"Is there no one left in public life in Illinois who knows the difference between right and wrong and will follow the former?" It sure wasn't Hastert!

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COMMENTS:
*  Look at the kind of people who run for these offices. They are essentially professional fundraisers. They have to be, in order to pay for the ads and mail.  The answer is to shrink the size of campaigns. Make them so small, they have to be done door to door, person to person. We need people elected on character and issues, not fundraising.  How? Subdivide the districts into 100 tiny ones. Those 100 then send a member of a Working Committee to Springfield. Give the 99 back home a vote for accountability.  Check it out at Neighborhood Legislature
*  While I'm at it, Greg, you are part of the problem. You - the media - give plenty of attention to the fundraising. You disdain people, such as myself, who spend their own money to get elected because they feel an obligation as a citizen and someone who has done well to give back. You think people like me or Rauner, for that matter, are in it for the power trip. I can't speak for Rauner but I got involved because I wanted to change the kind of leadership we have. Like you, I too am disgusted with the type of leadership we get - from Obama to Blago. Empty suits who mouth rhetoric but haven't really had to produce anything of value in their life.  When the media starts to encourage those who have been successful, instead of the used car salesmen we get, then we may get some leadership we can be proud of.  By the way, Hastert is indicted for the wrong crime. His bigger crime was being complicit with Bush in running up the national debt and the size of government, from NCLB to Medicare part D to Sarbanes Oxley to McCain Feingold, etc etc. It should also be noted that Hastert did nothing after his speakership but cash in, a la the Clintons - sitting on boards, lobbying and giving speeches for big $$. Disgusting is too nice a word to use.
*  Corruption is the human condition. It takes character not to succumb.
*  I am sure there are plenty of people who know "right from wrong" though it may be a good question why the best people are not the ones choosing to run for office. Seems the leadership of both parties in the state and the entire system of recruiting people into politics in IL needs to be overhauled (e.g., who in party leadership assesses the character of someone running for office for the first time?).
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And now it's Hastert. When will it ever end?
By Greg Hinz, May 29, 2015

At core, you'd be hard-pressed to come up with two more engaging stories of the American dream successfully at work than those of Denny Hastert and Aaron Schock.

Hastert was the revered high school wrestling coach, an affable, ordinary guy from the sticks who somehow ended up in Congress and, when his party called, in the speaker's chair, two heartbeats away from the presidency. Schock was the young man on the make, a motivated mover who was on his local school board in his teens, the House Ways and Means Committee in his 20s, and who knows how high in his 30s or 40s.

Now, in a puff of that lovely Illinois cultural air—as fresh and inviting as the back lot at a pig farm—both are gone, Schock forced from office in disgrace and under any number of investigations, and Hastert facing the end of his life in prison after allegedly agreeing to pay $3.5 million in apparent hush money to an acquaintance of his back from his high school days. The Los Angeles Times is now reporting that Hastert was paying to conceal sexual misconduct.

Does it never end? Is there no one left in public life in Illinois who knows the difference between right and wrong and will follow the former?

To say I'm disgusted is a gross understatement. Who gets indicted next, the Roman Catholic archbishop of Chicago?

I've been covering this stuff for 40 years, back when then-Ald. Paul Wigoda, 49th, got pinched in a zoning bribery scandal, and then-state Sen. Edward Scholl was found guilty of bribery. The former was a Democrat, the latter was a Republican, and that's apt, because when it comes to corruption chicanery, both major parties are involved up to their armpits.

Big Democrats: Dan Rostenkowski and Ed Rosewell, Jesse Jackson Jr. and Rod Blagojevich. And equally big Republicans: first George Ryan and now Hastert and Schock. All fully aware of what happened to the lives of those who preceded them when they broke the rules, but all (saving Hastert, who has yet to go to trial) blissfully ignorant.

MONEY OVER SERVICE

In prior cases of public misconduct, I've offered some theories as to why things never seem to change in this city and state.

One is that too many of our public officials are in it not to serve the public but to get things for themselves, be it money, power or sexual favors.

Even now, though they're careful to stay on this side of the law, both Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan and Senate President John Cullerton profit from tax appeals legal practices representing people who need something from government. Even now, reform Gov. Bruce Rauner pursues policies that will cut tax bills and fatten profits for him and his rich friends while simultaneously asking other groups to take it in the ear. In his case, such policies surely are legal but risk deepening the us-versus-them quality that is at the core of Illinois' political culture.

Another part of the problem is that we the people keep putting up with it. Only a few days ago, the ex-chief of staff to Ald. Howard Brookins was sentenced to 15 months in jail for taking a bribe to get his boss to sign off on liquor licenses. The alderman denies he's done anything wrong, and he faces no charges. But he hired the chief of staff and, guess what? He was just elected to a new four-year term.

To give a couple other examples, Dan Rostenkowski became a local hero after he got out of the pen, actually hired by a TV station to be a commentator. And Rod Blagojevich was easily re-elected as governor, even though the signs of what he'd done were almost everywhere.

But the rest of the answer of why this keeps occurring, time after time after time, is a mystery to me. It happens in the city and the suburbs, metropolitan Chicago and downstate. Among young officials and old veterans, Democrats and Republicans. Maybe it's just that it keeps happening because it did happen, sheer evil momentum.

I don't know.

I was supposed to go to the closing luncheon of the Chicago Forum on Global Cities today. I wanted to hear the discussion about whether cities ought to have their own foreign policy.

I obviously missed it, caught up in the Hastert scandal. But I say Chicago should have its own foreign policy. That is to pay some island nation in, say, the far, far south Pacific, to agree to take our crooked pols after we banish them.

It had better be a big island. And it ought to have lots of expansion capacity for decades to come.
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