RAHM EMANUEL SHOULD NOT BECOME THE HEAD OF THE DNC.

Here's what I said four years ago when his name was being floated, no doubt by him and is posse, for a role in the Biden administration.  And I'll post the entire post, not just a link that won't get followed up.

Saturday, November 14, 2020
Hate Mail - I Will Never Apologize For Saying What I Did BECAUSE IT IS THE TRUTH

Barack Obama making Rahm Emanuel his Chief of Staff was probably his first and one of his biggest mistakes, if it wasn't a mistake it would force me to revise my opinion of Obama as a person and a politician much lower than it already is.    

You don't have to take my word for why Rahm Emanuel should never, ever be appointed to anything by a Democratic President, ever again, Mark Konkol gave a partial list.

. . .  Biden would be better off without Rahm's political baggage.

And Rahm's got a lot.

It's no secret Emanuel was co-architect of the "three strikes" crime bill that led to the mass incarceration of African Americans — which Biden has called a "mistake" he regrets backing as a U.S. senator. In 1996, Emanuel advised former President Bill Clinton to "claim and achieve record deportations of criminal aliens." He was the architect of the North American Free Trade Agreement that sent American jobs across borders, and so-called welfare reform that only made extreme poverty worse.

But, let's face it, that's old news on a long list of reasons there should be a ban on appointing Emanuel to any job that gives him a say in public policy.

It's the state in which Emanuel left Chicago that is the most troubling part of his legacy, and a harbinger for the damage he can do when entrusted with power. His administration treated Chicago as if it were two cities — one for the rich and powerful, another for the poor and forgotten.

Chicagoans remember how often Emanuel bragged of attracting an always increasing number of tourists from around the world, while turning a blind eye to the exodus of Black families fleeing neighborhoods neglected by City Hall.

As mayor, Emanuel closed the most public schools in American history and shut down half of the city's mental health centers, most of them in poor and minority neighborhoods.

Emanuel catered to the rich and famous. His administration squandered millions of dollars in federal funding pushing Elon Musk's high-speed train tunnel to O'Hare International Airport that died before the digging started. He funneled billions of taxpayer dollars skimmed from public schools and the park district to developers building the rich part of town.

And Emanuel would have given away a corner of Chicago's precious lakefront land — and millions more taxpayer money — for "Star Wars" creator George Lucas' private museum, if a righteous lawsuit didn't stop him.

During Emanuel's tenure, he hit homeowners with the biggest property tax increase in our city's history, raised fines and fees that hurt poor folks the most, and made the city's bad deals with money-grubbing parking meter and red-light camera companies worse.

And let's not overlook Emanuel's lacking judgment on who was best to lead Chicago's efforts on everything from improving schools and reforming the police department to managing public housing.

His hand-picked public schools chief, Barbara Byrd-Bennett, went to federal prison for pocketing.

The guy Emanuel promised would restore trust in the Chicago Police Department, former Superintendent Eddie Johnson, only made matters worse. He got fired for lying to Mayor Lightfoot about the night cops found him passed out behind the wheel after a boozy night of kissy-face with an officer — who wasn't his wife and who recently filed a lawsuit accusing him of years of sexual assault.

Emanuel's choice to lead the Chicago Housing Authority board, John Hooker, has since been implicated (but not charged) in a bribery scheme in which, according to a federal deferred-prosecution agreement, ComEd dolled out jobs and money to win legislative favors from Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan.

Emanuel's pick to run the Chicago Board of Education, Frank Clark — ComEd's chief executive when the feds say the bribery scheme began — was named in a federal subpoena served on Madigan. And the FBI is currently investigating a dirty $1 billion custodial contract approved when Clark was board of education boss.

If Biden is being honest about his plans to be an American president who brings people together, the post-Rahm state of Chicago should be all the proof the president-elect needs to know that Emanuel isn't the guy for any job.

Rahm left our city more starkly divided by class and race than he found it.

Besides, America deserves better leaders than a failed mayor whose top City Hall lawyer brokered a deal with a poor mother — $5 million to keep secret a video showing a Chicago cop fire every bullet in his gun, 16 shots, until her Black teenage son was dead — that saved his re-election bid.

Take it from a city that knows.

Mark Konkol, recipient of the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for local reporting, wrote and produced the Peabody Award-winning series, "Time: The Kalief Browder Story." He was a producer, writer and narrator for the "Chicagoland" docu-series on CNN, and a consulting producer on the Showtime documentary, "16 Shots."

For once I'll give the guy's credits at the end of his piece, I trust local reporters a lot more than I trust national ones, when they've earned that trust.  Rahm Emanuel is one of the few alleged Democrats who I suspect loves to shaft the poor and powerless, to destroy the environment, to do the bidding of the rich and powerful as much as any Republican scumbag.  He never was really a Democrat of any kind I'd want to be in the same party with.  I don't know why Obama named him or why other Democrats gave him positions of power within the House leadership, perhaps they figured they needed a tough-guy thug on their side.  But there are tough guys who are evil creeps and those who aren't, Rahm Emanuel is the evil sort.

