Remember when both political parties weren't all that far from the center?
As recently as the Reagan years, most of the Democratic Party was liberal, but they weren't literally bat-guano crazy. I remember Democrats like New York's Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan; he was a liberal, but he wasn't crazy, and while I seldom agreed with him, he was intelligent and drew a certain amount of respect.
Most Democrats of that stripe have been kicked to the curb by the Democrat Party in favor of the "Squad" and looney-tunes progressives. "Woke" for the last few election cycles, outside of the major Democrat-controlled cities, has become a synonym for "losing elections."
Then, there's Chicago, where the electorate replaced the walking disaster, Mayor Lightfoot, with an even bigger disaster, Mayor Brandon Johnson. For the Clinton administration creature and former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, that is a bridge too far. He said as much to Bill Maher on HBO's "Real Time with Bill Maher" show on Friday night.
Emanuel said on Friday night that government has allowed the city to become too "permissive" on crime and has fixated on niche liberal issues like transgender bathroom policies rather than dealing with plummeting education standards.
"I don't want to hear another word about the locker room, I don't want to hear another word about the bathroom. You better start focusing on the classroom," Emanuel told the "Real Time" panel, featuring host Bill Maher and liberal pundit Fareed Zakaria.
Maher, who often shreds the excesses of the woke left on his program, wondered, "I read that the current mayor of Chicago has an approval rating of 6.6 percent…. What’s going on in Chicago?"
"Round it up. 7," the ex-mayor and former U.S. ambassador to Japan joked, though he went into some serious criticism of the city’s government. He began by noting his own mantra back when he ran the city, telling Maher, "Safe streets, strong schools, stable finances. Focus on those three things and your city’s going to be fine."
Watch:
I never thought I'd be writing these words, but... Rahm Emanuel is right.
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Look, everything in the deep-blue urban areas is crashing and burning. The schools are graduating legions of entitled illiterates while spending more per student than almost anywhere else in the world. Their police are hamstrung by stupid policies, and frustrated by permissive prosecutors and judges. Their "sanctuary" statuses have saddled them with hordes of illegal aliens. Crime is rising, and the approval ratings of the pols are crashing.
Chicago, though, seems to be leading the charge into stupidity. Mayor Lightfoot's approval ratings were down there with skunks and toenail fungus, so who does the city of Chicago pick to replace her? Brandon Johnson, whose ratings are now at the bottom of a metaphorical Marianas Trench. Even a liberal like Rahm Emanuel would be an improvement over these nuts.
It's a shame what's happening to our major cities. When I was a young man, in 1980 and 1981, my buddies and I went to Chicago a few times for the weekend. We hung around down on the Loop, heard some great music, ate some... food (hint: White Castle), and drank a fair amount of adult beverages. You could do that, then. Now? I wouldn't advise even a bunch of big, tough rural kids from Iowa to go into Chicago these days, much less get caught there after dark.
Rahm Emanuel is one of the few remaining voices of, well, not being completely insane, in the Democratic Party. Yes, that's damning with faint praise, but for today's Democrats, that's about the best we can give them.