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Bailout Blago

The governor was too honest for Washington.

The stoning of Rod Blagojevich recalls Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery,” a sinister short story about the inhabitants of an otherwise placid village where, periodically, someone’s name is chosen out of a hat for a public stoning. Like much of Jackson’s idiosyncratic fiction, a dark river of fear runs beneath the formal narrative—in this case fear of randomness, of sudden death at the hands of fate. It was, perhaps, Blagojevich’s fate to go down in history as a symbol of political corruption, Chicago’s Boss Tweed and the most infamous of mobster-politicians. Yet one can’t help but think it could have happened to anyone— to any member of the political class, that is.

This scandal is noteworthy because of the honesty and purity of its protagonist, the Illinois governor who has become a leper in the political universe because he didn’t deign to dress up his avarice and power-lust in the language of “public service” and altruism. With his fishwife of a first lady swearing in the background, the governor laid it all on the table, demanding cash for political favors, trying to sell Barack Obama’s Senate seat to the highest bidder, and seeking to have members of the Chicago Tribune’s editorial board fired as the price for state aid to the beleaguered Tribune Company. He was, in short, doing what all politicians do: dispensing favors to his supporters and punishing his enemies by withholding the same. “Why,” asked H.L. Mencken, “should democracy rise against bribery? It is itself a form of wholesale bribery.”

While the sale of Obama’s Senate seat has garnered the lion’s share of attention, the aspect of this case that gave rise to the most unladylike language from Illinois’s first lady—shocking our pious pundits and media bloodhounds—was the attempted firing of those troublesome Tribune editorial writers who had been crusading to get the governor impeached. In pitching a deal to the business side of the Tribune Company, Blagojevich rightly pointed out to the chief financial officer that, in granting state aid to bail them out, he would be doing precisely what the newspaper’s editorial writers had cited as grounds for his impeachment: going around the state legislature and directly handing out cash.


The source of this largesse was to be the Illinois Finance Authority, whose website describes it as “a self-financed state authority principally engaged in issuing taxable and tax-exempt bonds, making loans, and investing capital for businesses, non-profit corporations, agriculture and local government units statewide.” With “about $3 billion in project financing” to hand out each year, it has approved 780 projects to the tune of $11 billion to “stimulate the economy” —and, no doubt, to stimulate the bank accounts of the governor’s friends. This is, in short, a local version of what President Obama is proposing as his first act: a $2 trillion “stimulus package.”


Everybody knows that this world-historic chunk of moolah is going to be handed out to the president’s friends and that politics—not public interest—is going to be the rule of thumb in deciding on whom to lavish the loot. Paul Krugman worries that so much money will not find enough projects to fund, but he needn’t worry: the Blagojeviches of this world will find endless uses for it.


This is why the Obama-ites are desperate to put as much distance as possible between themselves and Blagojevich. Their entire political program is about doling out rewards to interest groups that supported them during the campaign: union power, money power, and corporate media power that did so much to make Obama-mania politically chic. Their economic “stimuli” will re-energize the sagging political fortunes of Democratic machine politicians from coast to coast. The Illinois Finance Authority will no doubt scarf up more than its fair share to fund the extortionate activities of present and future Chicago mobster-politicians and their clones across America. Imagine clouds of flies over a gigantic pile of offal, and you’ve visualized the scene once the economy is properly “stimulated.”


Not surprisingly, the Obama operative who most resembles a character out of “The Sopranos”—Rahm Emanuel—reportedly had 21 conversations with the Blagojevich gang, whose language he speaks fluently. This, after all, is a guy who once had a two-and-a-half-foot rotting fish delivered to an adversary, and famously, at a late night gathering with other Clintonistas the day after Bill was first elected, grabbed a steak knife, shouted out the name of someone on their enemies list, and slammed the blade into a table with full force, screaming, “Dead!”


Who knows what Rahm the Enforcer and Boss Blagojevich were chatting about while the FBI listened. You can bet it didn’t have much to do with the public interest.


Another potential victim of Blago-gate is the sainted Jesse Jackson Jr., who met with the governor hours before the Don Corleone of Illinois politics was hauled off to the hoosegaw by Fitz and the feds. A few months before, the network of East Indian businessmen who fund Jackson got together and decided to raise a million bucks for Boss Blagojevich, an act of charity that had nothing whatsoever to do with influencing him to appoint their man to Obama’s seat.


“People know me,” Jackson avers. “They know who I am. I’m confident that no one on my behalf made a single offer to anybody for anything.” Well, you don’t really know someone until you’ve listened in on his private conversations, which the feds may well have been doing when Jesse Jr. met with the Boss.


With Patrick Fitzgerald listening in on the other end, it looks like Jesse Jr., Rahm, and any number of Illinois Democratic Party muckamucks have met their nemesis. They don’t call him “Bulldog” Fitzgerald for nothing—a nickname Scooter Libby came to realize was well-earned and one the holier-than-thou Obama-ites will have good reason to remember.


During the Scooter scandal, the left wing of the blogosphere endlessly dissected each development, eagerly anticipating “Fitzmas” back in the winter of ’05. Now that the tables are turned, however, it doesn’t matter how many interesting angles and side-narratives this affair develops: the folks over at DailyKos, Firedoglake, and the Huffington Post won’t be mapping the highways and byways of corruption as they were last Fitzmas.


This year, a new crowd will be celebrating the season, with the Bulldog playing Santa and showering them with gifts. So join in the holiday cheer because


It’s beginning to look a lot like Fitzmas

Everywhere you go!

Can’t you just hear those wiretaps,

Oh don’t keep it under wraps

We could use a laugh or two these days, you know!


It’s beginning to look a lot like Fitzmas,

A bug in every phone!

But the prettiest sight to see

Is the indictment that could be
Tacked to the White House door.

__________________________________________

Justin Raimondo is editorial director of Antiwar.com. 

The American Conservative welcomes letters to the editor.

Send letters to: letters@amconmag.com

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