Rod Blagojevich lashed out at his critics over the weekend, boldly announcing that he's "followed every rule that exists," that Obama will regret meddling in the state's ethics legislation and espousing his theories on how Tony Rezko wound up in the mess he's in now.
"I have a theory on what happened in the Rezko situation was a system that sucked him in and then some lines were crossed and then that person found himself actually violating some of the rules. Those things suggest that you learn from your mistakes and judgments and you fix them and correct them. And the way to do it is to make the system more accountable to the people. And to me that's another example of why it's important for us to keep shaking that system up in Springfield," the governor said over the weekend. When asked if, given that his administration and his family are the subjects of multiple corruption investigations, he has any credibility on the issue, he replied that, "the reality is I've followed every rule that exists and no one has said otherwise."
Blagojevich also contended that Obama, who obviously isn't as politically savvy as our popular governor, is falling for a Republican trap by siding against him in the battle over state ethics legislation. “Let me be clear: I don’t think he should be asked to be involved in any of this. He’s busy running for president,” Blago said. “It’s the Republicans who dragged him into this issue. They’re the ones who called on him to call on Senate President Jones to act on the ethics bill.” Prognosticating, he warned that “sometime in October, in battleground states, you’ll be seeing TV ads that Republicans are putting up and the McCain campaign is putting up that will start accusing Sen. Obama of coming back to Illinois to help his old friends in the Illinois General Assembly." Because nothing says cronyism like twisting arms for... an ethics bill.
The governor left all of us with this bit of wisdom from Sophocles's play Antigone: "he said something like, all men make mistakes, but a good man changes course when he recognizes that mistake, and failing to do it, the only sin is pride. And so you make some judgments you place confidence in people -- I'm not at all alone in this -- and then sometimes people being human make mistakes and you learn from those mistakes and try to see what happened."
