Neo-neocon speculates about 2016:

So, could Rahm Emanuel become… the first Jewish president?

Only if Hillary decides not to run: “Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel is said by well-connected Democrats to be considering the idea of running for president if Hillary Clinton opts out of the 2016 race.”

But Hillary will decide to run. And she almost certainly will be elected. You heard it here first (although I continue to hope I’m wrong).

It occurs to me—not for the first time—that our presidential future is likely to be a series of “firsts.” No WASP male will ever win again; the American people desire continual diversity novelty—although ordinarily Jews don’t count in that particular equation, because “diversity” can only come from groups considered underprivileged and oppressed. So even if by some wild chance Hillary declines to run, I don’t see a presidential future for Rahm.

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Commenter George Pal sneers:

He’s too short, anyway.

Plus there are pictures of him pirouetting in tights and codpiece.

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Then Vanderleun takes the ball and runs with it.

Oh George, George…. you don’t really get it yet do you?

Emmanual runs. And he comes out. And he introduces his secret partner of many years to a national audience on Ellen as….. Barack Obama!

Obama splits from Michelle to follow his heart. There’s an amicable divorce and Rahm and Barry marry. Barry reveals he’s the official “wife” and hence gets back into the White House as the First Lady.

The country applauds and then grieves for Michelle until it becomes known that she and Ellen are…. well, you know.

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The reference is to this Jerome Corsi article from 2009, which quotes reports claiming that:

“President Obama and his chief of staff Rahm Emanuel are lifetime members of the same gay bathhouse in uptown Chicago, according to informed sources in Chicago’s gay community, as well as veteran political sources in the city.”

4:49 video

Former Congressman Eric Massa

The Politico:

Rep. Eric Massa (D-N.Y.) says the House ethics committee is investigating him for inappropriate comments he made to a male staffer on New Year’s Eve — and that he’s the victim of a power play by Democratic leaders who want him out of Congress because he’s a “no” vote on health care reform.

“Mine is now the deciding vote on the health care bill,” Massa, who on Friday announced his intention to resign, said during a long monologue on radio station WKPQ. “And this administration and this House leadership have said, quote-unquote, they will stop at nothing to pass this health care bill. And now they’ve gotten rid of me, and it will pass. You connect the dots.”

Eric Massa does not like Rahm Emanuel very much and has a lot to say about it in this WKPQ-AM 1:40 interview on Real Clear Politics.

“Rahm Emanuel is son of the devil’s spawn. He is an individual who would sell his mother to get a vote. He would strap his children to the front end of a steam locomotive.”

Update, March 10:

Eric Massa’s television apearances, WaPO reports, included a number of contradictory statements.

Massa went on television Tuesday night for the first time since the allegations surfaced, but his comments in two cable television interviews contradicted earlier statements, serving only to raise more questions.

The freshman Democrat told Fox News Channel host Glenn Beck that “not only did I grope [a staffer], I tickled him until he couldn’t breathe,” then said hours later on CNN’s “Larry King Live” that “it is not true” that he groped anyone on his staff.

He told Beck that he resigned from the House because he made the mistake of “getting too familiar with my staff” members, but he told King that he left primarily for health reasons. Massa, 50, has survived non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, but he said he is afraid that he is facing his “third major cancer-recurrence scare.”

On Sunday, Massa said he was set up by powerful Democrats such as White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (Calif.) as part of an effort to remove opponents of health-care reform legislation. He backed away from that claim Tuesday, telling Beck, “I wasn’t forced out. I forced myself out.”

Glenn Beck wound up apologizing to his views for wasting their time with Massa.

Conservative AM radio commentators were skeptical of Massa yesterday, noting that claims that he was being pushed out for not supporting health care were contradicted by his previous vigorous advocacy of a public option.

Before running for Congress as a democrat, Massa had been a registered Republican.

The way Mr. Massa has been all over the map politically and his propensity to contradict himself reminds me of Andrew Sullivan, so I find it pretty easy to believe the former Congressman is gay.

