Rod and Eliot: Two Twisted Peaheads In A Pod

Posted by LK on 12/11/08 • Categorized as Foreign Policy, Personal, Personal Responsibility, Politics, Psychology

editors note: the brief piece that follows has been slightly altered since it was originally posted In March under the title Mentally Ill, following Eliot Spitzer’s tawdry fall from grace. The ease with which it was modified points out an unsettling similarity between the pathologies that ran both Spitzer and Blagojevich’s thought processes. With LK making a few minor changes and simply substituting Blogo for Spitzer, what follows seems like it could have been written in its entirety today.

Additionally, this past Monday’s column would seem downright prescient if corruption wasn’t so damn predictable.

The audacity of the discrepancy between Rod Blagojevich’s public persona and his private indiscretions is breathtaking, so much so that it goes well past the lines of power crazed denial into an area that requires a copy of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders wielded by an ultra-talented shrink, in order to figure out what’s going on in this man’s head.

Blogo’s dramatic cries of innocence , which I’d guess he and his advisers created in a shocked stupor, couldn’t pass a skunk’s smell test.

The political Governor is in dire need of a mechanical governor. His engine needs a major ethical tune-up, and his psyche needs to spend some time in the garage with a master mental mechanic who tinkers with it mercilessly.

I wish it was as simple as the reaction I overheard from a 13 year old watching a news report of the unfolding events, who nonchalantly declared, “what a dope”.

But I think it’s part of the deeper and darker pathology of the times.