Now Playing: The Beast That Slimes Chicago

It’s quite a spectacular big-budget production of ugly, isn’t it? We couldn’t make this stuff up.

Actually, The Beast has been sliming the Windy City for a long time. Organized crime and dirty politics (“vote early and vote often and include your dead family members and pets while you are at it”) dominated Chicago during the early part of the last century. Scandals galore.

So, why can’t this beast be conquered?

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Hauslaib’s brief history of Chicago sums the whole mess up quite well.

“The reason Chicago politics is so corrupt is because, in modern American history, it’s never not been, which makes it very difficult to clean up. Especially because every politician who says they’re going to try and straighten Chicago out ends up lying and cheating worse than the pig who came before him. Imagine trying to clean up a greasy stove with a sponge covered in used Crisco and you’ll understand the job of cleaning up Chi-town. Basically, it’s the Frankenstein’s monster of political machines—a thing, composed of scrap materials functioning for a common cause (money), that will only be stopped if it commits to self-immolation.”

So, the day before yesterday during his news conference Obama said that some people see politics as a “business” (translation: make money any way that works, legality be damned) and others “want to serve.” Presumably, we are to infer, Obama means to place himself in the latter category.

But why did he come to Chicago in the first place? He had no ties there that I ever heard of, except for a job offer from now convicted Tony Rezko (who also helped him buy his home). Why would he have anything to do with William Ayers or the long line of those “business-oriented politicians” from whom he accepted large sums of campaign money? Why would he not be interested in how Emil Jones was going to get him elected to an office?

Let me reprise some amazing quotes from an article about Obama’s “toxic mentor” , Emil Jones, who refers to himself as “Obama’s Godfather.”.

Obama has often described Jones as a key political mentor whose patronage was crucial to his early success in a state long dominated by near-feudal party political machines. Jones, 71, describes himself as Obama’s “godfather” and once said: “He feels like a son to me.”
At one point during Obama’s 2003 Senate campaign, Jones set out to woo two African-American politicians miffed by Obama’s presumption and ambition. One of them, Rickey “Hollywood” Hendon, a state senator, had scoffed that Obama was so ambitious he would run for “king of the world” if the position were vacant.

When Jones secured the two men’s support, Obama asked his mentor how he had pulled it off. “I made them an offer,” Jones said in mock-Mafioso style. “And you don’t want to know.” Jones is now at the centre of a long row over his attempt to block proposed laws cracking down on his state’s “pay-to-play” tradition – whereby companies hoping to win government contracts have to contribute to the campaign funds of officials.

It’s difficult to imagine that Obama could emerge from this political cesspool clean. But he wants us to believe in his words. He’s really good with words.