Barack Obama and the democrats in Congress did not turn the economy around with their massive spending stimulus package. Unemployment rates are high. They have not fixed the credit markets with bailouts. A new wave of foreclosures is underway. Home real estate prices are still in decline, nearly a quarter of American home owners are underwater on their mortgages, and the commercial real estate market is headed for complete disaster. Small businesses are experiencing a credit squeeze, which some economic authorities argue is attributable to government soaking up available credit for federal deficits.

As the US economy sinks, the democrats controlling Washington are attempting to hand it an anvil in the form of a staggering new health care entitlement. If a deficit burden reaching to the sky is not enough, we know that Congress has every intention of allowing the Bush tax cuts to expire, and proposals for new forms of taxation, a V.A.T. and even a special wartime surtax, have been floated. Coming up as well are plans for even yet another massive federal tax scheme involving mandatory purchases of carbon credits (at least for business not favored by federal exemptions) and dollar transfers to international bodies and/or Third World countries.

Most of us assumed that leftwing democrats want to do all these economically unfortunate things because they are clueless, childish, and subscribe to a worldview whose economic theories have everything backward. They are reckless, irresponsible, and just plain dumb.

But, it turns out there is a more sinister theory out there.

According to James Simpson, writing at American Thinker, democrat bad economics is deliberate. There is a conspiracy, and they have a plan.

The methodology is known as the Cloward-Piven Strategy, and we can all be grateful to David Horowitz and his Discover the Networks for originally exposing and explaining it to us. He describes it as:

The strategy of forcing political change through orchestrated crisis. The “Cloward-Piven Strategy” seeks to hasten the fall of capitalism by overloading the government bureaucracy with a flood of impossible demands, thus pushing society into crisis and economic collapse.

Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven were two lifelong members of Democratic Socialists of America who taught sociology at Columbia University (Piven later went on to City University of New York). In a May 1966 Nation magazine article titled “The Weight of the Poor,” they outlined their strategy, proposing to use grassroots radical organizations to push ever more strident demands for public services at all levels of government.

The result, they predicted, would be “a profound financial and political crisis” that would unleash “powerful forces … for major economic reform at the national level.” …

The real goal of “health care” legislation, the real goal of “cap-and-trade,” and the real goal of the “stimulus” is to rip the guts out of our private economy and transfer wide swaths of it over to the government to control. Do not be deluded by the propaganda. These initiatives are vehicles for change. They are not goals in and of themselves except in their ability to deliver power. They and will make matters much worse, for that is their design.

This time, in addition to overwhelming the government with demands for services, Obama and the Democrats are overwhelming political opposition to their plans with a flood of apocalyptic legislation. Their ultimate goal is to leave us so discouraged, demoralized, and exhausted that we throw our hands up in defeat. As Barney Frank said, “the middle class will be too distracted to fight.”

I was smiling ironically, as I began assembling what I thought would make an amusing posting identifying a colorful and extremist line of accusation. But, as I reflect on the peculiarly self-destructive aspects of recent democrat political behavior, their strange willingness to defy the polls and ram through controversial measures in defiance of public opinion, I wonder if looking upon what they are doing as a form of the Cloward-Piven Strategy does not make sense.

It was the stock market crash that doomed Republican chances to defeat a relatively unknown, radical democrat last year. Chaos, fear, and uncertainty were precisely the reason that independent voters were willing to vote for Change, any kind of change, and took a flyer on Barack Hussein Obama. Chaos and economic bad news have been Barack Obama’s friends so far. Rahm Emanuel is famous for observing that he saw an empowering opportunity for the left in a serious crisis and was resolved not to waste that opportunity.

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That Barney Frank “the middle class will be too distracted to fight” quotation may be a warning sign, though. I’ve been unable to verify it as a real statement made by the Congressman from Massachusetts. It turns up in large volume as a search result, but always from this same body of text.

Barack Obama recently told the press that he thought about it for some time before deciding to go ahead and unleash attacks on AIG employees receiving contractually-specified compensation for job performance or as retention incentives. Doubtless, the president talked over whether it would be a good idea to use the White House as a platform to whip up public emotion into outraged anger directed at ordinary private citizens with his Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel.

