Posted by
Patrick Henry on Sunday, June 06, 2010 9:49:19 PM
Here's a nod to the many fine people who live in Chicago, Illinois. I love you,
and I feel sorry for you. Many have written about the Windy City and its fabled
political corruption. I was born in a Chicago suburb, lived there for eighteen
years, went back for another three of graduate school on the North Shore and
visited family often until they moved west. So I know precisely whereof I speak.
My first experience with "the Chicago way," came at the tender age of sixteen.
I had a shiny new drivers license, the keys to a family car and the world was
my oyster. Gas was cheap and cruising was fun. I found myself on Chicago's
south side with my two best friends going the wrong way on a one-way street.
I hadn't driven in that particular area before, had been forbidden to do so by my
dad and made a stupid wrong turn. Realizing the error of my ways immediately,
I turned quickly off on a side street. But alas, an officer had spotted me and
immediately pulled me over. He approached my window and asked for my
driver's license. I was sweating bullets. He lectured me about how much trouble
I was in and what could happen to me, most of which wasn't even true, although
I didn't know it at the time. I begged him to let me off with a warning, and he
asked how much money I had. It was $11. He turned up his nose and told me
that if I could get my two friends to chip in $5 each to go with it, he'd let me
drive away. Reluctantly, they did do. I handed him the cash, he handed back
my license and he turned to go.
As he walked away, I sat there realizing that I had just bribed an officer of the
law. I also knew that if I hadn't, my dad would have found out (a) that I got
stopped, and (b) that I was driving in an area he had told me to stay out of. That,
of course, doesn't justify it, but it seemed like the thing to do at the time. As the
officer, whose name was on his badge and is burned in my memory to this day,
walked away, he turned and looked at me in what was either pity or sneering
contempt. "You don't think much of me do you, son?" he asked. I was too shaken
to reply. "You'll learn," he smiled, "that's just how it is in Chicago." Yeah, that's
just how it was in Chicago.
When famed treasury agent Elliott Ness took on mob boss Al Capone, his biggest
obstacle was the Chicago police department, so riddled with corruption that Ness'
plans were often whispered to Capone before the orders were given to those
charged with carrying them out. When Capone finally went down, records were
seized revealing police officers and commanders, judges and politicians who were
on Capone's payroll. That was the Chicago way.
When the senior Richard J. Daley became mayor, he organized the Democratic
party there into a tighly knit series of "wards," each one with its own "boss" whose
responsibility was to deliver Daley and his favored candidates votes in every election,
and in return for which each received his share of what they called "boodle," the
spoils of victory in the form of under-the-table payoffs or city jobs. In 1960 most
Chicagoans believed that Daley and his machine stole the presidential election by
simply "losing" huge numbers of ballot. That was the Chicago way, too.
During Barack Obama's brief senate tenure he funneled hundreds of millions
of dollars to Chicago's extreme community organizing organizations like ACORN,
to corrupt union bosses, to housing projects conducted by crooks like Tony Rezko
and to other equally nefarious but politically favored groups or individuals. Today
the unemployment rate in Chicago stands at 11.2% and the street violence is so
bad members of the city council are demanding deployment of the national guard.
That's the way it is in Chicago, and the city's economic and civic decline stands as
stark evidence of the political corruption and the folly of simply throwing money
at social problems.
When Barack Obama ran for the presidency, he promised an open and transparent
government that would change the way business was done in Washington and do
away with politics as usual. Now, less than two years into his first term, Americans
see with disillusion his attempts to interefere in at least two primary elections by
trying to bribe would-be candidates into taking government jobs and thereby depriving
an electorate who wants and deseves to find the best possible candidate of the chance
to vote for anyone other than his own favored pick. It is proof positive that you can
take the crook out of Chicago, but you cannot take the crookedness out of the man.
Barack Obama is still doing things the Chicago way.
Whether one looks at Rahm Emanuel, who tried to use Bill Clinton to bribe
Pennsylvania's Joe Sestak out of that senate race, Rod Blagojevich, impeached
governor who tried to sell Obama's seat to the highest bidder, Roland Burris
who won the bid and by some strange coincidence failed to disclose his conversations
about money with Blagojevich in testimony before the Illinois legislature, or Jim
Messina, Emanuel's deputy who blatantly violated the Hatch Act by offering
Colorado's Andew Romanoff not one but three jobs to stay out of that senate
race, you only see the same thing. Chicago, Chicago, Chicago! And can you
guess what Emanuel's fantasy job is? You got it, mayor of Chicago.
The point is this: Barack Obama has imported the political manipulation, the
lawlessness, the suppression of dissent and the leftist social engineering directly
from Chicago to Washington D.C. It is his full intention to catapult that city's
shame into national policy, and he has already gone a long way toward doing so.
So Chicago may soon be coming to Your Town, USA. I'm ashamed that I paid
off that crook in the blue uniform when I was a kid. I've never done anything
like it again, and never would. But what kind of human being acting under the
color of authority extorts three scared sixteen-year-olds out of $21? That's
the way it is in Chicago, and if you don't want it to be that way in your city,
then you'd best plan to get yourself and all your friends to the polls in November
and derail this corrupt train before it finally runs over you.