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2021-07-31 -Land of the Free
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Calling Chicago "Chiraq" is now an insult to Iraq
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[John Kass] Every Monday in the city of anarchy, on what Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot once called "Accountability Mondays" without irony, the media tallies the number of the weekend murdered dead and the wounded.
And the Democrat politicians point fingers at each other.
More than 70 people were shot this past weekend, with 12 dead. Over the July 4 weekend, more than 100 people were shot, among them more than a dozen children, and 19 were killed. And so on, weekend after weekend, weekday after weekday.
Violence, the fear of violence and its after-effects are the top issues in Chicago.
More than 2,000 people have been shot this year, more than a 60 percent increase compared to 2019. The crime website heyjackass.com, puts the number at 2,064 shot and wounded so far, reporting that 428 have been shot and killed.
"Another bloody weekend," tweeted my friend Tom Bevan, co-founder of Real Clear Politics "Calling the city Chiraq is now an insult to Iraq."
He did provide the headline to this column. But let’s understand why it is an insult to Iraq. Chicago’s crime statistics, as bad as they are, don’t tell the full story. There were 970 murders in 1974—a record year for homicides—but Chicago’s population then was more than 3 million and half the city was considered middle class.
In the nearly 50 years since then, Chicago has continued to shrink and decay—beset by woefully inept governance and poisonous policies that ground down all but the most connected of the politically connected.
Hundreds of thousands have left town since then. Chicago’s middle class is all but gone. The working classes of all races and ethnicities, which gave this city its defining character for toughness and endurance, have been decimated. Many make plans to leave. Many more are just stuck.
So, what we’re witnessing in Chicago is not simply a return to some abstract high-crime statistic which could be debated ad nauseum by the sophists and excuse makers.
We’re seeing something else: the symptoms of death. And of civic anarchy, a breakdown and fragmentation, and literal chaos at the most fundamental levels of a once-great city, the most American of all American cities.
The Democratic elite which has controlled this town and state for almost 100 years—with support of eager Republican handmaidens in what I’ve long called The Combine—don’t have a clue on how to fix it. And they most likely wouldn’t be able to recognize a solution if it slapped them in the face.
Instead, they keep following the same policies year after year, indulging themselves in the rhetoric of race, all the while clinging to an ideological prism that offers them comfort and plaudits from the national party but blinds them to the realities on the ground.
In this they are very much like the tinkerers and architects of American foreign policy in Afghanistan and Iraq, which for decades was sustained by fantasy. And that fantasy fed death and ruin to American soldiers and to the Afghan and Iraqi peoples.
Wedded to their ideology and their partisanship, they don’t dare to question Democratic policies that have that have led Chicago and much of urban America to decay and despair. 
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Posted by M. Murcek 2021-07-31 00:00||
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Posted by Mullah Richard 2021-07-31 08:31||
2021-07-31 08:31||
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