“SIR, YOU DESERVE THIS CAR…”

12/18/08

The vestigial appendage known as the Republican Party in Illinois is currently running an ad urging its listeners to challenge the constitution of our state and urge their lawmakers to call a special election to fill Barack Obama’s U.S. Senate seat, the seat that our esteemed governor unsuccessfully attempted to peddle to a rather considerable group of interested parties.

The ad that the GOP is currently running tells us that the people of Illinois “deserve” better than they have been getting from their politicians (the currently second most prominent of whom is none other than that grand Pooh-Bah of the Illinois Republican Party, George Ryan, but somehow that is not at all implied in the ad), that they “deserve” a special election to fill Mr. Obama’s vacant seat. That seat has been pretty vacant for the last, oh, eighteen months or so, by the way, and that hasn’t seemed to bother anyone, but I digress, and this time not even parenthetically.

One can’t blame the GOP for this nakedly self-serving and partisan ad; it wants a shot at another Senate seat and, in an attempt to get it, is exploiting the perhaps two most salient characteristics of the modern American, especially the modern American of my generation: the seemingly uncontrollable habit of taking everything that occurs as yet another excuse for self-congratulation and the endless effort to achieve some sort of victimhood status. As I have said for years, “E Pluribus Unum” ought to be replaced in by “It’s Not My Fault” as the motto for modern America.

One can argue the merits of a special election to fill empty Senate seats, in Illinois or elsewhere. One could also argue for the sanctity of a constitution, but that is an argument that has fallen on increasingly deaf ears for at least the last fifty years in America. But regardless of the merits of a special Senatorial election, one really has to ask one’s self about the basis of this GOP approach. Do we in Illinois really deserve better? After all, we elected this clown of a governor. And he isn’t the first clown, or felon, that we have elected. Indeed, for generations, we have overlooked blatant corruption and voted for the most nefarious of scoundrels. Many of us have even reveled in our state’s, and especially its biggest city’s, hair shirt reputation as a city that boasts “the best politicians money can buy,” where “an honest politician is one who once bought stays bought,” and where voters are urged to “vote early and vote often.”

So where do we, even those of us who never voted for Blagojevich, get the idea that somehow we deserve better than what we are getting? As an electorate, we are getting exactly what we voted for, and, as paraphrasing one of my heroes, H.L. Mencken, we are getting it good.