Well, at a time when you’re finally able to pronounce his name correctly after hearing it a million times in the news for the past few weeks, Rod Blagojevich is being removed from office by unanimous vote. But don’t worry, even though now ‘Ex-Governor of Illinois,’ he won’t be forgotten any time soon as a very colorful and interesting trial looms with public playing of incriminating tapes of him trying to sell the senate seat vacated by President Obama to the highest bidder. It’ll make for a few weeks of political theater and a lot of late night jokes :-). And then, after his probable prison sentence, we’ll read all about it in a best-selling book, after a little more controversy is created to push the book sales ….. after all, this is America! 🙂
ROD BLAGOJEVICH : ‘I’M NOT A CROOK !’
Okay, so Blagojevich may be a crook, or ‘cuckoo,’ as somebody called him, and he may have crossed the fine line between legality and illegality, but I can’t help but wonder how many politicians today say ‘I’m glad it’s him up there having had his phones tapped and not me!’ By the way, I thought the same during the farce of Bill Clinton’s impeachment. I’m going out on a limb now, but I think it’s safe to say most people, especially the ones who voted to impeach him, said to themselves as well ‘I’m glad it’s him up there getting caught lying about sex, and not me!’ 🙂
‘I’M GLAD IT’S HIM UP THERE AND NOT ME !’
The larger point I want to make, though, is this: Regardless of Blagojevich maybe having been a little too brazen about trying to sell this seat, it is a common practice for most politicians to sell favors. You and I may donate $50 to somebody’s campaign out of love, because we really want that person to win, and naturally don’t expect anything in return. Only a fool can think that the same is true for large donors. There are usually favors attached to any large donation. Why else would we end up in a lot of cases with policies favoring these interest groups which often turn out to be bad for the average person?
PUBLIC FINANCING OF POLITICAL CAMPAIGNS !
So, unless the system is changed completely, we will continue to have ‘Pay-to-Play’ politics as usual and once in a while we’ll have another Blagojevich getting caught because of being too cocky about it. The only way, it seems to me, to avoid that is to end the practice of politicians having to raise enormous sums of money to get elected. And the only way to end it is to have public financing of political campaigns, as it is common in many other countries ….. and maybe then we’ll see
POLICIES THAT ARE ACTUALLY GOOD FOR THE AVERAGE PERSON ! 🙂
