For those who thought Obama would put us bloggers out of business

Rahm Fucking Emanuel?

This is the best you can do?

Rahm Emanuel? The guy tho fought Howard Dean, without whom the next president would be named "John McCain", tooth and nail about the 50-state strategy and tried to have him booted from the chairmanship of the DNC? The guy whose idea of strategy in presidential politics was to pour money into states that were a sure bet anyway and hope that maybe Florida and Ohio might go your way and get you the victory?

Rahm Emanuel? The guy who drove a nascent Democratic star in the person of Paul Hackett out of politics for good after insisting that Sherrod Brown, a good "party man", should run against Mike DeWine in Ohio in 2006? Sherrod Brown is a perfectly good Senator but Paul Hackett was a potential star who could have sold the Democratic brand for decades to come to the very swing voters that are always wooed so heavily at election time.

Rahm Emanuel? The guy who decided that a good, honest, well-known and popular progressive named Christine Cegelis wasn't the right candidate for Illinois' 6th district because you don't dare run against Captain Codpiece's war? It was Rahm Emanuel, having learned absolutely nothing from the infamous Max Cleland/Saxby Chambliss race of 2002, who machinated the moving of an Iraq War vet named Tammy Duckworth who had lost both legs in Iraq into the district under the assumption that no one would dare criticize a war amputee. No one knew who Duckworth was, so no one was there to defend her when her opponent, Peter Roskam, accused her of wanting to "cut and run" from Iraq. Duckworth is a brave and good woman who was as ill served by Barack Obama's would-be chief of staff as she was by Peter Roskam.

Rahm Emanuel was quick to take credit for the Democrats' takeover of the House in 2006, but as Paul Lukasiak pointed out at the time, if Rahm had had his way, the Democrats would have spent the next two years still in the wilderness. But hey...Rahm would have still been on the talk shows, and isn't that all that really matters?

The Hackett/Brown and Cegelis/Duckworth fiascoes is what makes Rahm Emanuel, as far as I'm concerned, the poster child for the Democratic Party's long sojourn in the wilderness. The future of the party is with Obama and with Howard Dean at the helm of the DNC, bringing the kids into the fold and showing that we don't have to be the party of glad-handing and hackery. Choosing this odious hack as his chief of staff is not the most auspicious of beginnings for Obama, though it's one that was predictable. After all, only Republicans thought Obama was the most liberal Senator. The rest of us knew better.