If All You Have Is A Hammer...

...then everything looks like a nail.

Rahm Emanuel, President Obama's chief of staff, has done a bang up job of late. He's ensured that Obama's high profile appointments have had spotless records, he's kept Congressional earmarks to a minimum, his previous experience as an investment banker has had a calming effect on the market and he's ensured that his boss hasn't been tainted by any of that notorious Chicago corruption. (I'll take a pass on discussing how the stimulus and the budget were written in a post-partisan manner.)

By any calculus, Emanuel, has had a tough month. Put it another way, he's been a failure.

However, there is one thing that Emanuel can do -- he can mix it up. Unfortunately for him, there is no special prosecutor after Obama, the GOP has pretty much given the chief executive a wide berth, and Big Media continues to be solicitous.

So, what to you do? You go to the Bill Clinton playbook and go after someone.

In this case, they're going after Rush Limbaugh.

I was at CPAC on Saturday night and I heard Rush's (lengthy) monologue about the President. Nobody is denying his desire that he wants the President's policies to fail. I'm not going to do Rush's bidding here -- he can do that well by himself. But if you read the speech, you'll know where he's coming from.

Here is what I find interesting. If Emanuel could do his job, he'd be working on the problems I listed above. (Obama is still in the midst of a honeymoon after all.) But he can't. His heart and his head are in the gutter. So he gets his puppet, Robert Gibbs (who still has his job, remarkably) to link Rush with the Republican Party. I was surprised that Rush's patriotism wasn't called into question.

I've heard of hatchet men, but Emanuel is the hammering man and not much else.

UPDATE: More evidence that Emanuel in an attack-hack.