Middle Men and Public Official A

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We haven’t heard a lot about Chicago and all of the political corruption that the city is famous for lately. It hasn’t been on the national media’s radar screen during the “summer of love.” Could there be a reason for that?

Will Chicago’s politicial culture become a major issue in the fall, maybe brought to the public’s attention via some shadowy 527 group’s ads?

Is that why John McCain brought up the need to fight against political corruption at a California fund raiser? Is that why Sarah Palin with her reputation of fighting against political corruption was brought onto the GOP ticket?

Could Chicago’s culture and history of political corruption have been the reason why Hillary Clinton didn’t want to give up without fighting for every last delegate? Hillary Clinton brought up the Tony Rezko - Obama connections earlier this year in her primary battle for the Democratic presidential nomination.

TMLutas wrote earlier this year that maybe the connections between Rezko and Obama aren’t so obvious for a reason.

Could it have just been a coincidence, maybe a bet on someone who had shown political promise in Chicago during a few years from June 1985 until entering law school in 1988 and greatness in law school?

It might have been all of the news about Barack Obama being the first African-American editor of the Harvard Law Review that captured the attention of many in Chicago and elsewhere. Is that how Tony Rezko came to offer Barack Obama a job — unsolicitied — when Barack Obama was still in law school?

Did those contacts over the years with Tony Rezko influence Barack Obama in any way?

Writes TMLutas:

Rezko isn’t an isolated player but rather part of a corrupt machine. “Public Official A”, Rezko’s major political patron, has now been officially revealed to be Governor Rod Blagojevich.

Smart corrupt officials don’t always do simple cash for favor deals, not in a place like Chicago which is crawling with corruption, not if they want to go national and want to be able to pretend to be honest. Smart corrupt officials use middle men.

Can someone rise through the ranks of Chicago’s political world without being caught up in corruption?

Could Barack Obama have been kept away from the messier side of Chicago’s machine on the hopes that he’d rise to a level where he’d be able to help the Chicago political machine via legitimate ways? Is Barack Obama one of the last clean politicians in a land where there are multiple political corruption investigations being conducted right now?

Until there’s something more, we have to give Barack Obama every benefit of the doubt that he stayed away from all of those interesting characters floating around the political scene in Chicago. After all, Chicago is the place where Alderman Arenda Troutman was caught on a FBI wire saying “most aldermen, most politicians are hoes.”

Having lived in Northwest Indiana for a while — home of one of the most corrupt political machines in the country, according to Robert Kennedy and the place where every so often the FBI carts away government documents from some politicial figure’s office — always makes me wonder. Can someone swim in a sea of political corruption without getting dirty?

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