Tweeter pretending to be Rahm Emanuel disappears

[February 25, 2011]  CHICAGO (AP) -- Rahm Emanuel complained that he didn't know it was OK to bring a ventriloquist's dummy to a debate. He marveled at a tiny model of Tokyo somebody gave him and couldn't wait to crush it while wearing a Godzilla suit.

He even described the time those AWOL Wisconsin lawmakers were tossed down a water slide by David Axelrod, political adviser to President Barack Obama.

All right, it wasn't THAT Rahm Emanuel, the one elected mayor of Chicago on Tuesday. It was a mystery tweeter whose obscenity-laced comments during the mayoral race were so popular they attracted 38,000 followers.

If all those followers had been votes, the person behind the Twitter account named "MayorEmanuel" would have finished fifth in the race -- not all that far behind the two candidates who finished third and fourth.

Whoever the fake Rahm Emanuel was, he is tweeting no more. The tweeter joked that he had entered "a time vortex" after Emanuel's victory and signed off.

"They'd better have coffee in the parallel (expletive) dimension I'm entering tonight, or I'm breaking right back out."

The identity of the fake Emanuel was so intriguing that the real Rahm offered to donate $5,000 to a charity of his or her choice if the tweeter came forward. No one did.

During the campaign, the tweets were popular for their absurdity and incessant profanity -- the latter drawn from Emanuel's real-life affinity for four-letter words. And the make-believe Emanuel was prolific, posting nearly 2,000 tweets since late September.

There was the imaginary road trip to Wisconsin and the plot to steal toilet paper all the way home. There were the debates when all he could think about was how one of his opponents sounded like the teacher in the Charlie Brown cartoons. And he waxed poetic about how the debates would have been "way (expletive) better if we were using muppets."

Emanuel, who studied ballet in his youth, even echoed the disgust of Chicago Bears fans with Jay Cutler when the quarterback left the NFC championship game early in the second half because of an injury.

"Hey, Cutler, my knee hurt before I had to dance 'Swan Lake' once. And you know what? I (expletive) danced the (expletive) out of it."

Whoever was tweeting had an intimate understanding of the candidates, their campaign schedules and the news of the day.

When former President Bill Clinton was in town campaigning with his former aide, the tweeting Emanuel talked about the wild nights he spent with "Big Bear."

"Woke up and Clinton's gone! His clothes and wallet are here. He's gonna (expletive) freeze out there. Come back, Big Bear."

The tweets included an imagined episode in which "MayorEmanuel" sneaked back into the crawl space of his house -- a reference to the drama that arose when the real Emanuel wanted to move back to his home to run for mayor but the renter wouldn't leave.

Accompanying him into the crawl space and on other excellent adventures was a favorite companion: Axelrod.

"Axelrod found a box of Legos, so he's in (expletive) heaven," he tweeted.

In the tweets, Emanuel found a duck in a river and named it "Quaxelrod," after his friend.

The fake Emanuel looked for another place to stay -- a task made tougher, he said, because there were few landlords who would rent to someone with "both a dog and a duck."

It was Axelrod, too, who supposedly donned a Chicago Bears mascot outfit "rigged with a drinking tube" and stood at the top of a water slide at a Rockford water park, "calling out cheeses, sending senators flying down."

[Associated Press; By DON BABWIN]

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