because Rod Blagojevitch is going down, and he’s going down hard; and unlike Tony Rezko, who kept his mouth shut after his conviction when the government tried to roll him, I don’t think Blagojevitch has the necessary selflessness or nobility of character to take whole hit himself. Indeed, as Rosslyn Smith notes,
Blagojevich may have more reasons that the obvious reduction of sentence to offer additional political scalps for Patrick Fitzgerald’s trophy wall. Hell hath no fury like a sociopath who sees himself on the losing end of a power struggle.
If he thinks Barack Obama can be one of those scalps, I have little doubt Blagojevich will wave it in Fitzgerald’s face, for whatever he can get out of it, and just for the sheer pleasure of the thing; in fact, even if he doesn’t have anything on the president-elect, I suspect Blagojevich may try to bring him down anyway. I hope he doesn’t, but this is Illinois politics, and particularly Chicago politics . . . you just never know for sure. Let’s hope Senator Obama did indeed come through the Chicago machine clean, and that his former colleague doesn’t have anything to use against him; if not, we’re all in for a really bad time.