I usually stick to commenting on events abroad, but I was shocked to see Rep. Bobby Rush (D-Ill.) address his fellow members clad in a “hoodie” in an unvarnished cry for media attention, capitalizing on the death of Trayvon Martin. He was dismissed from the floor, but not before donning his sunglasses and stating the following:

“Racial profiling has to stop…just because someone wears a hoodie does not make them a hoodlum.”

The Washington Post links the video here.

Fair enough. I’m not going to jump into the mix of the Trayvon fiasco, but I will remind our readership that Rep. Rush represents a district on the South Side of Chicago that’s primarily black, incredibly violent and desperately in need of positive leadership, on the home front. On a nearly daily basis, young black men are murdered where they stand — the casualties of a block-by-city-block drug war that left SEVEN people fatally dead in one weekend. Three people lost their lives in a triple homicide just last night. Channeling their gallow’s humor, the Chicago PD have taken to calling it “March Madness.”

Since 2008, 80 percent of the 530 young people under the age of 21 who have been killed in Chicago lived in the city’s South, Southwest and West sides. Englewood, a neighborhood represented by Rep. Rush, was perhaps the worst — it boasts a murder rate five times that of the rest of the city. 

So where is their congressional representative to be found? Certainly not beating the drum for an end to violence in his home district. No he’s too busy hamming it up for Congress, because that’s where the cameras are, and the black-on-black crime that’s bleeding his district doesn’t fan the flames of racial friction like a media-manufactured lynching.