BEWARE UNREHABILIATED REPUBLICAN POLS GETTING OUT OF PRISON

Rowland ran with a bad crowd and it rubbed off

Does the story of Marie Antoinette and Louis Capet being guillotined fill you with sorrow? What about when the entire royal family of Russia is brought down to a basement in provincial town and summarily executed? Do you think I'm heartless if I tell you I cheer these atrocities. I reserve my sympathy and my tears for the victims, not the perps. And the 18th century French monarchy and the 20th century Russian monarchy certainly shared reputations for no dearth of social victims. Members of royal families would get their jewel-encrusted Faberge eggs while citizens died like dogs of hunger and disease. You cry for a tsar and his family? I call that heartless. Every second these parasites on society remained breathing, was a sin against God and his creation.

"It started with my sense of entitlement, the belief that I deserved whatever came to me, that everything was about me." That wasn't a deathbed confession from Louis XVI or from Benito Mussolini. And it wasn't something Rahm Emanuel's brother Ari wrote for his client Paris to tell Barbara Walters on a phone call from prison. It's something I just read in tomorrow's NY Times from ex-con/ex-governor John Rowland (R-CT).

Over the next years we can expect more and more corrupt, self-entitled Republican politicians to be released from prison. The description of Rowland's life style-- all at the public expense-- made me want to vomit. But it led inexorably to his downfall.

Over the years, he had taken whatever anyone wanted to give him -- cigars and champagne, clothes and a canoe. He vacationed rent-free at the resort homes of a construction contractor doing business with the state and accepted chartered trips to Las Vegas from him, then looked the other way as aides steered more business toward the man.

Stealthy malfeasance rotted his administration. His co-chief and deputy chief of staff, both destined for prison, took bribes of cash and gold coins; the deputy's booty was later found buried in his back yard. Connecticut reporters broke new stories of corruption; Democrats began talking impeachment. Old political friends began publicly distancing themselves. By the summer of that year, Rowland had lost the support of his Republican base in Connecticut and, finally, his job.

He got off very lightly. He's white, rich, well-connected and Republican. He served 10 months of very easy time-- "no gates, no bars, no locks, no guards within sight"-- and got out last year. In China he would have been shot. Rowland is pulling down $60,000 a year giving lectures-- and feeling very sorry for his situation. He thinks he's living "hand to mouth." In my Los Angeles congressional district, where the cost of living is steep, the median income is $31,655. In Connecticut's first CD, where Rowland lives, it's $50,227. He still thinks he's entitled to more than anyone else. "I don't need a lot-- I only want to pay my bills." He doesn't mention what the bills are for.

He's anything but rehabilitated; still a Republican refusing to accept responsibility for his actions. Down deep he thinks he was unlucky, not criminal. People and circumstances forced the graft and corruption on him. It was everyone's fault but his own-- after all, he had to pay child support to the family he had abandoned during the days of wine and roses! Other people were always making more than him. Is that fair? Maybe they can make him a saint; their did for the dead tsar and his family. He never harbored the thought of sainthood; he just wanted to be president; He felt entitled.