Here’s more from Scott Turner of Rocky Sullivan’s in Red Hook. He runs the weekly pub quiz  over at that cozy bar and writes these great emails that I share with you.

What the hell’s in the
water that powerful people drink?  Either it makes them arrogant and
corrupt, or it leads them down the path of Haircuts of the Damned.

With Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich, it’s both…with a vengeance.

I and many of you live in Brooklyn, where both political malfeasance (see Yards, Atlantic, boondoggle) and bizarre coiffage are pretty common.

Chicago, with its infamous ward system, the place where
"vote early, vote often," if it didn’t originate there, it sure took
root.  Chicago, the Second City.  Chicago, in Carl Sandberg’s words:

Hog Butcher for the World,
Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,
Player with Railroads and the Nation’s Freight Handler;
Stormy, husky, brawling,
City of the Big Shoulders

It’s all that.  Not to conflate ol’ Big Shoulders with the Blaggy the
Governor’s operation in Springfield.  Still, stormy husky brawling
apples don’t fall that far from the tree.

As
you may have heard by now — it’s today’s big breaking domestic news
story — Gov. Blagojevich has been arrested and charged with an endless
cornucopia of corruption allegations

One of Blagojevich’s transgressions was trying to sell Barack Obama’s Senate seat.  "Unless I get something real good for [Senate Candidate 1], s–t,
I’ll just send myself, you know what I’m saying?" 

 

Later,
he fine tuned his message.  The senate seat, he said, "is a f—ng
valuable thing; you just don’t give it away for nothing."

[Those timid hyphenations cleverly camoflaging out cuss words come from the transcripts of U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald’s press conference today.]

Patrick f—ing Fitzgerald, f—ing bada-s stomping Blagojevich’s weak s—t press conference

Pretty sure the right-wing blogosphere’s collective head is exploding, trying to link Blagojevich
with our next prez.  Well, it’s fun for ’em, like the sugar-rush
excitement of kids on a school field-trip, walking up to the museum’s
front door.

There’s plenty more in the Rod Blagojevich Bag of Goodies.  So, so much more.  Stuff about getting Chicago Tribune newspaper board members fired, something about the Chicago Cubs, a children’s hospital.  Across the board wackiness.

Here in Brooklyn, there’s a valuable lesson in all of this: write laws that make corruption legal.  Mayor Bloomberg
strongarms with money, power, greed, arrogance and pure all-out bully
tactics — seemingly all covered by laws written for people like him by
people like him.  His beneficiaries include the Yankees, Mets, Bruce Ratner,
big developers, and local politicos willing to trade votes for pork, no
matter how few of their constituents get to actually feast on the pork.

What, him worry?

There’s
a second, sadder construct: people don’t get angry, so enjoy your
ill-gotten gains.  We’ve let Bloomberg gut this city’s soul,
infrastructure, schools, budgets, social programs, and every
development site in the five boroughs.  Some of us have risen up, but
not enough.

Blooomberg’s not as smart as everyone thinks — he’s certainly not
the big-business miracle-worker his carefully-cultivated image claims.
Tell me…what kind of society do we run when Blagojevic gets hauled in
for selling senate seats, but Bloomberg walks free after selling our
neighborhoods, infrastructure, our present and our childrens’ future
for far more than Blagojevic ever hoped to clear?