Bitch set me up!

For a long time, I believed in two things: one, that making the decision to be a prominent politician is incredibly dumb, and two, that that is a very good thing. It should be an unpleasant and demeaning process, discouraging those who don't have the stomach for it or are simply too crazy to run a country. Now, obviously, this doesn't work very well at all, because it actually just discourages sane people from participating, leaving plenty of room for all the wack-jobs, snake-oil peddlers, and ego-maniacs of the world to swoop in and build big gold statues of themselves, the precise opposite of what I (once) felt would happen. And so, I have a confession to make: secretly, so secretly that I did not realize it until today, I really like crazy politicians. Good governance? Fuck it. I want a crack addict.

What bought me to this realization? Two people, one of whom I am truly sad to see leave the national stage, and the other of whom I am rooting for wholeheartedly to stick around for years to come. Maybe, just maybe, they will pair up in some kind of cross-over universe to run for super-double-president. I am talking, of course, about Rod Blagojevich and Terry McAuliffe.

I'll admit, I wasn't a fan of either of them at first. McAuliffe, who I'd only heard of from his role in Hillary Clinton's campaign, drove me insane all through the primaries, showing up for Meet The Press in a hawaiian shirt mid-May talking about how Hillary still had the whole thing locked down and Barack Obama was being overconfident, and Blagojevich, who was so astronomically stupid as to get caught on a phone he knew was tapped talking about selling Obama's seat. But you know what? It's lines like these that make me wish they'd stick around forever, giving weekly interviews on Larry King:

As governor, he explains, he would transform the nearly half-a-million tons of chicken poop the state produces every year into an alternative energy source. "Ew," murmurs one elderly man. But, if McAuliffe recognizes any shade of absurdity in all this, he never lets it show. "Fifty thousand tons of chicken waste equals forty megawatts of power, which could power forty thousand homes!"

or

At moments during the day, Mr. Blagojevich reflected on what was ahead, most immediately how best to pay his mortgage come March 1 without his $177,000-a-year salary. He spoke of the guilt he felt toward his family for entering a political life, the “personal Greek tragedy” that he said he saw as his circumstances, and, all the while, his love of his job. His biggest error, he said, was the friends he had picked.

Chicken waste? Personal Greek Tragedy? So, so, so money.

Now, I realize I'm being pretty hypocritical. Sarah Palin is significantly more deranged than McAuliffe or Blagojevich, and yet I still hope that she wanders off into the Alaskan hinterland before 2012 rolls around. I also realize that both Blagojevich and McAuliffe are woefully unqualified for gubernatorial office (I will say, though, that McAuliffe is very, very good at raising money for democratic causes, and I don't know of any skeletons in his closet). But love, it's a tricky thing. I just can't fight it anymore.