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RUSH: Now, this just is mind-boggling. "Several Democratic operatives from Illinois say the Illinois state legislature will likely move as quickly as possible to hold impeachment proceedings against Gov. Rod Blagojevich (D), in attempts to prevent the jailed governor from appointing President-elect Barack Obama’s successor in the Senate." Now, you might be wondering how can that happen? Well, it's very simple. Illinois law allows Blagojevich to make the appointment while he is in jail. Legislators in Illinois thought of everything. They left nothing to chance. They know their guys are going to go to jail. Every Illinois governor the last 25 years has been in jail it seems like. Three of them are Republicans, we'll admit. Blagojevich was the first Democrat governor there in I think 25 years.
"While the decision would be a disaster for Democrats politically, no one is ruling out that prospect. Any candidate appointed by the jailed governor would be immediately tainted, and would face immense hurdles winning on their own in 2010. Blagojevich could also appoint a caretaker to the seat, but that also would not bode well for Democrats politically. Having a sitting Democratic senator from Illinois appointed by a jailed governor would hurt the party’s chances of holding the seat in 2010." Who says? Why would that make any difference? There's another state that's pretty comparable to Illinois in this regard, and that's New Jersey. And no matter what the Democrats do there, they keep getting reelected even from jail. So I don't know why they're all worried in Chicago about what this is gonna mean. I can understand them not wanting Blago to make the appointment of Obama's Senate seat while he's in jail, not because of how it would make 'em look, by the way, but because of how it would taint the appointee given all of this. The first question the appointee would be asked, "Well, what did you give, Governor Blagojevich, in exchange for the nomination?" And then there would be a little bit of a media investigation.
By the way, you have to look long and hard in the news today and on television to find that Blago's a Democrat. It's fascinating, but it's very difficult for the national media to find out his party affiliation. By the way, one leading member of the local media in Chicago is calling on the Illinois legislature to impeach Blago. His name is Mike Flannery. He's CBS 2 Eyeball News. He said, "This is disgraceful. I'm going to tell you, there's every reason for the Illinois House of Representatives to convene, and if he doesn't have the decency to resign, then the House ought to impeach him, the state Senate ought to hold a trial quickly, and I hope the governor does not move to make an appointment at this point." Now, I would remind Democrats, you're not handling this the way you usually have in the past. You're really not. I mean this kind of corruption was, well, not the exact kind of corruption that was going on during the Clinton years, but back then, all those things that were said were resume enhancements, or didn't keep him from doing his job. None of this kept him from doing his job. You Democrats, I mean you're not even willing to give poor old Blago here the benefit of the doubt, as the US Constitution does. He's innocent until proven guilty. And look at this kind of backyard old West railroad justice that even the media wants to engage in now, get Blago out of there real quick.
I am stunned that the Democrat Party has the capacity to be this embarrassed, because this is nothing new. Let's go down the list. Half of the Ford family in Tennessee is in jail, right? Carol Mostly Fraud. What did she do? She sold influence to a boyfriend or something, trip in Africa or some such thing. Kwame Kilpatrick in Detroit. Is he still in jail? A Democrat. You've got Jim McGreevey in New Jersey. You got Torricelli. You got the three ex-Chicago governors. They happen to be Republicans. It's all part of the same machine in that state. They couldn't catch Corzine, even a SUV tried to get him, but the SUV failed. SUV did its best when the law wouldn't. Eliot Spitzer. William Jefferson, congressman (Democrat-Louisiana). I mean, why are they so embarrassed over this? Look at Franklin Raines at Fannie Mae, Jim Johnson at Fannie Mae, why are they embarrassed? Dan "Rosty" Rostenkowski. Charles Rangel. The ethics committee in the House -- ha-ha-ha -- investigating Rangel. Rangel says he didn't do anything wrong. Pelosi says we'll have an answer on this very soon, and it will be official, he didn't do anything wrong. Democrats cannot make ethics violations. They can't commit them.
There's no such thing as an ethical violation if you're a Democrat. Only Republicans are capable of that because Republicans publicly state that they have standards. They have morals, they have this or that, and they think people ought to live by them. The Democrats say, to hell with all that, and so they can't be accused of hypocrisy. See, hypocrisy is the real crime, and there's no hypocrisy here, and nobody is surprised. We're just laughing at it. We're in the middle of a sitcom here. And you've got Fitzgerald saying the governor of Illinois -- he actually said this -- the governor of Illinois has taken us to a new low. He said Lincoln's turning over in his grave. And how about Jim McDermott? Remember that old grandfather and grandmother couple that were driving along in their Cadillac on a turnpike in Florida, and just like all the rest of us they had their little radio where they could monitor cell phone calls. So they turned on the radio and listened to people's cell phone calls, just like you can do in your car. And they overheard a phone call between John Boehner and Newt Gingrich, and they said, "Wow, this is American history being made, what do we do with this?"
So they thought, "Let's send it to Jim McDermott," Democrat, state of Washington, Baghdad Jim. They sent it to McDermott, McDermott gave to New York Times, New York Times published the transcript, Boehner sued, and eventually prevailed over McDermott to the tune of $700 some odd thousand dollars. What was the name of that grandfather and grandmother couple? The Martins, yeah, the good old Martins, they were just going to the mall to get some Christmas presents for the grandkids, monitoring the cell phone calls. The cell phone radio is an automatic tape recorder as well, I've got one in my car, don't you, Dawn? Everybody has cell phone recorders, yeah, they just happened to tap into American history there as they're heading to the mall to buy Christmas presents. So what's the big deal? It's not change. Don't tell me it's change. This is not change we can believe in. This is the same old same old that we've always known is going on.
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