Consider two paragraphs from a column I wrote in 2002:
“After winning his congressional seat in 1996, Blagojevich needed an issue hot enough to burn though the obscurity that envelops freshmen of the minority party. As fast as you could say ‘napalm,’ Blagojevich staged a press conference on an overpass above a South Side rail yard, where he warned that the U.S. Navy was about to ship surplus quantities of the jellied gasoline through Chicago to an Indiana disposal company.
“You would have thought the stuff was unshielded plutonium, not a compound so stable it has to be simultaneously sprayed and ignited to do its ghastly thing. Cooler heads pointed out that far more dangerous substances traverse Chicago daily by rail and semitrailer. But never mind. The Navy canceled the shipments, and Blago looked like a hero.”
The guy went on to pull phony stunt after phony stunt. There was his “no-new-taxes” pledge as the state budget plunged deeper into the red; his nonsense declarations about selling off state office buildings and the state lottery; his loudly declared, but largely unfunded, new health-insurance programs and day-care services for kids; and, of course, his free CTA rides for seniors. Whoopee!
Napalm is safer to transport than gasoline–it’s jellied gasoline so if it does spill, it is far more contained. This was the first big public event to suggest Rod wasn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer. That said, many thought if he surrounded himself with reasonably intelligent folks, he’d be fine. We’ve seen how that works out nationally and locally though give it to Bush, he’s not as dumb as Blagojevich.
I actually got asked to participate in this silliness by some activist, not Blago’s people directly.
She got my number as a member of Veterans for Peace.
I was polite, but declined to participate in opposing the napalm moving through Chicago.
I figured destroying the stuff was a good thing. And destroying by incineration made as much sense as any other option. And flammable/toxic stuff is shipped by rail all the time. Nobody notices.
How about all the times Blagojevich brought up the issue of .50 caliber rifles? Which he swore up and down were in use by Al-Qaida, so we needed to ban them in the US to keep them from getting to Al-Qaida in Pakistan.
As far as I know, a .50 caliber rifle has been used in the commission of a crime exactly once in the United States. I don’t know of any evidence other than Blagojevich’s claims that Al-Qaida was using them.