Chicago Violence: Brought to you by the Democrat Machine

Two good commentary pieces do a pretty decent job hitting the nail on the head when it comes to why nothing changes despite the horrific gang violence on Chicago's streets.

First, on the police.  Jack Dunphy notes how Chicago PD's leadership is filled with butt kissers who pander to the political hacks who run the city.

Really.  Just look at the chief, Eddie Johnson, who advanced his way to the top not through hard work and high test scores, but through one merit promotion after another.  And his girlfriend now wife, has managed a rather meteoric rise through the ranks.  Yeah, it helps to sleep in the chief's bed, isn't that right Nikita?  And on her Lieutenant's exam, she came away with particularly high test scores, along with two other female candidates who participated in a "study group" with the guy who helped create the exam.  Pure coincidence, right?

On top of that, she has filed a complaint that she didn't get that promotion to Captain that she thought she was entitled to.  Yeah, it's true and the Tribune even covered it:

Last month, she filed a complaint with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, claiming she was a victim of discrimination within the department’s promotional process.

 Enough with the teaser, let's get to Jack Dunphy's piece over at PJ Media:

The Real Reasons for Chicago's Deadly Crime Wave

You mean it wasn't John Wick came to town looking for who killed his newest puppy?

It is an accepted but lamented fact of life among police officers that in order to rise on the promotional ladder, one must endorse the political fashions currently in favor among the city’s politicians. And the higher one ascends on that ladder, the more convincingly one must do so. As a consequence, reflecting the governing principles of almost any city you can name, most police chiefs are liberals, or at least pretend to be with a passing level of feigned sincerity.

As a result of this, the upper levels of most police departments, most certainly those in large cities, become clogged with men and women who can recite leftist pieties as confidently as any MSNBC host, the better to curry favor with politicians whose sponsorship is essential to further promotion. All of these men and women believe themselves qualified to be the next police chief, but the one selected will have proved himself to be the most proficient panderer.

But this creates a problem within a police department, to wit, a division in the rank structure between those at or near the top who adopt the leftist nostrums of the politicians, and those at the bottom who must go out onto the streets each day and confront the very real problems engendered by those very same leftist nostrums.

There exists no more vivid example of this than the city of Chicago, where Hillary Clinton received 84 percent of the 2016 presidential vote, and where there hasn’t been a Republican mayor since 1931. Between Friday afternoon and Monday morning, 74 people were shot in the city,12 of them fatally. In one seven-hour span, from about midnight Saturday to about 7:00 a.m. Sunday, 41 people were shot, five of whom died.

These spasms of violence are sadly characteristic of Chicago, or at least parts of it. And equally as routine as the weekend violence are the Monday press conferences at which Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Chicago Police Superintendent Eddie Johnson put on their angry (or sad) faces and denounce the perpetrators and talk about how the mayhem is “unacceptable.” “What happened this weekend did not happen in every neighborhood in Chicago,” said Emanuel, “but it is unacceptable [that] it happened in any neighborhood in Chicago.”

A question for the mayor: If it really is unacceptable, why do you continue to accept it?

He’ll never answer that question, but the answer is that for him, facing re-election as he is, it’s politically untenable to take the steps necessary to stop it, steps which are well known and have been practiced in other cities, albeit by people with more courage than Rahm Emanuel and the people he allows to run his police department.

 

To his credit, in his press conference Emanuel (very lightly) touched on the problem at the root of the violence: packs of feral young men who from birth were never given a lesson in morality. “If you say enough is enough,” said the mayor, “you must come forward as a neighborhood where a moral center of gravity holds. . . . [There are] too many people with criminal records on the street, and there is a shortage of values about what is right and what is wrong, what is acceptable, what is condoned and what is condemned.”

But  If you were somehow to identify and arrest every single one of the shooters involved in the weekend violence, you would no doubt discover that nearly all of them came from homes with absent fathers, and that nearly all of them had been previously arrested for violent crime. (They won’t come close to arresting all of the shooters, or even a quarter of them; the website Heyjackass.com reports Chicago P.D.’s murder clearance rate for 2018 so far is 14.6 percent.)

