Blago

"I did a lot of things that were mostly right."

- Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich, defending himself during his impeachment trial

Now that's the sound of desperation if I ever heard it. But aside from that, what amazes me is that he is still out there proclaiming his complete innoncence. Other parts of his closing statement include, "You haven’t proved a crime and you can’t because it hasn’t happened. How can you throw a governor out of office with incomplete or insufficient evidence?" He seems so completely certain of his innocence that I almost start to wonder if this has been some big misunderstanding. He is a pretty good liar and an evil genius.

I think he demonstrated his evil genius best after the Democrats vowed to barr entrance to anyone he nominated to the senate. So he chose Roland Burris. Matt Taibbi described him as "a 71-year-old, half-batty egomaniac named Roland Burris, the first black man elected to statewide office in Illinois...an over-the-top eccentric who refers to himself in the third person ("If there hadn't been a Roland Burris, there would not have been a Barack Obama") and who has already built for himself a mausoleum inscribed with the words TRAIL BLAZER." 

One more paragraph to borrow from Taibbi:

Americans were thus treated to the spectacle of two white Democrats physically refusing to open the Senate doors for what would have been the body's only black senator. To make matters worse, the Democratic leadership hung its entire case for barring Burris from office on a technicality: His appointment, they insisted, had not been certified by the Illinois secretary of state. When the Illinois Supreme Court ruled that the Burris appointment was, in fact, legal, [Harry]Reid and [Dick] Durbin were left with a face full of omelet just weeks before Obama's inauguration.

The Democrats of course caved and seated Burris, saying, "oh no, we didn't expect Blago to nominate a respectable candidate." By choosing Burris, it made Blagojevich look like a reasonable guy since he was replacing Obama with another African American, and it made Reid and Durbin look like fools (but that was their own fault) since they seated him anyway, thereby giving credibility to Blagojevich. A stroke of evil genius.