There's something weirdly fascinating about professional wrestling. Not that we've ever watched it ourselves, mind you. But a, uh, friend tells us that you know someone is gonna get thrown out of the ring onto the fragile tables sitting over there and you know that guy's gonna struggle to get up and then grab a folding chair to swing back into the ring.

Neither contestant apparently watched last week's match because one of them still walks into the other's elbow. And when the elbow guy starts arguing with the referee, he doesn't think to look behind for the folding chair coming down to bloody his head.

It's a lot like watching Illinois politics. We too should have seen this latest move coming. Gov. Rod Blagojevich's brazen, bold blitz of naming Roland Burris to fill the vacant Barack Obama Senate seat is at once a brilliant and cunning and cynical political move.

In the last hour before the announcement, Senate Democrats, including Illinois' Dick Durbin, realized they'd been outfoxed, hastily conferred by phone and tried to duck by desperately announcing they weren't gonna seat Blagojevich's pick anyway.

A vacationing Obama, who's got nothing to do with it anymore and once vowed to stay out of picking his successor, sent word anyway from Hawaii that he sides with Durbin against Blagojevich, whom he helped elect in 2002.

Too late.

The governor said the other day he was going to fight, fight, fight his case to his last dying breath.

So Sunday night he calls up the wily, old, not always successful Burris who's always dreamed of an office higher than state comptroller or attorney general, both of which he held. The son of a railway worker, Burris is a Howard University Law School graduate who as a teenager helped integrate a local swimming pool.

Never lacking in confidence, Burris even hopelessly challenged current Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley back in the 1990s. Burris has state political experience going back to the '60s. He was the first black person elected to statewide office in Illinois and did it as a native of southern Illinois, parts of which culturally and geographically are farther south than Richmond, the one-time Confederate capitol.

Burris has been party loyal. He's been beaten often, though not bowed, by other Democrats -- Paul Simon in 1984 to win Chuck Percy's Senate seat -- including Blagojevich in 2002. The 2002 race was the third straight Democratic gubernatorial primary that Burris lost. (See Burris and Blagojevich speak for themselves in the videos below.)

But he came around to support good old Rod in that general election and the 2006 reelection, as did both Obama and his new chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel. Unlike, say, Caroline Kennedy,....