I'm having a slight shift of attitude with regard to Blagojevich, Boy Wonder. Though Blago appears sometimes to cultivate the image of an angel with a dirty face, I think he's been swimming in the river of Chicago political scum so long that he's become buoyant.
Today he was ambushed by Geraldo Rivera outside the set of "the View," that slightly daft daytime gossip opinion show featuring Whoopi Goldberg, among others. The reason I mention Whoopi is that she was ambushed, too, just after the Blago interview.
Prosecutor Fitzpatrick better have something good on the man, and by that I mean more than a Cagneyesque patois on audiotape. Eff them...this job is worth something! So I give Rivera and Blago credit for not being two-faced S.O.Bs; they were quite chummy during the interview, with hands on each others backs, but they sang the same song I'm now singing. Blago's a bad boy but is he a criminal? Did he try to sell Obama's Senate seat? Or is he just taking the fall for nearly all of Chicago and its seedy history?
What Rivera got from Blago is that he wants to be able to call witnesses before he gets railroaded through an impeachment trial. An impeachment trial is not a criminal trial, and there are no appeals. So why can't he call witnesses, among whom Rahm Emmanual and Valerie Miller are bound to figure.
Blago rightly demands that he be able to call witnesses. "What kind of country do we live in?" he asked Geraldo. Yet, the rules of impeachment are quite different from a criminal prosecution and, frankly, I don't know what they are in the state of Illinois. I would think that the man still has Constitutional rights; after all, there are some in congress who are trying to extend constitutional protections to Al Qaeda terrorists, so I should think that Blago must be allowed to properly defend himself.
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