Rahm Emanuel, as the Chicago Tribune reports, had at the time already long since collected his own bonus for passive collaboration on the board of the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation “Freddie Mac” in the policies directly responsible for the mortgage default crisis, unlike Jake DeSantis, for example, who would soon be nationally targeted despite having no actual real connection.

Before its portfolio of bad loans helped trigger the current housing crisis, mortgage giant Freddie Mac was the focus of a major accounting scandal that led to a management shake-up, huge fines and scalding condemnation of passive directors by a top federal regulator.

One of those allegedly asleep-at-the-switch board members was Chicago’s Rahm Emanuel—now chief of staff to President Barack Obama—who made at least $320,000 for a 14-month stint at Freddie Mac that required little effort. …

The Freddie Mac money was a small piece of the $16 million he made in a three-year interlude as an investment banker…

He was named to the Freddie Mac board in February 2000 by Clinton, whom Emanuel had served as White House political director…

The board met no more than six times a year. Unlike most fellow directors, Emanuel was not assigned to any of the board’s working committees, according to company proxy statements. Immediately upon joining the board, Emanuel and other new directors qualified for $380,000 in stock and options plus a $20,000 annual fee, records indicate.

ACORN probably won’t be busing any demonstrators over to Representative Rosa DeLauro’s house (where Emanual lives in the basement) to threaten him though, will they?

Rahm Emanuel, so fierce a political operator that democrats nicknamed him “Rahmbo,” previously had a softer side. Rush mockingly posted the above photo (and I enlarged it).

Recently targeted by the White House in a series of political attacks, Rush Limbaugh retaliated by challenging the renownedly eloquent Barack Obama to a live political debate on the issues on which they so conspicuously differ.

The current administration has specifically identified Rush Limbaugh as the principal spokesman of the opposition. No one would be a more fitting debate opponent.

Personally, I’ll bet that Obama chickens out and refuses to debate, but the compensation is that Rush will have plenty of fun mocking him for it.

I have an idea. If these guys are so impressed with themselves, and if they are so sure of their correctness, why doesn’t President Obama come on my show? We will do a one-on-one debate of ideas and policies. …

Let’s talk about all of these things, Mr. President. Let’s go ahead and have a debate on this show. No limits. Now that your handlers are praising themselves for promoting me as the head of a political party — they think that’s a great thing — then it should be a no-brainer for you to further advance this strategy by debating me on the issues and on the merits, and wipe me out once and for all!

Just come on this program. Let’s have a little debate. You tell me how wrong I am and you can convince the rest of the Americans that don’t agree with you how wrong we all are. You’re a smart guy, Mr. President. You don’t need these hacks to front for you. You’ve debated the best! You’ve debated Hillary Clinton. You’ve debated John Edwards. You’ve debated Joe Biden. You’ve debated Dennis Kucinich. You’ve debated the best out there. You are one of the most gifted public speakers of our age. I would think, Mr. President, you would jump at this opportunity. Don’t send lightweights like Begala and Carville to do your bidding — and forget about the ballerina, Emanuel. He’s got things to do in his office. These people, compared to you, Mr. President, are rhetorical chum.

I would rather have an intelligent, open discussion with you where you lay out your philosophy and policies and I lay out mine — and we can question each other, in a real debate. Any time here at the EIB Network studios.

Hat tip to the Barrister.

Never let a serious crisis go to waste. What I mean by that is it’s an opportunity to do things you couldn’t do before. – Rahm Emanuel

The Wall Street Journal quotes the democrat White House Chief of Staff’s dictum in explaining what the democrat’s so-called stimulus package is all about.

Democrats in Congress are certainly taking his advice to heart. The 647-page, $825 billion House legislation is being sold as an economic “stimulus,” but now that Democrats have finally released the details we understand Rahm’s point much better. This is a political wonder that manages to spend money on just about every pent-up Democratic proposal of the last 40 years.

