Chicago’s “peaceful protest” events continue, leaving another 59 people wounded and three more dead last weekend amid assorted Black Lives Matter mayhem, looting, burning, and bloody vendettas among the city’s predominantly black gangs. Who knows what this weekend has in store?
Three more Chicago police officers were shot on Thursday amid the ongoing chaos, which has buried the city in third-world-style high body counts of innocent, mostly black adults dead in its streets or their children bleeding in its gutters. Describing the mind-boggling ineptitude of Mayor Lori Lightfoot, noted political hack, LGBTQ heroine, and obviously incompetent public official, is a most difficult task.
The only way to precisely detail Ms.Hizzoner, upon whom the word “unique” is readily bestowed, is to search for examples of similar personae.
The breadth of the search led to three wildly disparate places. First, the Alibaba Online Catalog, for an analog of size, scale, and stability. Second, the writings of John Kneubuhl for character similarities. And third, a 2008 report by the McCormick Foundation on gun violence in Chicago.
The first search produced a full-scale analog of Lightfoot’s vertiginous leadership style.
The second search, for the parameters of her hubristic personality, required a little more digging.
Her undignified street-mouth was demonstrated in a leaked teleconference when Chicago alderman and fellow Democrat, Raymond Lopez, called her out for her poor leadership. (Coincidentally, Lopez’s office has been vandalized three times since that phone call, the latest before sunrise on Thursday.)
The works of prolific television writer John Kneubuhl came to mind. He created many characters for many TV series but one for “The Wild, Wild West” stands out: A megalomaniacal, self-declared genius who thought himself imperious, Dr. Miguelito Quixote Loveless. Unfortunately, he was frustrated at every turn by good guy Agent James West. Kneubuhl’s diminutive bete noire, it seems, showed that he not only could conjure fantasy, but he could predict a reasonable facsimile of the future, at least in as much as Chicago’s egocentric, power-obsessed and maladroit mayor parallels the fictional Loveless persona.
Lightfoot’s embarrassing display has even gone national. Last week, White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany described Lightfoot as “derelict” for allowing the kind of ongoing carnage cited above. Lightfoot, unable to defend her pitiful lack of leadership, employed the time-honored method of ducking the statement: She played the race card. (There’s a lot of that going around in Chicago lately.) Or in this case, the reverse race card.
She tweeted the new epithet “Karen,” a seething all-purpose slur for “privileged” white women, against McEnany: “Hey, Karen. Watch your mouth.” In doing so, she demonstrated not only a racist, low-class attitude, but stupendous political stupidity for putting the slur in writing! Thus, you should forgive the expression, putting her lightfoot in her mouth.
Meanwhile, between lobbing racist epithets and watching the murder rate in Chicago skyrocket, Lightfoot caved to BLM pressure and managed to make two statues of Christopher Columbus vanish, an astonishing act of “disappearing a problem” not seen since the heyday of Lavrentiy Beria’s NKVD. No one would ever call Lightfoot a racist over that, especially when calling her a tatterdemalion, gutless, moonbat would do just fine.
The third reference, regarding leadership skills in Chicago, was defined in a 2008 McCormick Foundation report on the problem of gun violence in that city. (I was one of the contributors.) The report detailed a completely integrated strategy for dealing with gun violence, encompassing the moral, organizational, and physical domains.
Chicago’s nonstop chaos confirms that it is in the moral domain where Lightfoot has completely failed, because this is the arena where the most immediate impact could have been made, by leveraging community leadership and winning the hearts and minds of Chicagoans.
It is blatantly obvious, what with Chicago’s unbridled murder rate, abysmally low morale in the police department (likely exacerbated by the tragic suicide of Deputy Chief Dion Boyd), and Thursday’s shooting of three more officers, that Lori Lightfoot has completely lost control of the city.
If Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., winner of the Nobel Peace Prize and master of Ghandi-style non-violence, were alive today he would again urge Americans to judge not on the color of skin but on the content of character. In the case of Lori Lightfoot, the judgment of character, or rather lack of it, would not be very difficult.