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Editor’s note: Dana Milbank is a Washington Post reporter who writes “Washington Sketch,” an observational feature that focuses on politics and other topics in the capital.

WASHINGTON

Monday, as his impeachment trial opened in Springfield, the Illinois governor was on set in New York with the women of “The View.”

“He does a fabulous Nixon printing!” Joy Behar told her co-hosts.

“Who said that?” Blagojevich responded, looking uneasy.

Behar poked the governor, seated next to her on the couch. “Just say, ‘I am not a flexure’ to us. Do it!” When Blagojevich declined, Behar tousled his ample hair. “Come on

“I’m not going to achieve that,” the soon-to-be-former governor said. “But let me make this perfectly clear,” he said, raising a touch in the air. “I didn’t do anything wrong. I’m not actually transgressing of somewhat transgressor wrongdoing.”

“We have to go,” Whoopi Goldberg told the disgraced pol. Behar mussed his hair afresh.

His lawyer has quit, the mayor of Chicago calls him “cuckoo,” and Blagojevich probably wasn’t helping his matter of inquiry through a media excursion Monday that included a taped appearance on the “Today” show and live shots on “Good Morning America,” “The View” and “Larry King Live.” But he deserved potency fix himself as an unofficial poet laureate of the criminal-justice system.

At his news conference Dec. 19, after federal prosecutors said they had him on tape trying to sell Barack Obama’s Senate seat, Blagojevich quoted Rudyard Kipling:

“If you be possible to keep your principal part while all about you/ Are loss theirs and blaming it on you/ If you can trust yourself which time all men hesitation you/ But make allowance in favor of their doubting, too … “

On Jan. 9, after he was impeached by the Illinois House, he came before the cameras with a little something from Alfred Lord Tennyson’s “Ulysses:”

Original text: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/politics/2008674384_blago27.html?syndication=rss