The governor was too honest for Washington.
By Justin Raimondo
The American Conservative
12 January 2009 Issue
The stoning of Rod Blagojevich recalls Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery,” a sinister short story about the inhabitants of an otherwise placid village where, periodically, someone’s name is chosen out of a hat for a public stoning. Like much of Jackson’s idiosyncratic fiction, a dark river of fear runs beneath the formal narrative—in this case fear of randomness, of sudden death at the hands of fate. It was, perhaps, Blagojevich’s fate to go down in history as a symbol of political corruption, Chicago’s Boss Tweed and the most infamous of mobster-politicians. Yet one can’t help but think it could have happened to anyone— to any member of the political class, that is.