I was driving home the other night listening to XM-Sirius’ POTUS station (one of my favorites) as they ran a news conference held by Illinois’ newest blowhard, idiot politician now that Gov. Rod Goodbye-a-vich has been impeached. Regular readers will know who I’m talking about — Roland “freakin'” Burris. The “emburrisment” of Chicago politics.

As I said in January, you could take the egos of, say, Muhammad Ali, Deion Sanders and Dennis Rodman combine then into a gigantic whole and it’d still be dwarfed by Burris’ self-regard. So when I was listening to this surreal news conference, held after it became clear that he can’t keep his story straight about what sort of contact he had with Gov. Impeach-a-vich before he was appointed junior senator of Illinois to fill President Obama’s seat, I started getting flashbacks to those looney get-togethers he had with reporters when I worked for the City News Bureau in Chicago.

It’s gotten worse for him since. Everyone has basically told him to resign — from the new governor of Illinois, Patrick Quinn, to Illinois Sen. Dick Durban and, in a roundabout way, even President Obama. Still, he hangs on. Perhaps Blagojevich is giving him advice, too?

So I got this image in my head of Burris as Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Ozymandias. Remember that poem?

OZYMANDIAS
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: `Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear —
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.’

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