One hand washes the other, but not cleanly enough

So former Democratic Illinois gubernatorial candidate Bill Daley and current Republican gubernatorial candidate Bruce Rauner are members of entirely different political parties, right?

Sort of. Or not really, actually.

From Steve Bogira via the Reader:

In the end, Daley apparently did not believe enough in public service in difficult times. In just over three months, his commitment to the race declined by 100 percent. In an interview Monday night with a Tribune reporter, he offered his reasons for dropping out. They boiled down to "Being governor sounds hard."

And then on Tuesday, Daley told Michael Sneed of the Sun-Times he thinks Governor Pat Quinn "will be beaten by any one of the four Republican gubernatorial candidates in the general election." And that among the Republicans, "Bruce Rauner is the strongest candidate."

And why is that, you may ask? Read on:

But why is Bill Daley dissing the Democratic incumbent, and boosting his Republican challenger?

There are presumably some other hidden reasons, but perhaps it's mainly because Daley has more in common with a corporate guy like Rauner than he does with a Democrat like Quinn.

Rauner is a multimillionaire venture capitalist. Daley has been president and chief operating officer of Amalgamated Bank of Chicago, president of SBC Communications, and midwest chairman of JPMorgan Chase. He's also been commerce secretary, and he put in a year as chief of staff to President Obama, succeeding another Rauner buddy, Rahm Emanuel, in 2011.

And both Rauner and the Daleys believe in putting family first.

Rauner, you may recall—though Rauner hopes you won't—apparently used his influence in 2008 to help his daughter get into Payton College Prep, the prestigious Chicago high school.

In April, Crain's Chicago Business columnist Greg Hinz reported that Rauner's daughter had tried to get into Payton, but her test scores and grades had left her just shy of admission. Rauner called Arne Duncan, who was then the CEO of CPS and is now the U.S. education secretary. A Duncan aide called the Payton principal, after which Rauner's daughter was admitted, apparently through a "principal discretion" process that allowed for up to 5 percent of admittees. (Political clout was not supposed to be a reason for a principal to exercise "discretion.")

"It's all baloney," Rauner told the Sun-Times, about Hinz's claims. "It's stuff that doesn't matter. It may have partial truths in it. It's all part of the process of slinging mud early against someone who's doing really strong."

I suppose Rauner thinks it's "stuff that doesn't matter" because the integrity of a person who would be governor is nothing to worry about in Illinois.

Oh, no. Of course not. Take a look at the guy who ran Illinois right before Quinn did. Or his predecessor. There weren't any serious ethics issues at all with those two. Not at all!

To be explained to Bill Donohue, ASAP

Someone might want to inform him about something called "age of consent", which he apparently comprehends just as well as the concept of actual "consent" in the first place.

If you guessed that this was part of some bizarre media apologia for sex abuse scandals among Catholic priests, you win.

When men have sex with adolescent men, it’s called homosexuality. It is not pedophilia,” Donohue told CNN’s Chris Cuomo on Friday. “Less than 5 percent of the priests involved in molestation are pedophiles. I will never stop telling the truth. And the pope never said we should either. I am against gay bashing.”

“You just heard what the pope said,” Cuomo noted. “Why wouldn’t you move past this parsing rhetoric and try to be about what your church is supposed to be about?”

“As far as I’m concerned, the Catholic Church didn’t handle this right,” Donohue explained. “I would have put these guys in in the slammer a long time ago. Instead, they think they can reform them. They sent them off to the psychiatrist.”

“But it is the discussion of homosexuality and the blame of them as somehow predatory that is what your pope is telling you not to say,” Cuomo pointed out. “Who says the molesters were gay?

Complete idiocy, right?

Oh, don't worry. There's more. With Donohue, there's always more.

The Catholic League president then moved on to attacking Jews for Hollywood movies that portray Catholicism in a bad light.

“Is it the Vietnamese who are making movies in Hollywood? Is it the Puerto Ricans who own Hollywood?” he asked. “Do you know that the Jewish Forward in its editorial said the exact same thing that I did?”

“I’m talking about secular Jews, who run the Hollywood studios, who make anti-Catholic movies!” Donohue exclaimed. “What is so absurd that?”

“The absurdity is that you are blaming it on a faith and a culture,” Cuomo observed.

I can think of a couple of other absurd things I've read recently, actually.