Enough with the Chicago bashing, Republicans

Hey. I'm no particular fan of Barack Obama or Rahm Emanuel. In fact, I spent a substantial part of my young adulthood fighting the Chicago Machine back when it was a great deal more formidable and monolithic- and corrupt- than it is today.

But I take umbrage at the current Republican fashion of attacking the president by trashing the town he and I both come from.

Would it surprise you to learn that, per capita, North Dakota has more Federal corruption prosecutions than Illinois?

Yes, I know all the jokes about how Illinois is the only state in which our governors make our license plates. And heaven knows that we have always had more than our fair share of corruption and dirty politics back home.

But it's become a cliche, and it kind of misses the point. Despite its history of corruption, Chicago is also the home town of Clarence Darrow and Jane Addams and Bob Merriam and Len Despres and Dick Simpson and Bill Singer. Illinois is also the home state of Abraham Lincoln and John Peter Altgeld and the Stevensons. And while we're more famous for crooked Democratic politicians than for crooked Republican ones, each party can claim one of the two most recent ex-governors of Illinois, both of whom are behind bars. The Democrats may have had Dick Daley, but the Republicans had Al Capone's pet mayor, William Hale Thompson.

Reform is as much a part of our heritage as corruption, and frankly the people who put so much stress on the latter that they forget the former need to read a little more of the history they bandy about so carelessly.

Mayor Emanuel is right about one thing: those who trash talk my home town need to become better informed.

HT: Raal Clear Politics