I'm curious why this story gets so little play, and Democrats dismiss any reference to it as mud-slinging.

Tony Rezko was obviously in trouble. He was a defendant in at least a dozen lawsuits, federal investigators in Chicago were poking around, and his name was in newspaper articles about corruption and fraud.

None of that stopped Mr. Rezko, a politically connected developer, and Senator Barack Obama from completing real estate deals a few years ago that resulted in the Obamas obtaining their dream house and the Rezkos buying an empty lot next door.

Nearly three years later, fallout from Mr. ObamaÂ’s relationship with Mr. Rezko, who raised more than $150,000 for Mr. ObamaÂ’s campaigns, continue to dog Mr. Obama on the presidential campaign trail. That distraction promises to linger as Mr. Rezko goes on trial on corruption charges starting Monday.

Mr. Obama, a Democrat, is not part of the case against Mr. Rezko, who is accused of shaking down companies seeking business with the State of Illinois. Mr. Obama has conceded that it was a mistake to bring Mr. Rezko into his personal real estate dealings, although he has insisted that there was nothing unusual about the developerÂ’s decision to buy a sought-after lot in an upscale neighborhood.

But a review of court records, including new details of Mr. RezkoÂ’s finances that emerged recently, show that the lot purchase occurred as he was being pursued by creditors seeking more than $10 million, deepening the mystery of why he would plunge into a real estate investment whose biggest beneficiary appears to have been Mr. Obama.

As Mr. Obama and Mr. Rezko were completing the property purchases in June 2005, Mr. Rezko was fighting to keep lenders and investors at bay over defaulted loans and failing business ventures. But he side-stepped that financial dragnet by arranging for the land to be bought in his wifeÂ’s name, making it the only property she owned by herself, according to land records.

As a result, when the Obamas bought part of the land from Mrs. Rezko seven months later to widen their yard, the money they paid was beyond the reach of Mr. RezkoÂ’s creditors, including one conducting a court-ordered hunt for his assets to recover a $3.5 million debt.

Politics of change? Yeah -- keeping a nice chunk of change in the hands of a corrupt crony and out of the hands of those he defrauded.

But this is Barack Obama -- he's young, he's hip, he's cute, and he's Democrat. We dare not look too closely at this deal between him and a corrupt businessman -- especially because we don't know what skeletons will come tumbling out of the closets back in Chicago, where corruption is the oil that keeps the Democrat machine rolling.

And so while the Daley Administration running Chicago and the Blagojevich Administration running Illinois are tarred by their associations with Rezko, we are somehow expected to believe that Barack Obama is the only politician who somehow remained above the sleaze, despite this sweetheart deal and the long association between the two.

All it requires is that one suspend rational thought until November.

Posted by: Greg at 11:30 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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