Originally Posted by
Dan Druff
On a side note, the corruption in Chicago still astounds me.
You'd think that, by this point, there would be some big story about it, and it would cause major reform and change as the rest of the nation fully wakes up to what's going on there.
But no.
Chicago is still as corrupt as ever, and it's just something residents over there find to be business as usual.
Chicagoans are like the long-battered wife from an upbringing of a battered mother, to where they just expect to be battered and don't really know any other way of life.
Rod Blagojevich was so used to the corrupt Chicago ways that he truly didn't understand what he did wrong when he was arrested for corruption. When your entire life is spent experiencing corruption at the government level, it's hard to imagine that being corrupt yourself can land you in prison.
If you ask the average person from Chicago about the corrupt government there, they just shrug and say, "We're used to it" or "That's the way government works."
Even the left-wing sitcom "Good Times" in the 1970s frequently made reference to the insane normalcy of Chicago corruption.
Corruption didn't really play a big part in this story, but it does seem to have some part in the fact that a crazily disproportionate number of detectives were assigned to this case, because it was one where everyone was watching, and they didn't want to screw it up on the national stage.