Gov. Rod Blagojevich of Illinois Impeached. 'Crazy Like a Fox?'

If he has done what is charged then he should be run not only out of Office but out of town! But, somehow, I think this story has some legs.

CHESAPEAKE, VA. (Catholic Online) - One of the most colorful Governors in U.S. history, at least since Huey Long, Gov. Rod Blagojevich of Illinois, was just removed from office by a unanimous vote, 59 - 0 in the Illinois Senate. The vote was followed by another vote to prevent the Governor from ever holding Public Office again. Can they do that? On January 29, 2009, the colorful Governor who has held the fickle attention of the American public for the last few weeks, goes home to his wife and family without a job, a car, or any idea of the source of his next paycheck.

All of this was prompted by a recent FBI investigation led by Patrick Fitzgerald, a federal prosecutor who himself has built a public persona, to publicly bring allegations and then charges (itself a strange sequence) against the former Governor.Fitzgerald accused him of many things, all of which can be summarized as corruption in office.

He alleged that Gov. Rod Blagojevich of Illinois tried to sell the vacated Senate seat of our new President Barack Obama. The results of this very public allegation have been extraordinary. Almost daily there has been a media circus on every branch of the new media. This unique character, the colorful Democratic Governor of Illinois, has landed numerous appearances on talk shows. He has turned the entire event into a global show.

The federal prosecutor who charged him so publicly (and there is some question as to the timing of it all) also brought down a former Illinois Governor named George Ryan. He is still in prison. This Prosecutor began his work as a U.S. attorney in the Northern District of Illinois in 2002. Fitzgerald, like the former Governor who has now been impeached, has seemed to revel in building a public persona. It all leads one to question whether the administration of justice in the U.S.A. has succumbed to the ever growing power of the cult of media personality. I say that as a former prosecutor.

Fitzgerald is the son of an Irish-American doorman in New York. He studied at the prestigious Harvard Law School. He was the New York prosecutor who convicted the blind Egyptian Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman for the evil attack on the World Trade Center in 1993. He also indicted public enemy number 1 in the U.S.A., Osama bin Laden, years before the hijackers under his megalomaniacal control flew planes into the twin towers on September 11, 2001 and killed so many innocent people in the name of Islam.

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Governor Blagojevich will be replaced by Lt. Gov. Patrick Quinn, another Democrat. However, this was not a partisan act, this clear and strong ejection from office. Perhaps Republican Sen. Dale Righter of Mattoon expressed the sentiment of most of the Illinois members when he called the former Governor "a devious, cynical, crass and corrupt politician." No other Illinois Governor in history has ever been impeached.

This colorful former Governor maintains that the entire affair and all of the charges against him are without merit. More than that, he alleges he is the one who has been wronged. In an impassioned final statement this Governor who refused to participate in the Senate procedure defended his work in Office and painted the move to impeach him as opportunistic and without merit. He insisted that he had done nothing wrong. He questioned the constitutionality of the entire procedure and raised some real questions under all considerations of due process.

Under the constitutionally questionable rules of the Illinois Senate, he could not confront nor question his accusers. He was not allowed to issue subpoenas in order to bring witnesses which he manitained would have supported his claims. He went further, he insisted that these were witnesses who would absolutely vindicate him.

His closing presentation was oddly persuasive and quite dramatic. He spoke for 47 minutes, smiled and winked at reporters upon leaving the chambers, and then showed the confident demeanor which he has displayed throughout this long drawn out ordeal. His comments were delivered in a comfortable yet strangely compelling manner. He said "You haven't proved a crime, and you can't because it didn't happen....It's painful and it's lonely, but I want you to know I never, ever intended to commit a criminal act."

Somehow, at least to this correspondent and long time lawyer, I do not believe we have seen the last of Governor Rod Blagojevich of Illinois. Of course, the "talking heads" on the major networks are abuzz, speculating that he has perhaps lost his mind. Sorry, but this old lawyer and former prosecutor thinks he may indeed be crazy, but, as they say, "crazy like a fox".

Please, do not get me wrong. If he has done what is charged then he should be run not only out of Office but out of town! His policies on the essential issues of our age are often completely at odds with my own deeply held and regularly expressed convictions. But, somehow, I think this story has some legs.

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