If They Are Smart Enough to Kick Out Lightfoot, Why Aren’t They Smart Enough to Elect a Republican? - The American Spectator | USA News and Politics
If They Are Smart Enough to Kick Out Lightfoot, Why Aren’t They Smart Enough to Elect a Republican?
by
Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot concedes after losing her bid for reelection on Feb. 28, 2023 (CBS Chicago/YouTube)

So Lori Lightfoot counterintuitively has been kicked out with a heavy boot, and we soon blessedly will have heard and seen the last of that apparition unless she appears in a future police bulletin as a crime victim during a Saturday night gang spree in Chicago. She now is the first elected Chicago mayor in 40 years to lose a reelection bid. Still, it seems that 17 percent of the voters in Tuesday night’s Chicago mayoral primary were idiots enough to vote for her reelection. Presumably, the other 83 percent of the Democrat primary voters were racists and misogynists and homophobes, voting against a Black lesbian woman (the “Democrat Trifecta” or the “Progressive Hat Trick,” your pick).

Sure, Black man Brandon Johnson scored approximately 20 percent, but his photo seems to identify him as a he/him/his type. Same with Willie Wilson and his 9 percent. Likewise, Kam Buckner and his 2 percent, Ja’mal Green and his 2 percent, and Roderick Sawyer and his impressive 0 percent (give or take a decimal). Jesús “Chuy” García got 14 percent, but he is not Black at all. Not to mention top vote-getter Paul Vallas, who got 34 percent, chock full of White privilege.

Why fixate on racism and misogyny? As one Chicago professor observed with all the wisdom and insight that contemporary academia offers your children: “Everyone’s whiplashed on this. The George Floyd [agitation], defund the police — [then] all of a sudden there’s a couple carjackings and people are like, ‘Bring in the white guy.’”

Yup. And Scott Adams is the racist?

Or consider how Mayor Lightfoot campaigned: “I’m a Black woman and, let’s not forget, some folks frankly don’t support us in leadership roles.”

Yeah. Also some people frankly don’t support morons who lead a once-great city into the dungheap of murderous crime. In 2021, under Lightfoot’s enlightened footwork, the city suffered the most murders it had recorded in a quarter-century. Plus 3,651 shootings — comprising 1,415 more than had occurred only two years earlier. Chicago had more homicides that year under Lightfoot than any other city in America.

But Lightfoot always had others to blame. When speaking to White audiences, she would blame the incompetent Soros-sponsored State’s Attorney Kim Foxx, a Back woman. But when appearing before Black groups, she praised Foxx as: “Our great State’s Attorney.”

She focused her deepest animus and contempt against the police, a creative law-enforcement strategy whose wisdom rarely has been pursued in campaigns to reduce crime. Consequently, in an environment where, for example, crime rose 36 percent in only one year, her police department dropped from 13,486 officers to 11,669, a stunning reduction of 1,817 cops or 13.47 percent of the Chicago police force, in the mere three years from January 2019 to April 2022.

It amazes me that voters ever elected that creep in the first place. One rarely ever has heard as vicious, vituperative, and vitriolic a public official as she. Even in the quasi-dignified surroundings of civic meetings, her lack of character emerged. F’rinstance: Feb. 24, 2021 (CBS Chicago): “Mayor Lori Lightfoot Caught Uttering Profanity into Hot Microphone During City Council Meeting.” When she was asked about the crisis in police morale, amid their skyrocketing suicide rate, she replied: “They have an incredible amount of time off.” During budget negotiations, she told aldermen (Chicago’s term for city council representatives) who opposed her spending plan, “Don’t come to me for s**t.” In one summary of Lightfoot, the Chicago Tribune wrote:

In text messages, Lightfoot referred to one alderman as a “dumb, dumb person of color” being led astray by Ald. Burke, who is white. Other examples of her past epithets toward aldermen include remarks that Jason Ervin was “full of crap,” Brendan Reilly was “bush league” and Byron Sigcho-Lopez was a “jackass.” During one City Council meeting, when she was upset with aldermen for delaying a vote on Celia Meza’s appointment as corporation counsel, Lightfoot stormed off the dais to confront Ald. Jeanette Taylor, leading to an ugly encounter where they screamed at one another and pointed their fingers in each other’s faces.

Class act.

In a dispute with Chicago Parks District Attorney George Smyrniotis over a request by Chicago’s Italian American community to raise a Columbus statue for only 20 minutes during a Columbus Day parade, Lightfoot allegedly said: “You are out there measuring your [expletives] with the Italians seeing whose got the biggest [expletive].” The quote appears in a defamation lawsuit filed by Smyrniotis against her. At a “Pride” event, she said: “F***  Clarence Thomas.” On a conference call with Chicago aldermen, where Alderman Lopez asked her about an outbreak of crime and looting, she responded: “I think you’re 100 percent full of s**t, is what I think.” Lopez then said: “Maybe you should come out and see what’s going on.” Her reply: “That is the stupidest thing I have ever heard.”

On yet another occasion, marking her two years in office, she declared that she would give interviews that day only to Black and Brown journalists.

Meanwhile, Chicago’s pension debt of some $34 billion is twice the city’s annual budget.

Do the people of Chicago deserve this misery? Yes, of course they do. They elected her. And they have elected Democrats as their mayors repeatedly for the past 90 years.

It is said that the highest vote-getter on Tuesday night, Paul Vallas, actually is a conservative who would be a Republican if such a party affiliation were not a surety of political death in the Windy City. So he is a Democrat. Indeed, there are many cities like that where it is so impossible to run as a Republican that conservatives run on the Democrat line.

In the end, people get the misery they deserve when they elect incompetents with dangerous progressive agendas on policing. Where Soros-backed district attorneys get elected, crime and murder soar. Then mourning relatives of the victims go on TV and weep. And then they vote again for the same woke candidates whose policies murdered their loved ones.

It will be interesting to see how Vallas does in the runoff. And yet the question remains: If Chicagoans are smart enough to figure out that Lightfoot should be thrown out, the first elected mayor in 40 years to be so honored, why can’t they figure out that it is time, at least once in a century, to try a Republican for mayor? It can’t get any worse, although woke Democrats have an uncanny ability to surprise on that front.

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Dov Fischer
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Rabbi Dov Fischer, Esq., is Vice President of the Coalition for Jewish Values (comprising over 2,000 Orthodox rabbis), was adjunct professor of law at two prominent Southern California law schools for nearly 20 years, and is Rabbi of Young Israel of Orange County, California. He was Chief Articles Editor of UCLA Law Review and clerked for the Hon. Danny J. Boggs in the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit before practicing complex civil litigation for a decade at three of America’s most prominent law firms: Jones Day, Akin Gump, and Baker & Hostetler. He likewise has held leadership roles in several national Jewish organizations, including Zionist Organization of America, Rabbinical Council of America, and regional boards of the American Jewish Committee and B’nai B’rith Hillel Foundation. His writings have appeared in Newsweek, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, the Los Angeles Times, the Federalist, National Review, the Jerusalem Post, and Israel Hayom. A winner of an American Jurisprudence Award in Professional Legal Ethics, Rabbi Fischer also is the author of two books, including General Sharon’s War Against Time Magazine, which covered the Israeli General’s 1980s landmark libel suit. Other writings are collected at www.rabbidov.com.
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