Personal Asides: Obama’s Cameo on Bears Football Outstanding…No Surprise Emanuel Knew About Foley Early and Saved it for the End of the Campaign.

Obama.

Barack Obama’s cameo on TV before the Bears game was outstanding. It shouldn’t be qualified by Obama critics…rated brilliant with faint damns. It was a masterpiece. Inexpressibly brilliant and congratulations to David Axelrod, if he was the one who thought it up and executed it. In this era of pop media it was worth two-dozen trips to New Hampshire.

Emanuel.

The fact that Democrat Rahm Emanuel knew of the Foley near-propositioning of young male pages and did nothing about it, waiting until the tag-end of the 2006 campaign to exploit it should not be used against him…any more than a vulture, sensing opportunity to dine, hovers in ever-declining arcs over a fetid body. That’s the nature of vultures and political animals of both parties; and that’s the nature of Rahm Emanuel. His face with sunken cheeks, deep-set eyes and hungry, gaunt tenor shows what he is: a political predatory Democratic animal.

The real fault of the Foley matter was the Republican Speaker who waggled his eyebrows, pursed his lips as if to say something and didn’t…and his Republican chief of staff who followed the old Illinois pragmatist-machine procedure copyrighted by the Republican Ogilvie-Thompson-Edgar-Ryan group…are Republican political animals that seek to protect their political genitals first and the public long after that. The fact that a predator-wannabe was stalking the place was known to the Speaker’s group and to Republican John Shimkus for a long time…and to protect themselves they allowed it to happen. So nobody ought to fault an animal like Emanuel for seeking to capitalize on it by allowing it to continue no matter how many young people were endangered. Mark Foley was a political animal whose Florida district Republican party knew what he was from the get-go and winked, blinked and didn’t talk about it. What should have happened was that once his predilections became known, he should have had primary opposition. Timidity and behavior of animals in the swamp meant that few brought it up…those who did were called homophobes…and Foley went on to get his party into trouble.

The only way political animals of the Emanuel and Hastert variety can be forced out of the swamp is by term limits. The only candidate in Illinois to support term limits in 2006 was David McSweeney. John Shimkus ran in support of term limits but once in the swamp reverted to animal nature and forgot his pledge. Who’s surprised? Any meaningful reform to the Illinois Republican party should insist on congressional term limits—voluntary if they cannot be mandated…with great onus to accrue on he/she who, like Shimkus, breaks the pledge.