Obama’s ‘Chicago Way’

NRO ^ | 5/30/2013 | John Fund

[RoosterRedux]

The scandals swirling around the Obama administration have many journalists scratching their heads as to how “hope and change” seem to have been supplanted by “arrogance and fear.” Perhaps it’s time they revisit one of their original premises about Barack Obama: that he wasn’t influenced by the Chicago Daley machine. You know: the machine that boosted his career and whose protégés — including Valerie Jarrett, David Axelrod, Rahm Emanuel, and his wife, Michelle — he brought to Washington with him.

*snip*

“We have a sick political culture, and that’s the environment Barack Obama came from,” Jay Stewart, the executive director of the Chicago Better Government Association, warned ABC News when Obama ran in 2008. He noted that Obama had “been noticeably silent on the issue of corruption here in his home state.”

Joel Kotkin, an urban expert who still considers himself a “Kennedy Democrat –– John F. Kennedy,” wrote at Forbes: “Most of us would put up with a bit of corruption and special dealing if the results were strong economic and employment growth. But the bare demographic and economic facts for both Chicago and Illinois reveal a stunning legacy of failure.” Since 2007, the Chicago region has lost more jobs than Detroit has, and more than twice as many as New York. The city’s murder rate is a national disgrace, and its teachers’ union is so powerful that a strike it called last year forced new mayor Rahm Emanuel to back down from his attempt to curb union power.

[grundle]

Here are 180 examples of Barack Obama’s lying, lawbreaking, corruption, cronyism, hypocrisy, government waste, and other misdeeds

32) Gave tax dollars to corrupt private contractors

While Obama was a state Senator in Illinois, he used tax dollars to build 504 units of slum housing, which had mice and backed up sewage. Federal inspectors graded the condition of the housing so bad that the buildings faced demolition.

[ClearCase_guy]

Welcome to the machine.

[Cletus.D.Yokel]

:: John Kass, the muckraking columnist for the Chicago Tribune ::

No bias there. Kass is the only bright spot in the darkness that is “Windy City Print Journalism”.

[cripplecreek]

Remember when the Alan Keyes campaign staffers were arrested for no more than being part of the campaign against Obama for senate?

[quintr]

list of political lies

[arthurus]

Perhaps now, as Obama’s “Chicago Way” is coming into focus, the media will want to redeem itself.

Reedmption? No. A little CYA, a little damage control, just enough criticism to say "see! we're even handed!" and continual promotion of the kenyan's socialist transformation of America.

[upchuck]

Bump.

This is an EXCELLENT article.

Didn’t the situation with the slum housing involve Jarrett?

[GOPJ]

You can take the politician out of Chicago, but you can’t take Chicago out of the politician. If the New York Times boys had spent as much time in Hyde Park as they did in Wasilla we wouldn’t be in this mess today.

[GOPJ]

http://www.examiner.com/article/video-the-fbi-mole-valerie-jarrett-and-the-chicago-political-mob

from the link:

... a separate scandal is developing regarding the Chicago political mob of which Barack Obama is a key figure. Valerie Jarrett, perhaps Obama’s closest White House adviser, owns a real estate venture in Chicago that is allegedly under suspicion for corruption.

..

This part of the scandal implicates a host of shady figures revolving around Obama in the infamous and corrupt Chicago political machine—Tony Rezko, Rod Blagojevich, Rahm Emanuel, and an FBI mole who himself had been convicted of crimes, but cut a deal to infiltrate the Chicago machine in exchange for the Feds keeping him out of jail. The mole has been feeding information to the Feds.

Dirty land deals, corrupt banking practices, play-for-pay political schemes, voter intimidation and fraud, and election tampering ...

[upchuck]

Thanks. I thought I remembered a connection.