Pwn3d!

Yes, dear; I packed you plenty of cigs.

And don’t forget, if you ever want to shower in peace, when you get inside remember shiv the first person who looks at you funny.

Well, well, well.

So former-governor George Ryan and his Rasto Rizzo – Larry Warner – just went down on all counts.

First the story, and then a quick explanation of why you should care.

Ryan found guilty on all counts

By Matt O’Connor and Rudolph Bush
Tribune staff reporters

April 17, 2006, 12:29 PM CDT

A federal jury convicted former Gov. George Ryan today on all charges that as secretary of state he steered state business to cronies in return for vacations, gifts and other benefits for himself and his family.

Lobbyist Lawrence Warner, a close Ryan friend, was also found guilty on all charges against him in the historic trial.

On their eleventh day of deliberations, the six-woman, six-man jury found Ryan, 72, guilty on 18 counts of racketeering, mail fraud, false statements and tax violations. Warner, 67, was convicted on 12 counts of racketeering, mail fraud, extortion, money laundering and evading cash-reporting requirements.

…

The trial played out over 5½ months as prosecutors portrayed Ryan as a shameless, greedy politician at the center of a series of dirty deals that enriched Warner and other friends who kicked back gifts to Ryan and his family.

But the defense called the evidence woefully inadequate, arguing not a single witness saw Ryan take money to influence his decisions and assailing key government witnesses for slanting their testimony to win leniency.

Neither Ryan nor Warner testified.

The charges against Ryan largely stemmed from his scandal-scarred tenure as secretary of state. But he was accused as governor of lying to FBI agents, arranging a lucrative make-work lobbying deal for a friend, lobbyist Arthur "Ron" Swanson, and leaking the selection of a state prison site to Swanson, who improperly profited on the tip.

Ryan also diverted state resources and staffers to half a dozen political campaigns, including his 1998 election as governor.

Prosecutors alleged that in 1995 Ryan helped arrange to be paid secretly by former U.S. Sen. Phil Gramm's ill-fated presidential campaign, funneled the money through a company operated by a trusted operative and passed on nearly $10,000 to four daughters.

…
Among the wide-ranging charges against Ryan, prosecutors alleged as secretary of state he gutted the office's investigative arm in 1995 to stop its agents from looking into shady fundraising practices of his campaign apparatus.

One investigator testified that Dean Bauer, Ryan's handpicked inspector general, refused to let him investigate a 1994 crash outside Milwaukee in which six children of Duane and Janice Willis were killed.

The fiery accident occurred when a heavy piece of metal undercarriage fell from a truck and punctured the gas tank of the Willis van. The truck driver, Ricardo Guzman, had paid a bribe for his commercial driver's license in Illinois and could not understand warnings from other truckers, in English, that the piece was dangling dangerously from his rig.
…

Ok, in the Land of Lincoln this is Very Big News, but if you don’t live here, why should you care about Dirty George?

Because it shows beyond any doubt that once a committed prosecutor gets the bit in his or her teeth, they can go after anyone, anywhere, without let or hindrance.

I’ll let you know a couple of things.

First, subtracting out all the corruption and scandal, he's one of a species of politician I rather like.

Never loved him, but he was an Old School Pol that you could work with. He liked Chicago, so there was none of that City Mouse/Country Mouse weirdness we get when the state gov goes through one of its periodic penile compensation problems that comes from Springfield being 40 times smaller than us. He was a light-up-a-stogie, pour-a-round-of-JB, and cut-some-deals kind of guy, who was never going to be a hero of mine, but then again I don’t come to politics with a lot of false expectations any more than I would sort through the racks at Target expecting to find Saville Row.

Always dee-lighted when I do, but I don't bet the rent money on it.

And his moratorium on the Death Penalty was one for the ages. A genuinely principled stand that required him to change his own mind and shed old skin. I never supposed I would see a discernable, moral arc suddenly appear in the makeup of a triceratops like Ryan, so good on him.

Second, Illinois is a pretty good microcosm of what a Blue America might actually look like. Urban, business-friendly Democrats balanced out by a patchwork of suburban/exurban/rural Dems, a lot of Moderate Republicans, a lot of Christopathic Republicans, Independents (whatever that means anymore), and a small, recurrent outbreak of Larouchies, Nazis and suchlike that boil to the surface every now and then like genital warts.

