'Salon' (Yes, 'Salon') Declares Rahm Emanuel a 'National Disgrace'

Say good-night, Rahmbo: even the hard Left is tossing you under the bus:

The scandal surrounding Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel’s grossly corrupt and negligent handling of police violence in his city keeps getting worse and worse.

Ever since Chicago was forced in November to release video showing the gruesome police killing of black teenager Laquan McDonald, Emanuel has been on a quest to save himself from being driven out of office. He has publicly shed tears over McDonald’s death and announced a raft of new measures intended to show that the Chicago Police Department is reforming itself.

Yet events, many of them of that same police department’s own making, continue to disrupt Emanuel’s plans to evade responsibility.

Even by the low standards of the Obama administration, race relations in Chicago have hit a new nadir. And yet arrogant Emanuel, in order to save his own political hide, went ahead and worsened them anyway:

We now know, thanks to emails obtained by The Daily Beast, that lawyers met with Emanuel just weeks before the election and discussed the video with him. They then insisted to the McDonald family that the terms of any settlement agreement over his killing include a provision that the video be kept from public view. (The lawyers were successful, and the settlement was approved by the City Council in a 36-second vote.) We also know from reporting done by the Associated Press that the mayor’s advisers were openly worrying about the potential fallout from the video as early as December of 2014—and that the supposedly independent body that monitors the police in Chicago was closely coordinating its response to the video with Emanuel’s staff.

It beggars belief that Emanuel—a man whose hard-charging, domineering, micro-managing tendencies are the stuff of legend—would have merely left the details of such a potentially explosive issue to his staff without some personal directive. That would have required a personality transplant. Clearly, Emanuel was involved.

It’s equally clear that Emanuel does not deserve to run Chicago for even a second longer. He exemplifies a particularly loathsome breed of Democratic politician—the constantly triangulating, plutocrat-courting, privatizing so-called “centrist,” that so dominated the Bill Clinton years. Emanuel deserves to be buried—along with that tradition—so that someone with a modicum of integrity can take the reins.

For me, it’s hard to separate your garden-variety Democrat pols from the “particularly loathsome breed,” but what the heck. It’s the thought that counts.