You gotta hand it to Rod Blagojevich. Here we all were thinking Sarah Palin was surely the dumbest state governor in the U.S., when all of a sudden… well, you know.
The Illinois governor’s arrest has been a slow softball down the middle for the news media. No, scratch that – it’s been more like TWO softballs down the middle. The first was the revelation of his corruption itself; the second and more shocking was how much he sucked at being corrupt. The guy just has no gift for graft.
Yet even with this fat pitch lobbed at them, a few conservative commentators have merely fouled it off. My overextended baseball analogy is specifically directed at the two posts at National Review Online’s blogging-head collection, The Corner:
This Illinois Senate-seat news is outrageous and shameful. That said, it warms my heart. Finally, a political scandal you can talk to your children about. No room at the Mayflower. No Myspace page. No Gay-American announcement. Just good and evil and money and power corrupting.
Hmm… yeah. Because the real threat to the public about political scandals is that they’re almost always not suitable for children. Golly gee, maybe Blagojevich’s lawyers can get him a reduced sentence because he kept it clean.
I agree with Kathryn that there’s something almost wholesome or nostalgic about Blogo’s criminal misdeeds. He wasn’t found opening an umbrella in parts of his anatomy for money on the internet… He didn’t check interns for a hernia without permission or spy for the Norks. He’s just a crook. A good, old-fashioned, crook. I know I’m supposed to be outraged, and in a certain sense I am… But in another sense, this is just plain enjoyable. It’s like when you watch “Cops” and the idiot burglar tries to hide beside a tree in the dark, even though he’s wearing light-up sneakers. It’s like when Dan Rather dares the world to prove he’s a clueless ass-clown. It’s just good stuff… This is the sort of criminality we want the Feds to find, particularly in Chicago. Everyone gets what they deserve — at least so far — and all of the guilty parties are all the more deserving of punishment because they don’t quite understand what the big deal is. I love it.
Oh for God’s sake, man, get a towel. …OK, here’s the thing: it’s important to recognize the difference between “a little schadenfreude” and “an avalanche of gloating.” One is a little too easy, but we’re all indulging in it a little and no one would begrudge you taking your turn. The latter, as we can see here, is such a disproportionate bludgeoning of an easy target that you end up looking like the bigger douchebag. Nice going.
Plus, you’ve left yourself wide open for your own helping of mockery. I have a few questions for you:
- Are you saying you actually watch Cops? Eech… Whatever. I guess The Deadliest Catch felt a little too highbrow for you. Hey, you know what’s almost as pathetic as getting arrested on Cops?… Being a person who actually sets his TiVo for that shit.
- Dan Rather. *sigh* That’s seriously the best you can come up with? A governor goes down in flames for trying to sell a Senate seat appointment, and you’re still beating that same old horse from 4 years ago?
- “Particularly in Chicago,” huh? Heartwarming. I’m sure there are plenty of people who’d like to know what the hell you’ve got against Chicago, but I’ll let them ask. I live in L.A., and I thought we were the big liberal Gomorrah you’d want to have raided by the Feds.
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Poor Jonah Goldberg. Too ugly for TV, too leaden for radio. (And that mother!)
Indeed, the crabapple doesn’t fall far from the crabtree.