The shock waves are still coming out of Illinois, following the FBI arrest of the governor of Illinois on charges of graft, extortion and other corruption charges.
Governor Blagojevich has been accused of trying to sell the U.S. Senate seat of President-elect Obama following Obama's resignation from the seat to prepare his new Administration. And he apparently interfered in the Tribune Company's sale of Wriggley Field to extort the board to replace the editors at their newspaper (the Chicago Tribune) who were calling for his impeachment. Tribune filed for bankruptcy on Monday; the sale of the baseball field could have netted the company $100 million.
The accusations contained in the FBI summary are staggering.
I'm starting to get the feeling that the level of corruption that the governor is involved with runs much deeper than has been revealed so far; and because Obama was a legislator in Illinois for ten years, his involvement with other state legislators and associates who were involved with this corrupt governor will be under close scrutiny.
I'm very uncomfortable with another Administration coming in with the kind of potential baggage that dogged the Clintons for years. It feels all too familiar and is the kind of thing that, as we have already seen, will lead to never-ending investigations, regardless of whether the President-elect did anything wrong or not.
This is one of the reasons that I liked Bush in the beginning: when he first came into the White House; there were no skeletons rattling around in a closet; Clinton came in with lots of them.
Whose example will Obama follow, I wonder?
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