Thick as Thieves

Do you think Governor Blagojevich is an anomaly? He is an extreme, but politicians of both parties are ethically-challenged. Randy "Duke" Cunningham and Ted Stevens are not the face the Republican Party wishes to project, but they are not the only bad apples.Tennessee, my home state, has been notorious from the end of Reconstruction, as a Democrat-controlled den of iniquity with demands of pay for play common in many state-regulated industries. The good government crowd could not claim much success in Tennessee until they brought down Democrat Governor Ray Blanton in a pay for pardons and liquor license scandal in the late 1970s. Neither donkeys nor elephants have a monopoly on graft, and it is feared that honesty is the rarest commodity.