2.05.2010

To my friends, the Democrats of Illinois

That is, those of you who voted in the primary. Ahem...

What the hell is wrong with you? Did you learn nothing from the Rod Blagojevich fiasco?

Honestly, I'm too baffled and horrified to come up with any commentary. I'm just going to provide the link and the lead paragraphs, take an Advil, and lie down:
Well, the incumbent Democratic governor won his primary in Illinois, which more often than not is a good thing for the incumbent's party in a major race. Except...

His new running mate--the candidate for lieutenant governor--has admitted he was on anabolic steroids in 2005, and he's accused of holding a knife to a woman's throat in that year (he denies that this is true). And the woman had pled guilty to a prostitution charge. And his ex-wife had previously alleged the candidate had choked her.

And the candidate says he won't drop out of the race.

Scott Lee Cohen, the pawnbroker and candidate for lieutenant governor who is at the center of all this controversy, won his place on the Democratic ticket independent of any help from either of the Democratic gubernatorial candidates, incumbent Gov. Pat Quinn and challenger Dan Hynes--both of whom say they didn't know about any of this until they read it in the papers.

But after winning his primary on Tuesday, as Quinn won the nomination for governor, Cohen and Quinn are joined on the ticket: when Illinois residents cast their ballots, they will vote for governor and lieutenant governor as a package--just as everyone in America does for president and vice president. They cannot vote for Quinn without voting for Cohen: the two are linked. There is only one box to check.

Update: Whew. Never mind.

6 comments:

  1. Come on, Doc. There was a big governor race and a big senate race. Those took all the attention. No one pays attention to Lt. Gov. I'm a political junkie and I fell asleep 1000 times thinking about that primary. It wasn't exactly front-page news. All I knew was that he was a sucessful businessman who fromed a group last year to pressure Blago to resign.

    Illinois Dems are pretty silly, though, since we nominated a 33-yr-old with ties to Rezko to run for Senate, basically giving it to the Republicans.

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  2. *sigh*

    I'm sure you're right, Brian. It's just incredibly depressing that somehow this specimen ended up on the ticket, thus creating the substantial risk that it will tank.

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  3. I wonder if it is just the fact that it seems harder and harder to entice well qualified people inot government. For example, we have a Tresuary Sec. who can't do his taxes without cheating, an Attorney General who cites SCOTUS cases which have been overturned, a TSA nominee who misled Congress about his past abuses of privacy, and Senators who insist on bribes in order to do their jobs. I'm really not picking on the Ds here -- they are the party in power, and so present the bigger target -- but rather the whole political culture of the last two decades. Was it always thus? Or is the influx of the mediocre and the mendacious a relatively recent phenomenon?

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  4. c'mon gj, again with the hyperbole. If you really think Tim Geithner sat down to do his taxes you are crazy, he has a professional preparer who didn't do his job well enough. The TSA nominee dropped out (as to his abuse, you seem to know exceedingly little about Law enforcement, no, certainly no Police has ever done a background check on anyone without explicit authorization...yeesh) and I am sure you can cite every Supreme Court case from memory and never, ever make a mistake. You expect perfection and then nitpick minor foibles or mistakes in a few prominent Democrats (interesting there are zero R's in your diatribe who are far, far more guilty). As to your historical revisionism, Politics and politicians have always been thus, ie. human. Do you really think the Southern Democrats of segregation were a noble lot? (well, don't answer, you probably do) So can it with the "I am gj, a paragon of perfection" implications. You know, you would have been on far stronger ground on just knocking Ill. Democrats. This guy Cohen is a nasty piece of work who I would never vote for, hence handing the election to the Republicans by default.

    charo

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  5. Tim "Tax Cheat" Geithner explained in his confirmation hearing he did his own taxes with Turbo Tax. You can read about it in this thing called Teh Intertubes by using Goggles. Srsly, dude.

    TSA nominee Southers lied to Congress; I might have given him a pass for illegally accessing federal records on his ex-wife's boyfriend to protect his kids if he had been upfront about it. However, people who lie to Congress ought not to be appointed to head Federal Agencies. Especially agencies which pry as deeply into personal affairs as the TSA.

    I'm not the Attorney General, and if I were, I'm damn sure that I wouldn't cite the Supremes unless I were certain about the case. AG Holder is a fool, and I'll bet you'll see bus tire tracks on him within the year.

    Senators for Bribes includes Sessions as a charter member, and I've said as much in bleakonomy comments, so your claim I've ignored Rs is untrue.

    As to your ad hominim about Dixiecrats, you must be scraping the bottom of the barrel for lies about me to try that. I'm not a segregationist by any standard, and I'm more than happy to state for the record that what the Dixiecrats did was wrong.

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  6. Whoopsie, s/Sessions/Shelby/g

    English, I mistakenly typed Sessions when I meant to type Shelby. I can't keep all the crooks in Congress straight without buying the program.

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