washington commercial that played in the waning days before the primary. Here’s what the late mayor said of QAOF, “I was nuts to do it. I must have been blind or staggering. I would never appoint Pat Quinn to do anything. Pat Quinn is a totally and completely undisciplined individual who thinks that government is nothing but a large easel by which he can do his PR work. He almost created a shambles in that department. … He went in there like a bull in a closet. Wouldn’t do what he was told, which was to put the systems in there which I had discussed thoroughly with him. No, he thought that department was a PR plantation and he didn’t do his work. And he was dismissed and should’ve been dismissed. My only regret is that we, uh, hired him and kept him too long. That was perhaps my greatest mistake in government in terms of appointments.”
The same can be said of QAOF being appointed governor. A big mistake. But not one we have to live with. Recently Bill “Dock” Walls has announced that he is reviving his campaign for governor and will run as an independent. Thank goodness the mistake that is currently in the governor’s seat can be removed this November by electing Walls to the job. You can hear and learn more about Walls this Sunday night on WRLL 1450 AM from 10 p.m. until midnight.
CONTACT: www.arlenejones.blogspot.com
