* This deserves its own post. It’s Gov. Blagojevich’s answer to a reporter’s question about how he came up with the idea to give senior citizens free rides on mass transit in exchange for breaking his campaign promise to veto every tax increase on “people.” The statement is hilarious…
“You know it’s interesting. It’s funny how these ideas come up.
“I was reading a book not long ago about Ronald Reagan’s summit with Mikhail Gorbachev and how it began a whole process of nuclear arms reductions and it was a historic second term for president Reagan in reducing the nuclear arsenal between the Soviet Union and the United States and ironic that Ronald Reagan, who several years before had declared that the Soviet Union was an evil empire, that they were the source of all that was wrong in the world, that they reserved to themselves the right to lie and cheat and all the rest that Reagan said back then.
“But then, as I was reading on, what I thought was very interesting was that he, in spite of what the state department and professional diplomats were telling him, decided to write a personal note to the Russian leadership about how he wanted to bring about dialogue and how fearful he was about the possibility of nuclear war between two powerful countries. And he had an idea to discuss that with them and he had an idea that was called star wars that ultimately didn’t get of the ground but an idea that was taken very seriously that actually led to those discussions and it was his idea, not the experts but his.
“So I thought about that and then I thought about real life circumstances, people who take public transportation, thought about my own background growing up with a mother who was a ticket agent for the CTA, thought about the story I just said about my dad when he was a senior citizen and envisioned the possibility that we could find ourselves where this was the only option I had as we approached the precipice of a scenario where there would be drastic service cuts and fare increases, and I thought why not then see what you can do, as I said, turn a lemon into lemonade and make it better, and the idea for seniors came up and that’s where it began and it’s been an idea that I’ve had since before Thanksgiving and one that we are really happy now to have a chance to be able to execute and implement.”
Discuss.