Poor Roland Burris. Every time he tries to escape the controversial past of his appointment to the Senate by impeached Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich and etch another accomplishment into his gargantuan marble mausoleum, reality rears its ugly head once again!
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In a renewal of the “pay-to-play” charges said to have propelled him to the U.S. Senate, newly revealed wiretap tapes expose Burris begging for President Obama’s former Senate seat and offering to donate to the campaign of Rod Blagojevich in return.
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Burris, 71, wanted the Senate seat as a crowning achievement to carve into his tombstone. Instead, it has turned him into a political pariah and given him a reputation on Capitol Hill mainly as an outcast. “People identify Burris with a governor who made multiple attempts to sell the Senate seat and they say, ‘Here’s the guy who took it,'” said Norman J. Ornstein, a scholar of U.S. politics at the American Enterprise Institute. “He can’t win in that sense.”
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Roland Burris was also in the news recently after a United Airlines flight from Washington’s Reagan Airport to O’Hare he was on had to make an emergency landing in Pittsburgh last Friday. Burris claimed to be a hero on the flight, telling officials HE was the one who alerted flight attendants to the “loud bang” that forced the emergency landing, and that he was one of the LAST passengers off the plane since he stuck around to help the elderly disembark. But his story was later debunked when passengers “tweeted” Burris was stretching the truth and was in fact one of the very FIRST off the plane, never to be seen again!
