When Rep Joe Wilson, America’s new poster child for impotent rage, called the White House last night to apologize for his outburst; the President was busy.

I’m guessing there was a game on. Or he was reading to one of the kids. Or he and Michelle had snuck down to the kitchen to have some ice cream.

So Joe Wilson got to talk to Rahm Emanuel.

Imagine that call.

Even the telephone in Wilson’s hand, a puddle of molten plastic left goopy and cold by the sizzle of that exchange.

A year ago this weekend, the very private Emanuel was standing and smiling n shorts and a t-shirt  surrounded by his kids across the street from the Starbucks on Lincoln Avenue in Chicago.  Cheering at the small town charm of the annual German American Parade that marks the beginning of autumn in our neighborhood. Brassy marching bands high stepping renditions of things like up tempo versions of “Bridge Over Troubled Waters” Local politicians throwing candy from floats, old steam engines, tiny yellow, red and black German flags, the lifting of a few cold steins and a knockwurst along the way.

But, like a lot us, he is different at work.

His brother, the award winning medical ethicist (Show of hands for all those who actually even KNOW a medical ethicist? Or perhaps, like me, you’re just glad that something called a medical ethicist exists) his brother has been quoted as saying that Rahm uses words like “Fuckhead” as terms of endearment.

You might have caught Rahm walking up the aisle at the President’s back, jabbing people in the chest with his finger.

In the epic knife fight wars with oceans of money pouring in behind all the legislators who look after the interests of the medical industries profit margins piled on the breaking backs of the sick, the poor and the lost; Rahm Emanuel is the guy you want to take sniveling little Joe Wilson’s call. The chopping and slicing and chewing and spitting out of whatever shred of a beating heart was left in Mr Wilson’s chest simply could not be applied more brutally by anyone more effectively than Rahm Emanuel.

Remember Dick Cheney? Remember how he would spit and snarl and then blindly send American men and women off to die? Remember how the thought, “Geez, I’d hate to go up against THAT guy, went through your head?”

Cheney was a pimple of evil. Rahm Emanuel is a surgeon warrior of the political battlefield. There is no one better to have stationed at the President’s back. No one tougher.

Off work? A wonderful Dad.

At work? There is no better warrior.

Be outraged all you want at Mr. Wilson. Rightfully so. Even better, send his opponent money.

But be happy you didn’t have to have that conversation with Rahm Emanuel.

It could not have been pretty.