Democrats can't intimidate anyone anymore. Where have you gone, Rahm Emanuel?
Most everybody on the Trump team with any political skill was indicted. The remainder may not have been criminal, but they were just as evil and mean.
Nobody in the Biden administration is that intimidating. They’ve got people like Vice President Kamala Harris, who only frightens people who think she may have become a ghost when she effectively disappeared from view Jan. 21.
Merrick Garland, the appellate court chief judge so moderate he was nominated to the Supreme Court by a Democrat, barely said a cross word about that nomination never getting a Senate vote. He hasn’t made much noise as attorney general, either, despite wading into an office waist-deep in poop.
Pete Buttigieg’s most daring political act as Biden’s highest-profile cabinet member was to give himself a two-month paternity leave.
Trump had four press secretaries. All of them were spectacular liars. Biden’s press secretary, Jen Psaki, hasn’t been caught in a lie yet, and the year is almost over.
Trump had four chiefs of staff. All were famous jerks. Biden’s chief of staff is Ron Klain. You don’t know who that is.
Barack Obama had five chiefs of staff. The only one worth remembering is Rahm Emanuel.
Why does everybody remember him? Because they were afraid of him.
There is nobody in the Biden administration that anybody is afraid of. Not even Biden, and he’s the guy with the red button.
Biden has passed up every opportunity to be terrifying. You may have fantasized that by now, somebody might have dragged Louis DeJoy out of the post office and made him dance while cowboys shot at his feet. But no. Nobody has even found a way to fire him.
You knew this was going to happen. There hasn’t been a Democratic president feared by Congress since Lyndon Johnson. There hasn’t been an intimidating chief of staff since Emanuel quit in 2010.
Who else but Rahmbo would express his displeasure with a polling contractor by mailing him a dead fish, 30 inches long and rotting? John Gotti?
Who else but Emanuel would have the stones to celebrate it years later by responding to a TV host who dissed Chicago food by sending him an anchovy pizza, referring to it ominously as “deep dish with dead fish?”
Obama knew who he had working for him. At a White House Correspondents’ Dinner, he said his chief of staff never felt quite right on Mother’s Day because "he's not used to saying the word 'day' after 'mother.' "
Emanuel had worked for Bill Clinton, too. At dinner the night after Clinton was elected president in 1992, he loudly condemned the men who had let his candidate down. “Nat Landow, dead! Cliff Jackson, dead!” he shouted as he repeatedly stabbed the table with a steak knife. “Dead! Dead! Dead!”
After Emanuel quit Clinton, he went to work in the finance industry, taking home $16 million in about two years despite no discernible background in the business. That’s Republican-style brazenness!
He brought home enormous piles of money for his party when chairing the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, during a couple of the years he was the representative from Illinois’ 5th District.
A favorite Rahm fundraising tactic: angrily telling major donors their contribution was pitiful and then hanging up the phone.
He got more than enough Democrats elected in 2006 to take over the House. Sometimes he won by welcoming Republican politicians who were willing to try being Democrats. He found winning with the turncoats preferable to losing with the loyalists.
He left the Obama White House to run for mayor of Chicago. The city was spectacularly in debt, after years of Richard M. Daley giving contributors and constituents what they wanted as if he had never learned how to count. At the end, the only (partial) fix Daley could think of was selling the city’s parking meters.
Emanuel knew how to count. He went to New Trier.
He started cutting costs as if he was still ensconced on the North Shore where he grew up. He closed 50 city schools, almost entirely in minority neighborhoods, and shrugged when half of Chicago went insane.
Nothing really stuck to Emanuel until a Chicago cop shot Laquan McDonald 16 times, mostly after he had already fallen down.
On some level, you have to admire the way Emanuel handled it. He substantially tamped down the problem by making a deal to give McDonald’s family $5 million in public money the day after he was reelected in 2015. They hadn’t even sued yet.
He got the City Council to approve the settlement by scaring them about the possibility of a video of the shooting without actually showing it to them. He managed to keep the video under wraps for another seven months.
People got kind of excited when they finally saw it. Some questioned why the cop was able to murder people without even having his reputation impugned. Many promised Emanuel would never be reelected. But when he opted not to run in 2019, he was actually ahead in the polls.
His retirement job was a seat on the “Powerhouse Round Table” of ABC’s This Week with George Stephanopolous. Every Sunday morning, viewers were witnesses to Emanuel efficiently kicking Chris Christie’s butt.
Emanuel left the show in August, abandoning everybody else on the panel to be beaten like a rug by Christie.
Emanuel had to quit after Biden nominated him to be ambassador to Japan. The Senate has never voted to approve him or most other ambassador candidates because Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, has blocked them.
Cruz is annoyed by Biden’s foreign policy, mainly the part of it where he has failed to do something bad to the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, a German project to transport Russian natural gas. Cruz seems to be against anybody selling natural gas unlikely to give him a campaign contribution.
Emanuel is not making any visible effort to free the logjam. He seems to be trying to show that he can make nice like a good diplomat.
It is probably the wrong time to send Rahm to Japan. He would have been a better fit there 90 years ago, when he might have terrified Tojo to the extent that he would never have gone after China, let alone Pearl Harbor.
But maybe he’s lucky to get Japan. So many people hate him because of the McDonald cover-up that maybe the only place he could operate with some semblance of peace is 7,000 miles away.
But peaceful coexistence isn't really his thing. Just imagine what it’d be like if he was locked in a room with Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema.
And wouldn’t you like to see him unleashed on Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert, Matt Gaetz and Paul Gosar?
No one else seems to know what to do about them.
They may be the most deranged individuals to ever be elected to Congress, and there are a bunch more whose cheese has slipped off their crackers almost as far.
Two years from now, they’re all likely to still be where they are, joined by similarly solid citizens. The midterms are shaping up to be Red Tide 2022.
Now that nearly the entire nation has been gerrymandered, it’ll be hard for the Dems to change that outcome. And they have shelved one of their few horror-inspiring weapons because he’s too horrible.
People for Bernie tweeted earlier this year, “Rahm Emanuel is a monster. A depraved, blood thirsty, cop-murder-cover-up monster.”
He may be a monster. But he’s their monster.
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