We’ve looked it over, and even we can’t quite believe it. There’s $1 billion for Amtrak, the federal railroad that hasn’t turned a profit in 40 years; $2 billion for child-care subsidies; $50 million for that great engine of job creation, the National Endowment for the Arts; $400 million for global-warming research and another $2.4 billion for carbon-capture demonstration projects. There’s even $650 million on top of the billions already doled out to pay for digital TV conversion coupons.

Read the whole thing. You and your children and your grandchildren will be paying for it.

Obama shakes Blagojevich’s hand, December 2, 2008

According to Fox News, Obama’s future White House Chief of Staff, former congressman Rahm Emanuel, had several conversations with Blagojevich and his chief of staff related to the appointment of a replacement to Barack Obama’s forsaken Senate seat… and the FBI has those conversations on tape.

1:56 video

Ouch! No wonder Rahm Emanuel yesterday refused to take reporters’ questions.

Barack Obama has not even been sworn in yet, and the partisan dam that blocked media inquiry into his ties to corrupt Illinois politics has already started to burst. The signs of an imminent press feeding frenzy at Obama’s expense are visible.

When Barack Obama named the Machiavelli of the democratic left, Rahm Emanuel, as White House Chief of Staff, the move, amounting to the selection of “a wartime consigliere,” was widely interpreted as evidence of the new administration’s intention of pursuing a highly polarized agenda, rather than, as Obama promised throughout his campaign, moving beyond partisanship.

Further signs of President-elect Obama’s intentions will come with ongoing appointments. Transition team chief John Podesta promised major cabinet-level appointments would be announced next month.

US News & World Reports published an unofficial transition flowchart (.pdf), currently circulating within the Beltway, which has some real eye-openers: e.g., Al Gore as “Climate Czar” and druggie-playboy-turned-Conspiracy-Theorist-and-Environmental-Prophet Robert Kennedy, Jr. as head of the EPA.

Robert Kennedy, Jr.

Walter Olson recently sounded the alarm about this possible appointment in Forbes, profiling Kennedy’s recent career promoting scary theories about childhood vaccinations causing Autism (complete with a CDC cover-up shielding the Drug Industry), air pollution causing Down’s Syndrome, and the Republican Party stealing the 2004 election.

James G. Wiles, in the Philadelphia Bulletin, asks “what would Rahm Emanuel do if he had Congressman John Boehner’s job as House Minority Leader?”

That’s easy. Put as many long-range torpedoes into the water aimed at Senator Obama’s ship of state before Republicans lose control of the Executive Branch as possible. Here are a few:

Appoint U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois Patrick Fitzpatrick as a special prosecutor so he can pursue his investigation of Tony Rezko and his corrupt dealings with Illinois’s governor and other creatures and spoilsmen of the Daley Machine. This will make it politically difficult for a President Obama to pardon Mr. Rezko and impossible for him to terminate Mr. Fitzpatrick as a federal officer come January 21 as a way of de-railing this investigation.

Appoint a special prosecutor to investigate ACORN’s voter registration methods and its dealings with the Obama campaign.

Appoint a special prosecutor to investigate the Obama campaign’s on-line fundraising operation, including its disabling of the credit card security software on its on-line donations system. File a complaint with the Federal Election Commission regarding same.

Appoint a bipartisan (love that word!) presidential commission to review the candidates’ fundraising in this election cycle and to recommend changes in federal election laws.

File ethics complaints against Sen. Chris Dodd and Congressman Barney Frank for their relationship with Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and Countrywide Mortgage.

Be it noted that, in his day, this is probably what Newt Gingrich would have done, too. It was then-Congressman Gingrich’s persistent filing of ethics complaints against then-House Speaker Jim Wright, D Texas, which eventually brought Speaker Wright down and made possible the Republicans’ re-taking of Congress in 1994 on the platform of the Contract with America.

Who needs a honeymoon anyway? Not Rahm Emanuel.

Too bad George W. Bush is likely to do none of the above.