One of the things that makes me happy about the Blagojevich uproar is the eloquent testimony it provides for the thesis that people don’t ever stop doing what people do. And because many of them have not ever read a book, they don’t know that this is what they are doing.
The world of Chicago politics is notoriously seamy, and this is the world out of which Obama has emerged in his very weird media-pristine condition. A media which stubbornly refused to ask even the simplest questions about Rezko and Ayers is now going to be forced to ask much more complicated questions about the entire swamp. But they won’t and then that will become an issue, and people just don’t stop doing what people do.
Blago appears to be about as sharp as a bowling ball, and so the next scene in this particular Cagney movie will be the one in which he “sings like a boid.” I knew the lustre was going to come off the Obamessiah thing pretty quick, but I had not anticipated it happening more than a month before the inauguration.
I am not saying that Obama had any connection with this particular eBay treatment of his old Senate seat. But he had lots of connections with lots of other funny business — and Chicago politics is like a clapboard hamlet up in the Appalachians where people have been marrying their sisters and cousins for over a century, and the last thing you want is to have something happen that makes the authorities send some people up there to give everybody a DNA test.