The Professor, the Ballerina, and the Public Enemy

Here it is only mid-July and already the true thuggish face of the Obama Permanent Campaign is emerging for all to see. When the president of the United States feels utterly free to bash private enterprise and the now-deceased Protestant work ethic, and even tries to criminalize it, you know we have entered uncharted waters in American political history.

Not since the Copperhead Democrats tried to appease the South and derail the Lincoln presidency have the Democrats been such an explicitly anti-American party. The relatively moderate party of JFK and Hubert Humphrey was hijacked in the streets of Saul Alinsky’s Chicago in 1968 and at the Miami Beach convention of 1972, which nominated George McGovern, and was transformed into a radical group that can no longer contain its animus against our country, our history, and our Constitution.

All eminently predictable, of course.

I’ve often called the Democrats a “criminal organization masquerading as a political party” — please read my brief  new book on the subject, The People v. the Democratic Party, now available on Amazon, for chapter and verse. But the current rogues calling themselves “Democrats” are, as I pointed out last year over on NRO, especially dangerous:

For years now, I’ve been saying that the modern Democratic party is the unholy issue of thirties gangsters and sixties Marxists, a criminal organization masquerading as a political party, composed of thugs, lawyers, layabouts, and guilt-ridden dupes, and motivated entirely by a lust for power disguised as the phony virtue of “compassion.” And I mean that in the nicest possible way: The Republicans could use a little — no, make that a lot — of their ruthless moxie.

The Professor

Speaking of gangsters and Marxists, Alinsky himself credited some of his effectiveness to the tactics he learned as an accomplice of the Capone mob in Chicago:

He introduced me to Frank Nitti, known as the Enforcer, Capone’s number-two man, and actually in de facto control of the mob because of Al’s income-tax rap. Nitti took me under his wing. I called him the Professor and I became his student. Nitti’s boys took me everywhere, showed me all the mob’s operations, from gin mills and whorehouses and bookie joints to the legitimate businesses they were beginning to take over. Within a few months, I got to know the workings of the Capone mob inside out.

I’ll bet he did. As a gangland historian myself, it’s been fascinating for me to watch the Mob’s progress from the cudgel wing of Tammany Hall, when it realized it could take over an entire city, to its seizing of various states (Nevada, Arkansas, New Jersey, New York, Missouri and Illinois) and — in the person of Barack Hussein Obama II and cronies like Jake Lingle and the Ballerina — one whole nation. Courtesy of the Chicago Sun-Times, here’s the current mayor of Chicago, in happier times:

Primo Uomo

It’s all well and good for Mitt Romney to point out, in his golly-gee genteel way, that the Obama administration pays off its political contributors in the form of government-guaranteed loans and rigged contracts. Of course it does — that’s the very essence of gangsterism, rewarding your friends and punishing your enemies.

But if Romney thinks that’s going to enrage the good people of America, he’d better think again, and fast. Thanks to changing demographics, the Left’s relentless assault on the American educational system over the past half-century, and the Regressives’ control of the media, it’s an open question whether such folks are still a majority. We’ve entered a period in our history very similar to the late 1920s and early ’30s, in which a sizable percentage of gangland-occupied jurisdictions sided with the gangsters. It took two-fisted reformers like Tom Dewey to rearrange the popular imagination. (The movies even mirrored the change, with James Cagney moving from playing criminals in semi-documentary films such as The Public Enemy to embodying the FBI in G-Men.)

Take that, America

Hard to know at this point why Team Obama is already going nuclear on Romney — is it confidence or desperation?  Gangbusters like Dewey and Eliot Ness, as well as crusading newspaper editors like Frank Knox, exposed the moral rot at the heart of the Democratic Party and its gangland allies, temporarily restoring the balance between honesty and corruption (and yes, in Illinois in particular, the GOP was and remains equally complicit in state-sanctioned theft).

Clearly, all the president’s men have gambled that — just as Axelrod has done throughout Obama’s fixed-fight career — they can knock Romney out early by destroying his squeaky-clean reputation. But, as Dewey and the others showed, you can still be a nice guy and fight as dirty as they do. The question is whether Romney understands that and, if so, what he plans to do about it.