Now that he has his very own pet President, Dick Daley apparently doesn't need a piss-ant little governor anymore.
EDIT: What do you mean he doesn't have a pet President? I guarantee you that Daley has FLIR pictures of every time Barry sneaked out on the porch to smoke behind Michelle's back. He probably has more copies of Barry's birth certificate(s?) than Obama does himself, too.
It is a tradition in Illinois politics. 4 of the last 6 governors were convicted - though most waited until after they were out of office to get caught.
ReplyDeleteUnless you are from Illinois you probably never heard of Paul Powell. A lot of money was found in shoe boxes in a closet after he died. (This was a guy who never made much money... legitimately.)
The only amazing thing is that the feds haven't been able to collar Richie Daley. He definitely has his fingers in the cookie jar.
My sister-in-law lives not far from St. Louis. She e-mailed today that she was doing a Happy Dance over the news of the Blag's downfall. No one south of Springfield cares if the Blag spends the rest of his days as someone's butt buddy.
ReplyDeleteWV: doute --- rhymes with route.
Like father, like son.
ReplyDeleteOne can only hope that this degenerates into finger-pointing that brings down the entire Illinois machine as the players each attempt to save their own skin.
ReplyDeleteOddly enough, I hope Obama doesn't get nailed in this. I wouldn't mind him getting stung a little (okay, a lot) from it, but not irreparably tainted. There are good things that can be wrung out of Obama's presidency and bringing him down now would be a cure worse than the disease.
I don't know how you can separate BHO from the Chicago machine and its politics because he is their product. Rezko and others in this mess may well determine BHO's fate. One thing for sure it is going to make an extremely interesting 2009.
ReplyDeleteAll The Best,
Frank W. James
To hell with Obama; I want Dick Daley to do the perp walk.
ReplyDeleteI'm a pilot; it's personal.
Meigs Field, I got it. :(
ReplyDeleteI don't throw the word 'Stalinist' around lightly. But Da Mayor, Blago, and Uncle Joe all have one striking feature in common and that is a complete disregard for what is right and what is lawful. All three have (or had) a habit of blithely, casually, nonchalantly proposing and/or implementing plans that violate laws of their own governments, or even basic human decency, so long as such violations serve their own agendas.
ReplyDeleteAs a former Illinois resident, I well remember Blago casually proposing raising the FOID fee to $500/year. He also blithely proposed a government confiscation of privately owned businesses (casinos) because - and this is just about exactly how he said it - the State could use that money to implement his Socialist agenda.
Daley's reaction to Heller has been similar. "Law of the land? So what?"
'Thugocracy' is a neologism that comes to mind here.
Is it too much to hope that some of the mud could get on Hizzoner this time? Blago certainly has been a medium-large cog in the Dayley machine for long enough to know where the bodies are buried, and he looks the weasely type to rat out the Boss of the criminal organization he worked for. Doubt it, though: I'll bet the Boss has something even better on Blago he is holding back against just such an eventuality.
From the dynasty that said "Vote early and often", and got away with registering voters in cemeteries. The same people who showed the Kennedys how to rig an election.
ReplyDeleteFor reference,recounts done after Jack Kennedy's inauguration showed that he would have lost the election had all the fake votes been eliminated.
The problem with so many Irish-Americans (I can say this, as I was raised in a Gaelic speaking house by my little old County Galway grandmother) is that they still act as if there were NINA signs in the windows of every business and school.
I respect the hell out of an ethos and sense of loyalty that could keep a people together through eight centuries of madness and wholesale butchery.
The idea that a poor rural people could stand up and beat the greatest empire the world had ever seen, after being defeated every two or three decades for thirty generations, puts a certain extra cockiness in my step.
Winston Churchill despised the Irish, describing them as "an innocent and easily lead people, capable only at fighting, fornicating, and writing maudlin poetry". He went on to say their only national virtue was a suicidal stubborness.
Actually, I think he was still ticked about Fontenoy, and they write some damned good poetry.
But, America's been good to it's Irish Catholics, and they are the wealthiest, best educated Christian ethnic group in the country, running neck and neck with the Jews in both categories.
In the bigger cities, you'll still see the big armed Mick cops and firemen with their bulldog tattoos. One of them is a son of mine.
But you're many times more likely to see a stockbroker, a lawyer, a successful businessman.
And yet, the urban Irish, a brutally conservative people, secure in their upscale ghettoes and Catholic schools, are so often still the power brokers in the Democratic political machines their grandfathers created.
They say things they have no belief in, consider public hypocricy nothing more than a tool, and maintain an essentially European political world in the cities they control.
The Urban Italians and Poles are no different. No suprise there, as they were "Americanized" in the churches, parochial schools, and colleges built by the Irish, and prospered in direct proportion to the degree they assimilated into the local machine. In a very real sense, none of these people have ever left Europe.
I'm prouder of the Irish side of my heritage than I am of the Scottish side.
This one small country gave us more presidents than any other, along with Davy Crockett, Daniel Boone, Francis Marion, Simon McKendrick and Simon Girty, Jim O'Hara, Tim Murphy and two thirds of George Washington's Continentals.
