"It's a ripe mess and voters know it. It's right there in front of them. And this has outraged many liberal pundits, who perpetuate the myth that they speak truth to power even as they rally around the desperate establishment queen. The wits of our modern Versailles continue to ridicule voters who dare think the system is rigged, and call them foolish, deplorable hicks or mentally ill.
But media ridicule and the mocking of voters who have been left behind in this economy has its limits. All it does, really, is stoke cynicism in the final days, leaving Mrs. Clinton and her friends scrambling one step ahead of a closing Trump.
What has been revealed about the Clinton campaign is the Chicago Way, a line I adapted years ago from the movie "The Untouchables" about Al Capone's Chicago, superbly written by David Mamet. It comes from Sean Connery's beat cop character telling Kevin Costner's Eliot Ness that if the gangster brings a knife, you bring a gun.
You've heard it. Even President Obama joked about it once. But you don't use knives or guns in politics.
What I learned covering politics in a corrupt and broken Illinois — following kinky Chicago Democrats and equally kinky Republicans who formed a bipartisan Combine similar to Washington's — is that politicians don't get blood on their hands.
They use the color of law to make fortunes, and the hammer of government to destroy their enemies.
What you need is inside information and leverage, and political servants to bring that information to you, sharp and ready, so you may use it to grab power as you pull the levers of the people's government and tell them everything's legit.
The system was exposed even before Bernie Sanders lost to Clinton in the Democratic primaries. Clinton's control of Democratic Party superdelegates, those party insiders who were leveraged for her against Sanders, made that clear. Sanders had no chance.
Then came Wikileaks and DNC collusion, forcing the resignation of Democratic chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who was replaced as interim party chair by Brazile, who was then dumped as a CNN commentator for allegedly leaking presidential debate questions to Clinton through Podesta.
There are good journalists at CNN, Jake Tapper being the most prominent, and he's been properly angry and properly horrified at what Brazile has done. But it all adds to the general perception of journalists being recruited to play the inside game.
And now comes the worst of all, what seems to be that proxy war, fought through the media, between FBI agents investigating Clinton on a series of fronts and the Department of Justice which has reportedly tried to shut those investigations down.
Yes, it's corrosive. It is the Chicago Way writ large.
And pretending it is something else blinds Americans to dangers yet to come, no matter who is elected president in November."
What plagues Clinton in the final days: The Chicago Way
Chicago Tribune Piece (Link found on the RealClearPolitics site)