It's Not Over Until the Fathead Sings

And so endeth the latest but certainly not the last act of the Three Penny Opera of Chicago corruption: Not with a bang but a 47 minute-long whimper.

The Illinois Senate today voted to impeach former Governor Rod Blagojevich by a 59-0 margin, thereby ending, if audiotape testimony is a reliable indicator, the most massive and meanest one man political crime wave in recent memory. Depending on your point of view, Blagojevich, who'd been arrested early last month and charged with corruption, had turned his impeachment proceedings into everything from a three penny opera to a minstrel show to theater of the absurd.

During his impeachment, Blago likened himself to a cowboy about to be lynched by a mob and his impeachment to the Holocaust. He's the first Governor to be impeached in the state's history, which is saying a lot considering the neverending corruption that's infested Illinois for farther back than living memory.

And while no one can fault any of the state Senators for voting unanimously to impeach Blagojevich, one has to wonder why the equally obvious corruption of his predecessor, George Ryan, didn't make him the first Governor in the state to be impeached.

Still, in an era when Democrats have a golden opportunity on both a state and federal level to show how much better they can run things than those at the kiddie table, Blagojevich came along at exactly the wrong moment after having tried to sell the new president's Senate seat and reminding people that, yeah, the Democrats are just as corrupt as the Republicans. They just don't think quite as big or are as good at it as the GOP.

Some myths are comfortable and Blagojevich raped us of that without making the slightest attempt to be a class act about it, opting instead to be a bigger drama queen than any Republican who also had his porcine hoof caught in a cookie jar.