(Melchizedek Communique, MC1209b08) So Patrick Fitzgerald is like Eliot Ness, and Rod Blagojevich is like Al Capone. You saw the movie, "The Untouchables"; you know the score.

Thank God for the Internal Revenue Service. Except for the IRS, they'd have never put away Capone. Sure. You saw the movie, "The Untouchables"; you know the score.

And wasn't it terrible how that little girl got killed by the bomb in the suitcase? ("Hey, Mister! You forgot your suitca..." Kaboom!) And remember how the mother came to great hero Eliot Ness of the U.S. Treasury Department, and begged him to do something. (Never mind that the Chicago gangsters never really killed any little girl with a bomb. Forget that.)

So Patrick Fitzgerald and the Feds are great heroes, just like Eliot Ness and the Untouchables. Really though, Al Capone wouldn't pay kickbacks to the U.S. Treasury Department, and that's why the Feds went after him. The administration of Warren G. Harding, America's real first black president, fronted a protection racket for bootleggers. Harding's "Ohio Gang", in return for cash payoffs handed over to "bag man" Gaston Means, caused the Federal law enforcement to not see corruption in various cities. But Gaston Means, in a tell-all book published in 1930, says nothing about kickback "protection" money being paid by Chicago gangsters.

Naturally allied with any federal protection rackets was Colonel Robert McCormick, owner of the Chicago Tribune newspaper. Chicago mayor Big Bill Thompson was an anglophobe: "Keep out of foreign wars and make the King of England keep his nose out of our affairs!" roared Thompson in the 1920s. "To understand how the American monopoly press has been, and remains, pro-British, and like the Tribune Company having the Queen of England as a large owner," wrote Sherman H. Skolnick ("American Troika -- Part 1"), "one would have to begin by studying the early 1930s speeches in the Congressional Record of the most brave and outspoken Congressman in U.S. history, Congressman Louis T. McFadden... And the Brits know full well, having installed Bush the Younger, that he is, at the same time, subject to being terminated at any time by documented scandal." Big Bill Thompson, no friend of the British royalty, was the opposite of Tribune owner McCormick. Thompson was on friendly terms with Al Capone. People are going to buy liquor, just keep it under control, was Thompson's reasonable approach. McCormick did not like Thompson, and McCormick did not like Al Capone, by extension. In the late 1920s, McCormick whispered to president Herbert Hoover that Capone could be nailed by income tax laws.

Sure, Rod Blagojevich is no angel and the people of Illinois have increasingly grown sick of him. But why does Eliot Ness always -- always -- pounce on Chicago? When will Eliot Ness pounce on Washington, DC?