CHICAGO. In a sign that he plans to take a hard line against media critics of his boss, Rahm Emanuel, who will be chief of staff in President-elect Obama’s administration, today warned political cartoonists to “lay off Obama’s ears or I’ll break your fingers.”
Emanuel: “I’m gonna crush you like a bug just to watch the juice run out.”
During the campaign Obama displayed a sensitivity bordering on prickliness to media adversaries, throwing reporters from the Washington Times, the New York Post and the Dallas Morning News off his plane after their editors endorsed Senator John McCain. “Those guys got off easy,” said Emanuel, who is known for a hardball style honed on the streets of Chicago. “I let them take their Diet Cokes off the plane, and they got to keep their copies of the in-flight shopping magazine.”
Both Emanuel and Obama are long-time residents of Chicago’s South Side, where their street gang, the 55th Street Exterminators, was involved in numerous skirmishes with members of Neocon Nation, a rival gang with deep roots in the University of Chicago’s free-market economic departments.
Milton Friedman: “You touch that Mint Milano, I’ll break your face.”
“It could get pretty ugly at a Friday afternoon sherry hour,” says former Dean of Students Willem de Vice, who was head resident at a U of C dorm. “You can talk about ‘hope’ and ‘change’ all you want, but nobody wanted to be in the line of fire when there was only one Pepperidge Farm Mint Milano left on the silver platter.”
Copyright 2008, Con Chapman
