Under Color of Authority

Someone me sent the following via email several days ago, thinking it was probably something I’d want to see.  I think they thought it was funny, the idea that Illinois wants to get rid of Barack Obama. We went back and forth in email about it, and my correspondent thinks I jumped to the wrong conclusion about what’s going on in this little message. I’ve taken a couple of days to think it over, and I now agree that it’s not the “whisper campaign” kind of message, with a hidden message of racism, that I originally thought.

It’s just a garden variety “The Democrat Party are a bunch of loosers” flyer, which is pretty funny when you consider that the “Republic Party” are going to “loose” a lot of races in 2 weeks – according to a lot of polls, they’re behind in the Presidential race, and also the Senate and Congressional races are looking like a tsunami is about to break.

I don’t have the original email, as my correspondent cut-and-pasted it out of whatever they received to preserve the sender’s privacy, and therefore I don’t have the headers.  Due to the fact that it was apparently composed in MSWord, it’s full of non-compliant CSS cruft, and WordPress will strip it all out and reduce the wild colors and huge fonts to plain text if I’m not careful. This alone is nearly criminal! Such sloppy coding!

But I digress.

My correspondent had added an amused note at the top, not realizing the real aim of this missive is to raise doubts and not a little fear in the minds of voters.  Is it one of those “whisper campaign” emails I’ve read about, or is it just a really bad, poorly researched, inaccurate, badly punctuated, wildly non-humorous and malformed joke?

The first section, in blue, refers to Illinois, but if you analyze what it’s saying, it makes absolutely no sense.  And the latter part, which is set in tables (Augh!! TABLES!!) somehow equates a high murder rate (of doubtful provenance) with Democrats in power.

The real message seems to be “Democrats = corrupt mismanagement.” There may be a secondary message of “black people=law breakers” but it’s a stretch, and probably a logical break (if there’s any logic at all in the mismatched, unrelated “facts” quoted). My own thoughts on this matter are below this piece of work.

Maybe a neighboring state should annex them,

put them out of their misery! No wonder they

want him to run for president, they want him out of there!

CHICAGO POLITICS

BODY COUNT IN THE LAST SIX MONTHS:
292 MURDERED IN CHICAGO
221 KILLED IN IRAQ

OUR LEADERSHIP IN ILLINOIS ;
SEN. BARACK OBAMA
SEN. DICK DURBIN
REP. JESSE JACKSON, JR.
GOV. ROD BLOGOJEVICH
HOUSE LEADER MIKE MADIGAN
ATTY. GEN LISA MADIGAN
MAYOR RICHARD DALY
ALL DEMOCRATS

THANK YOU FOR THE COMBAT ZONE IN CHICAGO

OF COURSE THEY ARE BLAMING EACH OTHER.

CAN’T BLAME THE REPUBLICANS, BECAUSE THERE AREN’T ANY.!!!!!

STATE PENSION FUND — $44 BILLION IN DEBT, WORST IN THE NATION.

COOK COUNTY (CHICAGO) SALES TAX — 10.25%, HIGHEST IN THE NATION.


CHICAGO SCHOOL SYSTEM — ONE OF THE WORST IN THE NATION.

THIS IS THE POLITICAL MACHINE THAT OBAMA SAYS HE COMES FROM IN ILLINOIS .

AND NOW

OBAMA SAYS HE’S GONNA ‘FIX’ WASHINGTON POLITICS.!!!!!

Gah.

That’s exactly how it was formatted, in all its crufty, misaligned, badly spaced glory. I found a plain-text version of this very message on a British online answer forum thread… now there’s political genius for you! Post it where people who can’t vote in the election will see it, that’ll get results! Anyway, I noted in a comment there that “Clearly, someone had help from our friend Mr. Clippy.”

Now there are a lot of assertions in this screed, and some of them come near enough to the truth that the mud sticks just a little bit. Which is how you want to formulate your muck, because if it’s an obvious lie, it’ll slide right off your intended target. Who’s the intended target? Obama, and also a number of other Democrats running for office in Illinois, but mostly it’s probably Obama.

A couple of the listed politicians are anti-progressive, anti-reform, and only anti-corruption “on paper” but not when you dig a little deeper into their associates and hiring practices. I’m thinking of Blagojevich and Daley, specifically. And this list leaves out Cook County Board President Todd “Baby Huey” Stroger, who inherited his seat in a scandalous imbroglio a couple of years ago.  The rest of the people on this list have absolutely no say in how Chicago is run or how law enforcement there operates.  Rep. Jackson is singled out, probably because he has a famous father,  but there are several Congressmen and -women who have Chicago districts.

With the exception of Daley and Stroger, none of these people have any authority over Chicago. Whoever wrote this document is probably just irked that the Illinois GOP can’t seem to get its act together the last couple of electoral cycles — they lost big on the national and statewide side 2 years ago. They always are strong Downstate, though, so they elect a fair number of state legislators.

As for some of the other issues:

The Illinois Pension Fund is about $44 billion in debt, or was when this article was published. Ironically, the previous governor, a Republican named George Ryan, seems to have done little to prevent the disaster, even though HIS predecessor warned of it and tried to head it off.  Well, there was that corruption case on Ryan’s mind, and he’s in prison now. He was also a little busy commuting death sentences just before leaving office.  It’s nice that he did that, but it doesn’t take away the fact that an entire family was destroyed because of his corrupt policies while he was Secretary of State.

The Cook County sales tax is indeed high. That’s mostly on account of those assholes Stroger, Pere et Fils, and their cronies on the County Board.  I can’t wait for when Todd Stroger comes up for re-election.  I belong to the Facebook group “Cook County Citizens for the Removal of Todd Stroger.”

Chicago Schools? Well, they were considered the worst in 1987 but there’s been a lot of improvement since then, and the system is considered a laboratory for reform now.  But some people will always think they’re the worst, because of gangs and “the gays.” Oh, and Resident Bush’s “No Child Left Behind” not being properly funded hasn’t helped, but the Chicago school system seems to be in turnaround in spite of that. And Obama is planning on some educational reform of his own.

As for Obama saying he comes from the Chicago Machine, that’s not true: he’s not really of it or from it. He kind of sidestepped it, coming as he did from a reform-minded neighborhood, Hyde Park. NPR had a good story about Obama’s political beginnings that gave a lot of background. He did learn some things about how to get opponents (one, a former mentor) kicked off the ballot on a technicality, but he didn’t put in years licking boots and doing and getting favors, either.

As far as I know, the Democrats on the above list aren’t blaming each other for either Chicago’s murder rate, or the number of people killed in Iraq. It’s actually the Republicans who seem to be getting ready to play an epic round of Blame Game for a change (and not the Democrats, who remain refreshingly on-message yet still deliciously reality-based).