The Week That Was: #Rahmsplaining It All
By Staff in News on Nov 30, 2014 10:15PM
Consider, if you will, a city in which the mayor is the subject of calls for investigations about his policies, policies that harm public schools and the taxpayers while furthering the enrichment of Wall Street; for taking illegal campaign contributions from the scions of Wall Street; and runs a television campaign ad its subjects immediately call a complete and utter fabrication.
Now imagine that same man is the heavy media favorite to win re-election in one of the nation’s largest cities.
No, it’s not “The Twilight Zone’’— it’s Chicago in the era of #Rahmsplaining.
The ad claims he was instrumental in helping a community coalition shut down coal plants that were polluting their neighborhood and endangering their children.
The organization says the mayor was helpful in the way a five-year-old child might be in making cookies—he’ll get under foot, annoy the crap out of you, lick the beaters, eat all the cookies, then take all the credit.
I know what you’re thinking. Anyone can disagree about who gets how much credit. This is a simple disagreement about percentages. Perhaps, but in this case Emanuel actually had members of the community organizations arrested. If you can find a way to get from having the backers of a cause arrested to claiming you spearheaded their effort, then you understand #Rahmsplaining.
Chicago has a history of similar logic. While City Hall was #Rahmsplaining long before Rahm was actually the mayor, the North Side nine have been Cubsplaining for more than a century. In fact, right now, the club is Cubsplaining exactly how it started a construction project it may not have finished for opening day.
Lately, we’ve seen a well-known national company Uberspalin things. It Ubersplained why charging five times their normal rates during a rush-hour crisis is good for us.
That was just after Uber 'splained about how, when the company threatened to use private data to harm its critics, it didn’t really mean it would use private data to harm its critics. That's just the media being sensationalist for accurately quoting its executives.
Now, the Bears, they don’t really Bearsplain anything. They just suck. Watching this team is more likely to induce sleep than a glass of wine with Bill Cosby. It appears, though, the GOP employs the same caliber of people who troll Mark Trestman’s daughter on Twitter. Let’s hope there is a special, never-ending Black Friday sale stampede where they all meet in the afterlife.
Speaking of sports, the Blackhawks just finished an annual pilgrimage known as the “circus trip,’’ on which it went 5-1-0. That is a stretch each November while the team has to go on the road for an extended period while the circus performs at the United Center. So while circuses may be horribly cruel to Lions, tigers and elephants, while glorifying the likes of Gunther Gebel Williams, it seems to be good for our hockey team.
Woo, go Hawks!
And, lastly, only in Chicago would a federal judge have to be so explicit as to tell our Mayor he is not allowed to start tearing up the site of the proposed Lucas Garage Sale before a ruling can be made on whether or not the decision to build it actually contained a single iota of the democratic process.
In Chicago, that kind of instruction is known as ... Meigsplaining.
And that was...the week that was.
—Tony Boylan
'The Week That Was'' is a satirical, yet informative, look back at recent news. We consider it to be mostly accurate