Senator Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) charges Obama with "beginning the unraveling of Social Security"

[ieoeja]

73. How could someone who worked for Chicago Democrats conflate Obama with Chicago Democrats?

Obama got into office as a reform candidate in opposition to the Machine. The Machine jumped on Obama's bandwagon after that wagon was already on the road (ditto Rahm).


And for the record, it is impossible for Chicago to be the most corrupt city in the country. The federal investigation into Chicago politics when Republicans were running the city was never officially closed. As a result, the Feds have never stopped investigating this city. No other city in the country is under that kind of scrutiny.

Conversely, a few years back after the trial following an investigation into New York corruption concluded, the New York congress-critters demanded that the DoJ close the investigation. The DoJ is not allowed to go on fishing expeditions when there is no open investigation. So they now need a credible accusation of corruption in New York before they can investigate corruption in New York.

For that matter, if you are from the Chicago area then you HAVE to know that Cicero and Rosemont are far, far more corrupt than Chicago. Those two cities are run by the mafia!

I grew up on a farm in the smallest and least populated county in Indiana. And I can assure you that corruption there was rife. We had the misfortune of the county prosecutor dying in office. The governor, being from the rival party, assigned someone from his party. Half the politicians were in jail before the year was out.

The prize is bigger in Chicago. And it gets far more scrutiny. That is what truly separates Chicago from other locales when it comes to corruption.


Now, as to Illinois ... this is historically a Republican state after all. So it should come as no surprise that, what, four of our last six governors ended up in jail? And Nixon called off his 1960 recount because it found vast more voting irregularity in the Republican strongholds (again, those places *not* under constant scrutiny).

Though the biggest crook of them all, Gov Len Small, was never put away. Gotta love a man who garnished state employee's wages for involuntary political contributions, coined the argument that it could not be illegal if he did it (he beat Nixon to that argument by decades), stacked the State Police with Klansmen, called up the National Guard to defend him from the police, and ultimately got away when his jury was stacked/bought-off/intimidated by one Alphonse Capone.