We had 25 years of GOP rule in the state capitol under a series of Administrations and legislatures that – for the most part -- might best be termed as green-eyeshade-Centrist, that trotted along, side-by-side, with Chicago: its Great City that has been Democratic since the days of Alphonse Capone.

A state that is 73.5% White with its own big, fat swath of Right Wing crazies, but that stayed electorally abstemious enough to make a skinny Black Democrat with a funny name a Senator…and dispatch a raving loony Black Republican to political oblivion even though he came with impeccable wingnut credentials.

And yet, in this sober Midwestern state of burghers and shopkeepers, farmers and bankers, the Republican Chief Executive was essentially run out of office, forced to stand in the dock and has now been found guilty of 18 crimes. (The radio said 22. Either way, it’s a whole lot.)

This is fascinating because this was not an impeachment.

Unlike L'Affaire Clinton, this was not a lesson in what a reckless, hate-drunk bunch of yahoos can do when they get their grubby paws on unchecked power and decide to go on a vengeance-potshotting bender.

Instead, this was a lesson in what happens when a vigorous prosecutor gets his teeth into a case of a breach of the public trust and steps up to the job like a bricklayer. Workmanlike, one row carefully on top of another, laid straight and true.

What were the elements that put Ryan in the box?

Corruption. Specifically, campaign-finance-based corruption.

Putting the pursuit of partisan power ahead of the public good, and people dying as a result.

Lying to cover up the original crimes.

And as a last resort, using political influence to try to kill the original investigation.

Does this symptomology sound at all familiar?

And what makes it all possible -- what put the voom in the engine -- isn’t magic or miracles. Just human nature.

In politics, forget all the “Omerta” and blood-oath crap, except in the most whacked-out, Gordon Liddy/Joseph Goebbels cases. Politcos are mostly just like normal people, except they have a freakishly more highly developed nose for which way the prevailing wind is blowing and whether it’s laden with the perfumes of exotic spices and distant lands...or loser stink with a side of feces .

They are lightening, Rain Man calculators when it comes to figuring out the cost/benefit of knowing -- moment-by-moment -- when to jump and which way.

This from “The Maltese Falcon” explains political “loyalty” infinitely better than I could:

Kasper Gutman: I couldn't be fonder of you if you were my own son. But, well, if you lose a son, its possible to get another. There's only one Maltese Falcon.

A-yup.

So I don’t look for fireworks over D.C., or impeachment hearings, or anything like them anytime soon, even once the Dems take back control of one or more houses of Congress.

The last inch of the window closed on the GOP in 2004. That was the 11th hour of their soul: a last chance to stand up and demonstrate that any of them are even remotely interested in justice and the public good and holding elected officials to account for lies, corruption, treason, the deaths of Americans and the ruin of nations.

They’re not.

They’re a sack of complicit assholes who would rather napalm the Constitution than live by it. Who scream themselves deaf that Liberals Are Angry while relying for their electoral manhood wholly and deliberately on racists and homophobes and grinning professional haters like Rush and Falwell and Robertson. So when faced both with prospect of losing (and the acres of subpoenas that will follow) and the reality that all of their First Order Lies are collapsing into rubble around them, do not expect them to come over all reasonable.

Expect trench warfare...as the stalling and obfuscating and rear-guard cover-up actions by Quislings like Pat Roberts to get hotter and angrier.

Expect the Swiftboating to be cranked up to a hitherto unimagined level.

Expect terror-alerts every seven minutes.

And in the end, none of it will save them, because spackled all over D.C. like Blue Dress bukake after the biggest gang bang in history -- in the newspapers, in email, on hard-drives, on video, in transcripts -- are the same indelible stains of fraud and failure, corruption, betrayal and death that brought George Ryan low.

It isn’t nearly as sexy as Fawn Hall’s panties packed full of documents, or as mesmerizing as watching Sam Ervin’s eyebrows semaphore out his contempt and incredulity as one layer of Nixonian lies fell away to reveal other, deeper, spine-rotting levels of treachery, but it works.

So as they scramble for the lifeboats while simultaneously declaring that anyone who says the ship is taking on water is a traitor, expect Republican rhetoric to get very wild and very ugly indeed over the next six months.

Expect the bullshit to get more extravagant and the bearings that work Scotty McClellan’s jaw up and down over his lie-hole to burn out and need replacing at least once a week.

But we all know what the immortal Sam Spade says about that, right?

“The cheaper the crook, the gaudier the patter.”