Maggie's Farm

Bird Dog ... It's hard to understand Chicago-style politics unless you've lived there, but we [Americans] made the mistake of importing a whole nest of people who were raised in and functioned and flourished in that Tammany Hall atmosphere, and really don't know any other way to do business.

Paranoia is part of it. Entrenched corruption is another part. And the group that's in power has been in power at least as long as I've been alive [and we all know how long that is]. In some ways, it resembles the Sicilian Mafia, which has tentacles throughout Sicily and southern Italy in every part of its functioning. The thing about the Italy parallel is that with Italy, you have to factor in the Resorgimento, and how relatively recent that was, in historical terms. Before the Resorgimento, Italy was a loose assemblage of city-states some of which hated each other, and most of which had their own Mafias.

Yes, America is an assemblage of regions too -- the Southeast, the Northeast, the Middle West, the Northwest, the Southwest, etc., but these regions were a pretty yeasty bunch, being constantly stirred up by influxes of bunches of Americans moving around within the country. Many of the cities in our country have their own brand of organized outlaw underclass, but I contend that Chicago has one of the most deeply seated and successfully operating outlaw underclasses in the country.

I suspect that in the coming years, when the full picture of the Obama campaign and presidency is revealed, we're going to find that it is unique in our country for its level of deliberate, determined corruption from the get-go. And directed from within the Administration.

Since I'm 81 now, and getting creakier, I probably won't ever know if I was right.

Marianne

Bird Dog -- Give him best wishes on his birthday from an equally cantankerous old Harvard girl, will you? I use a cane too. Fortunately, I took fencing in college, so it can on occasion be used as a weapon.

Marianne

DaveinPhoenix ... I suspect that next on Obama's priority list is building up his 'civilian militia,' which will appear in our neighborhoods in time for the census taking, bolstered by the thugs from SEIU and ACORN.

When the performance reaches your house, I advise courteous, principled resistance. Don't let those folks into the house. Doorsteps or covered porches are plenty good enough. Answer a minimum of their questions [they don't need to know the square footage of your house, the numbers of bathrooms or any other sign of civilized opulence.] They definitely don't need to know your Social Security number, if you own a gun/guns, your bank account and credit card numbers or any other personal information that can be used to steal your identity or harass you. If you're my age, you can pretend to be charmingly vague, as my lawyer advised me to do. But the US Constitution mandates that you give a truthful account of how many people live in your house. And that's all. Somehow or other, over the years, the census takers have developed a 6 page list of questions to ask us. Don't answer it.

Marianne