“Ambassador Rahm Emanuel”: The Biden Jobs Program No One Needs

Rahm Emanuel is why we can’t have nice things.

Sometimes, a casual conversation turns out to be prophetic and stays with you for decades to come. In 2006, I had lunch at the LA World Science Fiction Convention with Eric Flint when the subject of Barack Obama came up. I admitted that his incredible rhetoric gave me hope.

Flint — a union organizer from Chicago — quickly disabused me. Obama, he said, was a Chicago Machine Democrat, and that meant he was a cynical horse-trader whose version of “democracy” was for insiders to do deals in backrooms, without accountability or transparency.

Those words stayed with me through the Obama years, as Obama literally shut off the server that grassroots organizers used to coordinate the campaign that got him elected and told us all to shut up and go away so he could strike deals with the GOP to get stuff done.

Flint’s compact description of Chicago Democrat politics has been an invaluable guide to understanding everything from Rod Blagojevich’s criminal corruption to Lori Lightfoot’s ghastly handling of the Black Lives Matter uprising last summer.

Above all, Flint’s description is how I’ve come to understand Rahm Emanuel, a terrible person even by the standards of the…