Yes, we do have a different take. I think Fitzgerald was a bonafide statesman. The best Senator from Illinois since Ev Dirksen. He was also not a member of “the Combine.” Because he wasn’t, he had to be destroyed.
I call LaHood “LaThug”, because he is well known as the enforcer for the GOP wing of the Combine. He did the dirty work of kneecapping Fitzgerald at every turn and making sure he would not be around for a second term. The Combine doesn’t care which party a Senator is from as long as they aren’t a reformer. Since Obama and Durbin won’t interfere with the GOP Combiners, there’s no problem. LaThug and Co. wanted the likes of RINO Loleta Didrickson in 1998, and to their horror, Fitz upended here. He had to be destroyed. Same went for Al Salvi in 1996 when he upended Combiner Bob Kustra (the real definition of somebody who didn’t want the job he was running for — Fitzgerald most certainly did want his job, but when your own party does its damndest to undermine everything you do and threaten to run people against you, it’s quite hard to do your job).
It’s funny, I was watching the other day a book discussion with ex-Gov. Dan Walker, himself an outsider reformer from the Dem side, and he discussed how impossible it was to do his job when the Combine (the Daleyites and Simonites) made his single term a hell on earth — all because he defeated the anointed one — then-Lt Gov. Paul Simon — in ‘72.
Topinka herself is too stupid a person to mastermind any antics, she just follows orders. The IL GOP has some profoundly serious problems, and until it dumps these crooked “business as usual” types that play footsie with the rodents, of which they are ethically and morally indistinguishable from, the problem will never be solved.
Every last Combine Republican needs to be run out of office in the state of Illinois, and from out of leadership, all the way down to the precinct levels. They’re a cancer, and if that cancer isn’t excised, they will convert the state into a permanent rodent bastion for the forseeable future.
I sincerely hope Mr. Schock has absolutely no ties to this corrupt regime, and that includes LaThug the Enforcer.
Actually, Al Salvi engineered his own defeat in the 1996 general election. Remember when he made that idiotic claim that Jim Brady had once sold machine guns? The Combine didn’t force him to do that.