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    Thank God for Blagojevich! You Can't Make This S**t Up

    Posted Wednesday, December 10, 2008 6:00 PM | By E.J. Graff

    TELL me that the Illinois governor's idiocy isn't entertaining. Melinda, please don't take this personally. How absolutely dumb and jaw-droppingly venal can you be? Openly selling a Senate seat? Shaking down the Chicago Tribune's editorial board: Did he really think the newspaper wouldn't expose him? You couldn't put this in a comic novel: It's too ridiculous for fiction.

    Maybe I'm finding it hilarious because I just spent a week in bed with bronchitis, and I really needed to laugh out loud (albeit wheezing a bit). Maybe it's because I assume that politicians are often doing nasty things behind our backs, and I love to see them get their comeuppance. Or maybe it's because my very first political memory is of coming home eagerly every day from junior high school to watch the Watergate hearings. How much fun was that?! The evil henchmen Haldeman and Ehrlichman! The upright whistleblower John Dean! The irrepressible Martha Mitchell! The haplessly loyal Rosemary Woods! Oh golly, that was so much better than watching game shows or my mother's soap operas. And in Watergate the bad guys actually paid for their wrongdoing—unlike, say, the Reagan administration for its constitutional violations in Iran-Contra, or W.'s administration for eliminating habeas corpus, violating the Geneva Conventions, and lying to take us to war?

    Come to think of it, maybe that's why I'm lapping this one up so happily: It sure looks like Blago will quickly go down, and other evildoers with him. And because it's so nice to have a good old-fashioned influence-peddling scandal to follow for awhile, something purely about self-interest and money—instead of a pointless sex scandal, where we have to debate Whether and Why We Care What He Does With His Zipper. (Boring!) The Blago cast of characters looks like it will be lovely as it unrolls in the weeks to come. The Upright Patrick Fitzgerald! The (so-far) Honorable President-elect Barack Obama, whose push for an ethics bill may have set the ball rolling! The Lady Macbeth, played by Patti Blagojevich! Who else will we meet in the weeks to come?

About E.J. Graff

  • E.J. Graff is associate director and senior researcher at Brandeis University's Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism, where she directs the Gender & Justice Project. She is a resident scholar at the Brandeis Women's Studies Research Center. As a journalist and author, her work has appeared in such venues as The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post, Foreign Policy magazine, The Boston Globe, The Los Angeles Times, Columbia Journalism Review, Good Housekeeping, The Nation, The New Republic, and in more than a dozen anthologies. She collaborated on former Massachusetts Lt. Governor Evelyn Murphy's book Getting Even: Why Women Don't Get Paid Like Men--and What To Do About It (Simon & Schuster, 2005). Her first book, What Is Marriage For? The Strange Social History of Our Most Intimate Institution, has been widely cited in legal journals, reprinted for academic use, entered as courtroom exhibits, and quoted by government policymaking bodies.
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