Dan Froomkin has a must-read analysis of the recent stories in the DC press about how great Rahm Emanuel is. There’s a lot of good stuff, but this line stood out to me:

The fact is that after a campaign that appealed so successfully to idealism, Obama hired a bunch of saboteurs of hope and change.

Rahm was simply their chief of staff. And now, this hypercompetitive bantam rooster is attempting to blame others for what went wrong. That’s evidently so important to him that he’s trying to take a victory lap around the wreckage of what was once such a promising presidency.

What’s so offensive to me isn’t the presence of long, hagiographic pieces on Rahm Emanuel. It’s that these pieces are being pitched and written while key decisions that affect the path of the administration are being made. Rahm and his loyalists are spinning these stories at a point in time when both the Obama presidency and Democratic majorities are facing incredibly rocky political terrain. The timing is so wrong it is in itself offensive.