Malphas, a Mighty President of Hell

On this All Hallows Eve, as we citizens of Chicago begin another slow winter freeze, watch one season of local sports franchise implosion fade into another season of different sports franchise collapse, and find ourselves beset on all sides with fiscal disaster, failing schools and legendary municipal corruption, we cannot help but notice that -- election after landslide election, for an entire generation -- one man has presided over it all.

And we are moved to ask the perennial Halloween Question: "Is dis guy in league wit da fuckin' devil or what?"

Before you answer, consider this description Malphas -- a "grand president of Hell" -- from Johann Wier's "Pseudomonarchia Daemonum" (1583)

...he is seene like a Crowe, but being cloathed with humane image,

speaketh with a hoarse voice,

"If we quoted Mayor Daley correctly every time we dealt with him, he probably wouldn't be embarrassed, but some people would probably be embarrassed for him." -- George Langford, Chicago Tribune's public editor

be buildeth houses and high towres wonderfullie, and quicklie bringeth artificers togither,

Daley will be remembered as a "builder mayor" despite Chicago's failure to land the Olympics, Simpson said. He helped spearhead the popular downtown Millennium Park, the O'Hare International Airport expansion project and a redeveloped south Loop area of downtown Chicago.

he throweth downe also the enimies edifications,

...
In a controversial move on March 30, 2003, Mayor Daley ordered private crews to destroy the runway in the middle of the night, bulldozing large X-shaped gouges into the runway surface.[7] The required notice was not given to the Federal Aviation Administration or the owners of airplanes tied down at the field, and as a result sixteen planes were left stranded at an airport with no operating runway, and an incoming flight was diverted. The stranded aircraft were later allowed to depart from Meigs' 3,000 foot (914 m) taxiway.

Mayor Daley defended his actions, described as "appalling" by general aviation interest groups, by claiming it would save the City of Chicago the effort of further court battles before the airport could close. He claimed that safety concerns required the closure, due to the post-September 11 risk of terrorist-controlled aircraft attacking the downtown waterfront near Meigs Field.[9] In reality, closing the airport made the airspace less restrictive. When the airport was open, downtown Chicago was within Meigs Field's Class D airspace, requiring two-way radio communication with the tower. The buildings in downtown Chicago are now in Class E/G airspace, which allows any airplane to legally fly as close as 1,000 feet (300 m) from these buildings with no radio communication at all.[11]

Editorials in the Chicago Tribune pointed out that "the issue is Daley's increasingly authoritarian style that brooks no disagreements, legal challenges, negotiations, compromise or any of that messy give-and-take normally associated with democratic government."
...

he helpeth to good familiars,

Stroking Mayor Daley's big ego has become commonplace and I don't expect aldermen to have the guts to stand up to him anymore. He is the master puppeteer amongst 49 "yes" men and women, who would rather pimp the tax payers for debt in 2016, than to find more creative, fundraising efforts to bridge the Olympic cost overruns.

he receiveth sacrifices willinglie,

It has been nearly a year since he imposed tougher limits on who can contribute to his campaign, but Mayor Daley showed Wednesday he can still rake in the dough.

The mayor returned more than $128,000 in campaign contributions that violate his crackdown on money from donors with potential conflicts, but he still has nearly $5.7 million for the Feb. 27 election.

And Daley's campaign officials said this month is so loaded with fund-raising events, they are having trouble scheduling them all.

"We've just run out of dates right now," said Terry Peterson, his campaign manager.

Daley's war chest dwarfs those of his challengers, according to reports filed Wednesday. He started the year with ...

but he deceiveth all the sacrificers,

The Shadow Budget

...
On October 15, Mayor Richard M. Daley held a press conference to break some bad news: To erase a $500 million budget deficit for next year, he would probably have to eliminate jobs, cut services, and dip into reserve funds generated by leasing the Skyway and the parking meters.

But behind the scenes, the mayor and his chief aides were proposing to spend millions of taxpayer dollars on a rehab of Willis Tower, subsidies for privately run hospitals and Fortune 500 corporations, and pet neighborhood projects that won't be included in the official city budget.
...

and there obeie him fourtie legions.

Those same aldermen now see a measure of justice in the fact that the renegade organizations the mayor used to govern by fear are at the root of scandal. Chief among them is the Hispanic Democratic Organization, led by Victor Reyes, former director of the Mayor's Office of Intergovernmental Affairs.

"The single most important fear was this army of thugs that he had on the street. Come election time, all he had to do was snap his fingers, and 500 of them were in your ward kicking your ass," said an alderman who asked to remain anonymous.

"This political underworld shut out the traditional party structure. He created it. He ran wild with it, and now it's starting to devour him. These organizations are the single-biggest factor in the mayor's undoing."

Ald. Joe Moore (49th) agreed that there is not a "tremendous amount of sympathy" for Daley because of his dictatorial style and renegade political army. That explains why U.S. Rep. Rahm Emanuel (D-Ill.) has so far been the only prominent Democrat to stand up and publicly defend Daley.

"Whether it was by design or just willful ignorance, the mayor bears responsibility for the growth of these independent political organizations loyal only to the mayor and the fact that so many people in those organizations received city jobs in violation of the Shakman decree," Moore said.

Ald. Brian Doherty (41st), the Council's lone Republican, said he knows how bitter his Democratic colleagues are about the mayor's political army.

"HDO, the Coalition for a Better Government -- these organizations under his people's leadership -- they acted like rogues. They weren't answerable to anybody, so they basically did what they wanted to do," Doherty said.

Sure, on the one hand, this is a triple-dipped, superstition-frosted paranoid conspiracy trifle, dropped into your virtual Halloween sack since I can't personally lob a bag of genuine, witchcraft-infused seasonal candy

at every one of my fabulous readers.

But on the other hand, it is impossible not to notice that at the same moment newspapers are figuring out how to commit mass suicide with ever greater efficiency, and the working press is slowly starved out of existence, yakking up the right flavor of superstition-slathered paranoid conspiracy piffle

has become a golden ticket to media power, fame and wealth beyond the dreams of Avarice.