JOHN KASS ON OBAMA AND REZKO: The chutes and ladders of The Chicago Way: While Obama climbs high, his onetime pal Rezko is slip-slidin’ away. “Watching the boys I thought about what Rezko must have been like years ago, at 19, coming out of Syria hungry and broke, with nothing but ambition. It didn’t take him long in Chicago to see how things were done, how crooked politics are here, played as politics are played in the Middle East and everywhere else. Everywhere, that is, but in those embarrassing Obama creation myths spun by myth masters from Chicago’s City Hall, all about hope and change and Barack transcending the broken politics of the past. Rezko was of the old broken politics, which is the same as the new, hopeful politics.”

It sure seems that way. Plus this: “Obama will campaign for re-election, and with the media’s help, he’ll levitate above Chicago politics, unstained, as if his feet never got dirty here. And Rezko? He’ll sit in a federal cell, silenced, waiting, hoping for a presidential pardon, buried beneath The Chicago Way.”