America's 'Best Friend' Deserves Better Than Ambassador 'Rahmbo'

CHICAGO — After meeting with President Joe Biden at the White House last month, Japan Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga said he considers the United States his country's "best friend."

Biden's response: Let's send world-class bully Rahm Emanuel as the U.S. Ambassador to Japan to handle diplomatic relations with the world's third-largest economy and the fate of international security in the Pacific region?

[COMMENTARY]

Say it ain't so, President Joe.

Or at least explain to our best friends in Japan why they deserve an ambassador whose idea of diplomacy is to send a pollster a dead fish, drop the F-bomb while negotiating a teachers union contract and advise Stanford Graduate School of Business students to be "idealistic" and "ruthless" in negotiations.

"Diplomatic" isn't a term anyone has ever used to describe Chicago's former mayor.

But here are a few: "imperious jerk," "liar," "a------" and "bully."

Emanuel's nicknames include: "Rahmbo," "The Rahminator" and "Emperor Rahmulus" — after Romulus Augustulus, a "usurper and puppet" known for being the last Western Emperor before the fall of Rome.

The nameplate on Emanuel's desk when he served as former President Barack Obama's chief of staff read: "Undersecretary of Go F--- Yourself."

Plus, Emanuel has a long reputation of being the purveyor of terrible ideas including the "three strikes" crime bill that led to the mass incarceration of African Americans — which Biden, himself, has called a "mistake" he regrets backing as a U.S. senator. He was the architect of the North American Free Trade Agreement that sent American jobs across borders, and of so-called welfare reform that only made extreme poverty worse.

MORE ON PATCH: Take It From A City That Knows: Rahm Emanuel Is Bad For America

And then there is the sorry state Emanuel left Chicago before deciding not to run for a third term because his approval rating was so low there was no way he could win re-election.

His Chicago legacy includes a series of disgraceful milestones, including the closure of the most public schools at one time in American history, passing a record-breaking property tax hike and his administration's cover-up of the video showing a police officer shoot and kill Black teenager Laquan McDonald until Emanuel got elected to a second term.

Those are just some of the reasons that so many people objected to the suggestion floated in the New York Times (probably by Rahm himself) that Biden was considering Emanuel for a spot in his Cabinet until the trial balloon thankfully burst.

While the idea of shipping Emanuel halfway around the world sounds like a good idea, even the most cynical Chicagoans wouldn't wish Rahm on their worst enemy.

Let alone Japan, America's best friend.

Mark Konkol, recipient of the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for local reporting, wrote and produced the Peabody Award-winning series, "Time: The Kalief Browder Story." He was a producer, writer and narrator for the "Chicagoland" docu-series on CNN, and a consulting producer on the Showtime documentary, "16 Shots."

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