Never underestimate a man with no decency

SHEER GALL | Governor doesn't even try to hide his glee as he thumbs his nose at his detractors

At least I wasn't alone in forgetting rule No. 1 with Rod Blagojevich: Never underestimate the man's sheer gall.

Even as I was warning two weeks ago that Illinois legislators had left open this very possibility by failing to schedule an election to fill President-elect Barack Obama's Senate seat, I bought into conventional wisdom that our governor wouldn't have the temerity to go ahead under these circumstances and try to appoint someone.

What's the saying? Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.

Somebody was just on television asking what Blagojevich gets out of doing this.

I thought that was obvious. He gets the satisfaction of knowing that he's once again thumbed his nose at his detractors. Better than that, he's thumbed us all in the eye, an old boxing trick. He didn't even try to wipe the smirk off his face as he was doing it.

Forget that nonsense about this being his duty. He loved it.

This time, though, there was no secret about the governor's accomplice.

Former Illinois Attorney General Roland Burris wore an ear-to-ear grin to demonstrate how eager he was to assist Blagojevich in his latest outrage, gladly accepting this vote of confidence from a man he had dismissed as "incapacitated" two weeks earlier.

If the overeager Burris wanted to preserve his reputation as an "honorable man" untainted by Illinois politics, he should have done the honorable thing and stayed out of this. But his ego was too big for that.

I used to say all you needed to know about Burris was that he spoke about himself in the third person, named his children Roland II and Rolanda and dreamed aloud of the day when Illinois would be called the Land of Burris.

Now, I'll need to amend that to add that he's the type of person who would gladly accept the Senate nomination from Blagojevich in this situation -- so eager to round out his bio with the type of high-level title he long had coveted.

Burris asked that we have the same faith in him now that voters showed in electing him three times as state comptroller and once as attorney general. That's fine, except what about the lack of faith voters showed in rejecting his previous campaigns for the Senate, governor and mayor?

The voters of Illinois caught on to Burris years ago. He's an average Democratic Machine politician who was Peter-principled beyond his ability.

Now, Blagojevich and Congressman Bobby Rush want to turn his nomination into a racial issue, as if it's an attack on African Americans to thwart this governor who stands accused of holding a not-so-silent auction for the Senate seat. Please.