But the "Suicidal stubborness", the desperate tribalism that showed so well at places like Bennington and Fredricksberg, with the 7th Cavalry and the Lost Batallion, has a dark side, at least in the cities,
It is the cynical ideal that honesty is an absolute only among the tribe or personal friends. The difference between the kind of Irish Catholic you're likely to meet in Iowa (Think Frankie Morrisson, otherwise known as John Wayne) and a big city politician manipulating the remnants of a people's cultural memory.
What makes it all the more difficult is that the city Mick is going to have the same cheerful, chatty, likeably gregarious manner as the Americanised Mick.
But the degree to which so many of them accept a medival hierarchy still leaves me stunned at times.
My mother was a private detective, and was not the least bit naive or given to foolish sentimentalism. But, again out of tribalism, she was on the town Democratic comittee.
She came home one night, laughing to beat the band, and wrote down verbatim what she had just heard from John Bailey, the Connecticut equivalent of the Daileys and Kennedys.
He, after hours of putting up with a roomful of Middletown Sicilians, had found himself in a corner with several other Irishmen and more Jameson whiskey than he needed. His comment was "I'll tell you how to run the Democratic Party".
"You buy off the Guineas with highway contracts and office jobs for their nieces". "You give the Jew lawyers their fair share"."You throw a bone to whatever witch doctor is running the ghetto this week, but you never let control out of the hands of the Irish".
That's what we see in Chicago and New York, Boston and St. Louis. It's the mistrust, the clannishness, the ruthlessness that made sense in a beleagued collection of rebels a century or two ago. And it's given us one of Boss Daley's discreet sociopaths as POTUS.
I'd rather have Obama as President, considering the only option is that utter moron (and Irish Catholic machine politician) Joe Biden. Or, God help us, Nancy Pelosi, one of the few women in politics that make me smile at the name Hillary Clinton.
At least Obama is bright enough to realize he isn't very bright, and essentially has handed everything except the speech reading over to a melange of Clinton and Bush II bureaucrats.
But the more I look at the mess my cousins have made in urban America, the more I think the next conservative President we get should offer the choice of secession to the big coastal cities.
It makes me proud as an American to know that my elected officials command some of the highest prices in the world.
ReplyDeleteThere was a big fuss around noon about how they arrested him at home and how embarassing it was for him. As opposed to a perp walk on the front steps of the state capitol building? Me, I figure they didn't want somebody pulling a Jack Ruby on him as he was being taken into custody.
That jack Ruby thing is a big possibility, you just watch.
ReplyDeleteDick Daley is now the most powerful man on this planet. What a scary thought.
Wolfwood wrote: "Oddly enough, I hope Obama doesn't get nailed in this."
ReplyDeleteDisagree. I think a scandal that has the Snob entering office as a powerless laughingstock, such an epic fail that every policy he suggests or supports is automatically discredited, is the best outcome that America can possibly hope for.
I'm with wolfwalker.
ReplyDeleteGridlock would be manna from heaven.
db
Wolfwood wrote: "Oddly enough, I hope Obama doesn't get nailed in this."
ReplyDeleteStrangely, I don't want it, either.
I didn't want His Obamaness. I wish our nation didn't elect him. But I believe that we're getting a president who was by and large elected within the rules, and I'd like to see our nation prosper. If our president is a crook first shake out of the box, then we are doomed to see a failed presidency, and thus a 4 year period of failure for this nation. I don't want that. We need to win some, even if it's with B.O. at the helm.
If he's in it up to his ears, then let's bring him down quick and easy. But if not... let him lead. Because he's going to, anyway.
Our delusional sociopathic absentee gov (you don't often see him anywhere near the capitol as his wife won't leave Chicago and never moved into the Governor's mansion)will stubbornly remain in office as long as he can and fight these charges as political persecution. Then if the legislature doesn't act quickly enough he'll probably try to appoint himself to the U.S. Senate seat that B.O. has vacated.
ReplyDeleteI'm happy as hell about his arrest as I was "laid off" by his minions in 2003 when he took office. I hope that he and Rezko sing like canaries and bring down B.O., King Richard, and his machine. The Chicago political crooks have been screwing up this state for years.
Interestingly the judge made him surrender his passport AND his FOID card! What is our most anti-gun governor doing with a Firearm Owners Identification card? Like his father-in-law Dick Mel, I guess some people "are more equal than others"
Zendo Deb - that's actually 3 of the last 8. Stratton was charged, tried and acquitted in 1965.
Ed Foster - Do you include Chicago and Detroit as coastal cities?
TBeck & Og - I shouldn't be giving Daley ideas but he'll probably have Blago offed in public and then use it as support for his gun grabbing crusade
Tam - This is the first visit where I've commented. Been looking at your blog for about a month. Found you via The Armed Schoolteacher. Keep up the good work and stay warm!
Bruce B., Springfield, IL
Bruce B., I certainly do include the great lakes cities as coastal. Thank you Jesus for the St. Lawrence Seaway.
ReplyDeleteTo paraphrase Clemenceau, different cultures require different polities. No borders, no armed guards, just a change in street signs that gets them out of our voter pool, in which they have been peeing for most of a century.
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ReplyDeleteSo let me get this straight (in geek-speak)
ReplyDeleteDaly = Darth Vader
Blago = Admiral Ozzel
Obama = Captain (soon to be Admiral) Piett