As Rahm Emanuel knows, to take a stand against hit-and-run fatherhood is to cast blame on a significant portion of the Chicago electorate. What’s more, to do so would also cast blame on the leftist policies that gave rise to the welfare state and to which he owes his political career. The vast government apparatus that over the years has come to make fathers unnecessary, at least in a financial sense, lies at the very heart of Democratic politics. Single mothers may do their best, but the research is consistent and irrefutable: boys raised without fathers are far more likely to become involved in crime.

 

Read more…

The bottom line is that the violence has no meaningful political price for Rahm & crew, so they do nothing to stop it.

And Robert Engler has a great piece at The American Thinker.  Titled, Chicago: Don't Ask Those Who Caused the Problem to Solve the Problem, he addresses how Democrats have run Chicago longer than the communists ran the Soviet Union. 

Last weekend, Chicago saw 74 people shot and thirteen killed, some of them children.  At the same time, a music festival attracted thousands to a lakefront Grant Park, where they danced with little regard for the deaths and chaos happening just a few miles west.

For some, outside the Chicago cultural bubble, questions are asked.  How could this happen?  What can be done about it?  Why doesn't the mayor care?

Perhaps there are answers to these questions, but so what?  The truth is, given the social, political, and cultural history of Chicago, no one who could do anything about the murders and chaos in Chicago really cares.  Nothing will be done, because death and chaos in Chicago are just part of the cost of keeping the power structure in place.

Perhaps a biological analogy is in order.  Consider an anthill run by a Democratic queen ant.  There will always be a certain amount of death and waste among the worker ants.  That's just the way the biological order is.  Chicago, like an urban organism, is not at all different.  If a few are shot every day, that's the price the Democrats pay for political party survival.

Look at the history of the power structure that runs Chicago to see why no one cares and no one wants to change the social order there.

Chicago is an urban culture unto itself.  For an outsider, that urban culture is hidden behind the façade of an "American city," yet little things like not putting catsup on a hot dog show us that Chicago is a unique place with its own traditions and political history.  Add to that that about 20 percent of Chicago's population, today, is foreign-born.  These foreign-born individuals often come from cultures different from the ethnic Democrats who populated the city after WWII.

The structure of evil that is the Democratic Party in Chicago has ruled the city longer than the life of the old Soviet Union.  The point of the party is political power, not charity or social justice.  Most people who live in Chicago are progressive and do not see the structure of evil that daily closes in on them.  Consider, for example, how the Catholic Church in Chicago has surrendered to the party platform to hold and keep political power.

The transformation of the Catholic Church in Chicago from a church of conservative Eastern Europeans to the religious arm of the progressive Democrats is one of the most important ironies of our age.  Most of this transformation can be placed at the feet of Irish Catholics, who are involved in both the hierarchy of the Church and city politics.

Engler also tackles gun control.

Chicago has some of the most rigid gun laws in the nation, yet year after year, hundreds are shot.  How can that be?  It can be because no one wants to enforce the law.  In Chicago, you get along by going along.

Oh yes, they enforce it.  Against the law-abiding.  Criminals?  They get electronic monitoring bracelets if they pinkie promise not to drink, use dope, cuss, or commit crimes against their neighbors.  

He continues on:

Chicago is the most segregated city in the nation, yet it is run by Democrats who proclaim civil rights and affirmative action.  What a living contradiction that is.  

..

No.  Chicago is what it is, and it ain't gonna change.  Take your moral outrage elsewhere.

Read the whole thing.

In the end, that last excerpted line sums it up.  Chicago is what it is.  It ain't gonna change.  Take your moral outrage elsewhere.

Check out my piece on the victims of the previous weekend's violence in Chicago.  Virtually every last one of those victims were either gang members, hanging out with gang members, and/or served as backstops for gang gunfire.

Oh yes, and for the record, this most recent weekend "only" saw one homicide and 37 wounded.  I guess John Wick got who he wanted the previous weekend after someone killed his latest puppy.