“The Chicago Way” used to mean bringing a gun to a knife fight: “He sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue,” in David Mamet’s famous dialogue from The Untouchables.
What do you call it when elected officials actively work against the best interests of their own constituents, up to and including abetting violence and even murder, just to make sure Orange Man Bad never looks good?
In Chicago these days they call it “business as usual.”
Appearing on Fox & Friends Monday morning, Chicago alderman and retired police officer Anthony Napolitano said that Chicago Democrats are “too afraid right now to ask the president for help because if it does work, they’re going to make the president look like a success.”
“It’s a political move,” he claimed.
Napolitano told the hosts, “We need help” in Chicago because “We had 30 officers protecting against about 1,000 protesters. It looked like a scene out of 300.”
300 was the Zack Snyder movie based on the graphic novel (fancy comic book) loosely based on the 480 B.C. Battle of Thermopylae in which about 300 Spartans and 700 other Greeks lost their lives in a rearguard action holding off tens of thousands of Persian soldiers.
In other words: Napolitano’s comparison is plenty apt.
More desperate though than small numbers of cops trying to hold off huge numbers of rioters is the vast, law-abiding majority of Chicagoans held hostage by a tiny fraction of killers — and the city’s unwillingness to do anything about it.
Emma Colton reported for the Washington Examiner earlier on Monday:
Chicago police have reported a spike in murders and shootings this year compared to 2019. Shootings increased by 71% in May compared to the year before, when 409 people were shot. Murders were up 60%, with 85 reported.
Just this non-holiday weekend, Chicago’s thugs shot more than 60 and murdered 12.
Chicago’s new police superintendent, David Brown, has been on the job only since Mayor Lori Lightfoot appointed him in April. He told reporters last week, “Just imagine starting a new job and having to figure out historical violent crime in about 10 weeks.”
Perhaps Mayor Lightfoot should have chosen someone with work experience more relevant to Chicago’s situation? Brown was praised for his job as chief of the Dallas Police Department, where he worked to reduce violent confrontations between police and civilians. But by his own admission, he seems to be overwhelmed by Chicago’s violence.
Maybe Brown’s situation is one of those happy accidents.
PJ Media co-founder (and my former boss) Roger L. Simon says that the situation in our cities has gotten so bad that it’s made Trump a virtual shoo-in for reelection.
Too many Americans are what Kurt Schlicter aptly calls “normals.” These people aren’t just white. They are brown and black and yellow and everything in between.
Some of them are friends and relatives and co-workers who aren’t saying a word about anything, who rarely ever do, who don’t want to get their cars keyed or something a whole lot worse to happen to them. But they are there.
Some of them even cringe at some of Trump’s presumed excesses, but they cringe more at the thought that police will not be there in an emergency for their families. And they’ve seen that happen all around.
The thinking on the Left however still seems to be that enough riots, enough destruction, and enough murder will be enough to win the November election and start enacting the most authoritarian, anti-American legislative agenda in our history.
At least, I can’t think of a better reason why Mayor Lightfoot would refuse to ask a Republican president for help when her city’s people are getting slaughtered in the streets.
Or why Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler would be working hand-in-glove with a couple of Marxist groups (antifa and BLM) to keep his city ungovernable.
For his part, President Donald Trump has said he’s ready to lend federal assistance to riot- and violence-torn cities like Chicago, but only if they ask for it. For my part, I’m just about ready for Trump to use the Insurrection Act to start arresting these Marxist ringleaders.
