The Chicago Tar Baby

By Alan Caruba

The media is working overtime to put distance between President-elect Barack Obama and the festering dung heap of Chicago politics that has produced yet another Illinois Governor-Headed-To-Jail.

On December 12, the Associated Press was reporting that “President-elect Barack Obama insists he didn't have any contact with Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich or anyone else who might have been scheming to sell the president-elect's U.S. Senate seat. But he has not yet given his transition staff the same clean bill of health -- perhaps with good reason.” The Obama team, however, will reportedly provide data to support their claim none of them were involved with the Blago mess.

Considering that the media for the two years that freshman Senator Obama spent campaigning to become President made virtually no mention whatever of the sinkhole of corruption that the Chicago Democrat machine has been for decades, they surely don’t want him to enter the Oval Office under a cloud.

So we are hearing that Obama didn’t like Blago, rarely spoke to him, et cetera. In the same way the press danced around all of Obama’s questionable friendships, alliances, and associations while he sought the highest office in the land, you can put good money on their determination to protect him when he takes office.

It won’t work.

It’s the same principle at work as when the neighbors call the police to complain of a bad smell coming from the apartment or house next door. There is always a dead body waiting to be found.

Watching Obama dance around his answer to the question of whether he had spoken with Blago regarding the vacancy he was leaving behind was great fun as he picked his way through the landmines inherit in the words “I” and “we.” It reminded me of the unlamented former President Clinton’s interpretation of “is.” It didn’t make Monica Lewinski go away. And it’s not likely to make Blago or Rezko go away either any time soon.

The most ethical Congress in history, as Speaker Nancy Pelosi promised, and now the most ethical White House is already beginning, as they say, to stink like a fish from the head down.
After damning Republican miscreants as “a culture of corruption”, it turns out Democrats too have their own ethical problems.

Politics in America, never pretty to begin with, has become a criminal enterprise in which the public treasury is now laid bare to the use of anyone with a vote in Congress.

Obama has promised “change”, but by the time the Blago saga plays itself out, it will be just more of the same bad news. The problem will be finding the truth about it anywhere in the mainstream press.