The shocking news out of Chicago is a reminder of how corruption pervades our society.
We have had our share of corruption scandals here in New York over recent years. But corruption goes even further back to the Garden of Eden, to ancient Greece and Rome, to Julius Caesar and the senators who murdered him, to New York's legendary, crooked Boss Tweed, who robbed the city blind in the 1860s, spending a fortune on the courthouse that bears his name. The words of Lord Acton ring true again: “Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
If you look up the word corruption in Wikipedia, it lists abuse by types, including: bribery, graft, patronage, nepotism and cronyism, embezzlement and kickbacks. If the charges brought by the federal government in Illinois are true and if they honored people for scoring high on the corruption meter, then Gov. Rod Blagojevich deserves a medal for fitting many of those categories.
“The conduct would make Lincoln roll over in his grave,” U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald said of the governor's behavior.
In a 76-page indictment, the federal prosecutor accused the governor of trying to sell the U.S. Senate seat vacated by President-elect Barack Obama. Wiretaps revealed the governor saying: “I've got this thing and it's [expletive] golden and uh, uh, I'm not just giving it up for f------ nothing. I'm not gonna do it.”
The governor, on the tapes, even cursed Obama for trying to influence the decision over who would replace him. According to the indictment, Blagojevich tried to get jobs in the private sector for himself and his wife. On one tape, the governor said: “I want to make money.”
The governor and his chief of staff were charged with conspiracy to commit mail and wire fraud and solicitation of bribery. The prosecutor said the charges were “a truly new low.”
On Monday, the day before the indictment was revealed, Blagoyevich told reporters: “I don't believe there's any cloud that hangs over me. I think there's nothing but sunshine hanging over me.”
Well, the clouds have rolled in, for the governor, for Chicago and for the people of Illinois.
President-elect Obama has urged Blagojevich to step down.
Lt. Gov. Pat Quinn, a political foe of the governor, summed it up: “Pray for every person and every family in Illinois.”
And, if you're in a praying mood, whether you are in Chicago, Los Angeles, New York or any other American city, you can pray that, if corruption afflicts your community, a prosecutor like Fitzgerald will pursue it, closing in on wrongdoing no matter where it leads.
