Barry & Blago: There's No There There

The ink was barely dry on the Rod Blagojevich indictment yesterday when Barack Obama haters charged out of their holes, torches and pitchforks held high. But by the time the sun had set over Lake Michigan, it was obvious that there was little beyond a few crumbs to connect the president-elect to the corrupt Illinois governor.

This, of course, did not keep them from trying, although their rabid attacks on U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald when he was going after Scooter Libby were unsurprisingly absent.

As it is, Blagojevich speaks harshly of Obama in excerpted wiretaps in the indictment because he isn't from the pay-to-play school so familiar to students of Chicago political history.

The president-elect has kept Blagojevich at arm's length, going so far as to snub the foul-mouthed little shit as a speaker at the Democratic National Convention and asking confidante Valerie Jarrett (identified in the indictment as "Senate Candidate 1") to take herself out of the running for his vacated Senate seat because of the stink emanating from the governor's office.

Yes, Blagojevich's hubris is "staggering," as Fitzgerald puts it, but the scandal begs a larger question:

Blagojevich seems sure to become the fifth Illinois governor in four decades to go to prison on corruption charges. Does that make Illinois the most corrupt state, knocking New Jersey from atop my personal list? Nah. Sarah Palin's Alaska takes the cake, at least for crooked pols per capita.

1963 cartoon by the great Bill Mauldin of the Chicago Sun-Times
on the occasion of the John F. Kennedy assassination