One of the things Lawrence O'Donnell said in praising Biden's choice of Ron Klain for his Chief of Staff is that one thing he knew was that neither Joe Biden nor Ron Klain ever left a tough negotiating meeting in which things got heated with people hating them.  I hope that is a sign that Biden's long time in office has given him the political skills that Obama clearly didn't get from his brief time in politics before he became President, skills that make him realize he doesn't need a Rahm Emanuel and that having one would cost him more than it would ever gain him.  If Obama had passed a really great Affordable Care Act, based on him practicing more skilled politics, it would have been universally popular and the Supreme Court would never have dared try to sabotage it.  He probably would never have lost the Congress two years in if he had delivered the far, far more effective and worker friendly economic recovery bills that were proposed.  Rahm Emanuel's scumbaggery is largely to blame for the immediate failure of Obama to deliver what he had promised the Voters who voted for him, audacity.  What was audacious was Emanuel's influencing Obama to be a fraction of the president he had promised to be.

Response To Another Comment

Oh, fuck off, you obtuse piece of shit. As you well know, I am on record (and have been for years) as saying that Netanyahu and his cabal are evil and have to go. Get back to me when you can say something similar about Hamas or the Palestinian's political leadership going back six decades or more.

I mean that Arafat guy was a freaking riot!!!

A. I did say something similar about Hamas and Hezbollah last week,  I said I didn't choose them or like them any more than I liked the Israeli government.   I am opposed to all violent, terrorism wielding and anti-democratic groups and authorities and governments,  I've never made any secret of that.

B. If you read more you might realize that Arafat has been dead for 20 years, almost to the day.   I'd recommend you expand your reading past recipes in the Sunday NYT and that one and only book you ever read about Nazi rule, even Shirer knew he needed to write a more complete one, though The Rise and Fall is probably longer than you can navigate outside of the world of swords and sorcery or 18th century bodice rippers. 

C.  The United States doesn't support the "leadership" of Palestinians, sending them arms and money and support for their genocidal military campaigns and it isn't demanded that the government of my country support them.  That is unlike the demand that it support Israel, right or wrong, something which may very well have had an impact on the 2024 election to the detriment of all except the fascist government of Israel.   I think the population of Israel is as suckered as those who voted for Trump even as he'll damage them and risk their lives. 

D.  Whether Hamas or Hezbollah really constitutes the leadership of the majority of Palestinians is an untested question, though I wouldn't doubt that after, especially this most recent, slaughter by Israel in Gaza that Hamas could do what it wouldn't risk trying before, win an election.   I have heard some claims that support for Hamas increased in the West Bank in the past year, so, well done, Israel.  Such is the consequence of Israeli policy and military actions as it keeps doing the same thing and expecting a different result.   The thing is, Simels, I can't express any doubt about the Likud-fascist coalition being what a majority of Israelis want BECAUSE THEY HAVE BEEN KEPT IN POWER ALMOST CONTINUALLY FOR NEARLY HALF A CENTURY BY ISRAELI VOTERS.   Israel has had a morally damaging effect on both those who live there and those they have been trying to destroy for more than seventy years, now.  Palestinians in Israel may have a vote, but it's a vote about as meaningful in terms of governance as the vote of LGBTQ+ voters in Utah.  And the law of Israel will keep it that way.

Doing the same thing over and over, expecting a different result, Israel may be in such a spiral of insanity but I don't have to accept that the United States should go down the drain with it. 

E. If you think the tactic of labeling anyone who opposes zionism and the Israeli state as antisemtic is going to keep working,  that's rapidly losing its effect.   That IHRA committee that rigged an "official" definition of it to protect Israel from the truth might have been the last straw that broke that particular camel's back.   As I pointed out the other day, that's so obviously what the goal was that even one of those in on it admitted that was the result, right-wing zionists using it as a weapon in the United States and elsewhere to shut of criticism of the Israeli government and to protect it from the consequences its actions earn.   I knew one woman who had fallen for the "Israel right or wrong" propaganda until she actually went there and observed the treatment of Palestinians by the Israeli government and their military.   The reality of what Israel was in reality shocked her out of a life-long habit of thought and she didn't support Israel nearly as much. 

Younger people don't have such a well-instilled habit.   Unfortunately, and especially due to the dishonest and irresponsible practice of the past seventy years that insists that antizionism is antisemitism,  Jews who are entirely blameless for the actions of Israel and the American support of it get the blame when the fascists in Israel commit atrocities.   Timmerman was right, most of the antisemitism from after 1948 is a result of the state of Israel.  Until zionism, the Muslims had a far better track record of co-existence with Jews than Europe did, though nothing like the record of the United States and Canada.  I am afraid we now have a real danger of that changing as zionists team up with our indigenous fascists in support of Israel.   Though most of the young antizionists I've encountered make the distinction between zionists and Jews,  I wouldn't depend on that safety net as antizionism becomes more main-stream.   And antizionism will become more mainstream due to the nature of the Israeli government and Israeli society under apartheid. 

This isn't going to continue.  Israel is an untenable project, especially as those who are of good will leave it in increasing numbers leaving the fanatics such as Brooklyn and Chicago have contributed to the fascist "settler" movement which has committed repeated acts of terror, some of which even the Israeli government has had to step in to stop.  I would love to know the percentage of the Lubavitcher cult from the United States  comprise those "settlers" and how they voted in the U.S. election - I assume most of them retain dual-citizenship.   Among the rioting soccer hooligans in Amsterdam, there were a number of Trump signs held up.   I would wonder what such a figure would show if such a figure could be had, as opposed to the lies included in opinion polling.