Assembling the Obama Thugocracy: Rahm Emanuel

Barack Obama "reaches across the aisle" by offering the Chief of Staff position to the most viciously partisan Democrat in the House of Representatives, Rahm Emanuel.

Here's what Nina Easton of Fortune Magazine had to say about Emanuel in 2006:

Emanuel's in-your-face money demands make him stand out in a party that has sometimes been a little prissy about big-donor fundraising. He's expanded the DCCC's donor base, appealing both to like-minded young financiers and big-business donors with GOP ties who are hedging their bets this fall.

When it comes to slicing and dicing his Republican foes, Emanuel applies a Chicago pol's sensibility that recalls that famous "Untouchables" line: "He pulls a knife, you pull a gun; he sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue."

Consitutional Thugocracy Rating: 100%

UPDATE:

Blogger Getting Paid to Watch elaborates on the "political thug" theme:

Obama the uniter names political thug Rham Emanuel his Chief of Staff

ORIGIN OF THE TERM "THUGOCRACY"

Wordspy cites the first use of the term "thugocracy" back in 1982:

thugocracy (thug.AWK.ruh.see; th as in thin) n. Rule of a country or state by a group of thugs.

Example Citation:

"But can the United States in general, and the war on Osama bin Laden and the Taliban thugocracy in particular, somehow be mass-marketed to a vast and skeptical Muslim populace?"

—Tom Mashberg, "America promises to be a hard sell to many Muslims," The Boston Herald, November 11, 2001

Earliest Citation:

The cruise ship is another Pequod, or ship of fools: one of those large symbols with strings attached, by means of which the writer snarls at socialist thugocracy, the class warfare of crooks versus fools, third-world liberation movements, the United Nations and just about everything else.

—Paul Zweig, "Modest Proposals," The New York Times, June 20, 1982

George Will has used the term "thugocracy" in several columns since 2001, according to Wordspy, and may have used it as early as 1988.

Lee Cary of American Thinker first combined the term "thugocracy" with "Obama" in his May 16, 2008 article A President Obama's Neoliberal Thugocracy.

The term "thugocracy" was first combined with "Barack Obama" in the more traditional media, as best I can determine, by columnist Michael Barone on October 12, 2008: The Coming Obama Thugocracy by Michael Barone

COMMENTS SOUGHT:

I've heard some comments that using the term "New Thugocracy" to describe the Obama Administration may be unfair.

I would like to hear comments from readers on this topic.

In my usage of the term, I think of a "thugocracy" as governmental rule by "political thugs", as opposed to "thugs".