One of the reasons why the Catholic Church has a 3 year readings cycle for Sunday Masses and a two year reading cycle for daily Masses is that you have to speak and repeat things for them to sink in.
Likewise you have to state the obvious aloud a few times for people to acknowledge it. It’s not enough that “everybody knows” it, it’s that people are unafraid to say the truth right in front of them.
Yes, well, we can reasonably infer that Tehran has a horse in this race insofar as it is trying to kill one of the candidates. And no one, including the Post’s reporters, disputes Western intelligence and security agencies’ assessment that Iran’s motive is vengeance for the 2020 strike on its IRGC commander. Moreover, the report makes note of the corroborating evidence that Iran is implicated in multiple hacks of Trump campaign email accounts, in which its agents absconded with campaign secrets and retailed them to both U.S. media outlets and the Biden campaign itself. A rather lopsided pattern has emerged.
Or as John Sexton put it:
if there are two candidates and Iran is trying to kill one of them, that would seem to indicate a clear preference in the race.
This would be the same Iran who is aiding Russia in their war against Ukraine.
Now think about this for a second. If you are Putin and you think that Trump is the favorable candidate, wouldn’t you be putting pressure on Iran to leave him alone, or wouldn’t you instead be putting pressure on them to try to knock off Harris? I mean if Harris winning means we’re all in on Ukraine wouldn’t the Russians want to stop that?
In politics and real life look at what people do rather than their rhetoric. The actions of Iran and Russia and China for that matter tell us who our enemies want to see in the White House and that someone is Kamala Harris. They also tell us who they want to see in the grave and that person is Donald Trump.
It speaks volumes as to what the left has become that so many leftists want that as well.
Clarification: When I mentioned not paying attention to a candidate’s “rhetoric” I was being kind to Vice President Harris as it would be a huge stretch to elevate the standard Harris word salad anywhere near to the level of “rhetoric”.
Chicago, in Brandon Johnson, has a leftist idealogue as its mayor. Not surprisingly, he’s failing.
Take away his far-left beliefs, “Branjo” is a big empty suit, one tailored by his former employer, the radical Chicago Teachers Union.
As I discussed last week, Johnson was a backer of the Defund the Police movement, until after he made it to the runoff round of last year’s mayoral election.
Johnson’s approval rating is 25 percent. Crime was the biggest issue of the 2023 campaign. While murders are down slightly, the crime numbers remain horrible. People don’t feel safe, despite the minimalizing of lawbreaking by Chicago’s weak-kneed media.
Despite 33 of Chicago’s 50 alderpersons voting to continue the city’s contract with ShotSpotter, a gunfire detection system deployed in high-crime areas, Branjo is putting ShotSpotter on mute.
While there are critics of ShotSpotter on the left and right, the general belief of people possessing open minds–meaning people aren’t extreme left-wingers–is that ShotSpotter works. A University of Chicago Crime Lab study said that there is a “3-in-4 chance that the technology saves about 85 lives per year.”
Besides those 33 alderpersons, Chicago’s two major daily newspapers, the Chicago Sun-Times and the Chicago Tribune–both liberal publications–favor keeping ShotSpotter. As does Johnson’s pick for police superintendant, Larry Snelling.
Branjo has never explained why, other than fulfilling a campaign promise, his reasons for dumping ShotSpotter. Last week, Chicago’s man-child mayor dismissed ShotSpotter as “walkie-talkies on a stick.”
ShotSpotter, until Sunday night that is, is deployed in 12 of Chicago’s 22 police districts. The problem for Johnson and his far-left cop-hating base is that those districts are minority-majority. However, most of the alderpersons representing those areas voted to keep in ShotSpotter in place. The core of the support for cancelling ShotSpotter in the City Council are alderpersons–some of them are openly socialist–from progressive white wards on the North Side who put Johnson over the top in last year’s election.
This afternoon on X, Silvana Tabares, who represents a Southwest Side ward. bashed Johnson’s shortsightedness.
Experts and community member all know ShotSpotter provides a vital tool for first responders to render aid to victims of gun violence.
Beginning tonight, every gunshot victim bleeding in the streets of our city will be a worth sacrifice in the eyes of our mayor for his radical agenda.
Every single one.
STATEMENT: Tonight's ShotSpotter decommission marks the implementation of the most radical, reckless, and dangerous policy in the history of our city. pic.twitter.com/aulxGP3bF6
Branjo’s inner circle is comprised of fellow leftists. Earlier this month, on the Fran Spielman Show podcast, a moderate downtown alderperson, Brian Hopkins, ripped the mayor.
“When you’re a democratic socialist who has some very extreme, left-wing views, that closes off a lot of opportunities to grow relationships with centrists or even moderate Republicans,” Hopkins said. “The city is suffering from that.”
A couple of, well, normal people were part of Johnson’s core staff early in his administration. Rich Guidice, the mayor’s first chief of staff, resigned his spring and he was replaced by a left-wing radical, Cristina Pacione-Zayas. Earlier this month, an office reshuffling ended up with an experienced and respected intergovernmental affairs officer, Sydney Holman resigning. Now in charge of lobbying the City Council and state legislators for Branjo is another extremist, Kennedy Bartley, who called police officers “f*cking pigs” in a 2021 podcast.
Chicagoans are only 16 months into Johnson’s four-year term as mayor.
As Barack Obama once said, “Elections have consequences.”
I’m old enough to remember when Democrats when an election loss was pending would try and figure out how to convince voters to consider them rather than encouraging people to murder their opponents.
Of course that was back in the days when I was a Democrat last century.
There have been a few humorous reactions to this event but nothing I’ve seen is funnier than this headline from the Daily Caller:
What really amazing about this story is that less that half a day before this 2nd assassination attempt Dana Bash was grilling J. D. Vance, Trump running mate trying to blame his and Trump rhetoric for various bomb threats in Springfield.
For some reason the base tweet won’t embed, not sure why.
While the tech giants were very quick to scrub Ryan Routh’s very left leaning social media it’s going to be rather hard to scrub all the various interactions he had with left media over the years.
What’s really interesting is that once Ron DeSantis announced that Florida would conduct it’s own investigation suddenly the FBI became talkative about Mr. Routh’s ahem “interesting” past.
Finally my worry concerning all these attempts at murder is pretty much the same as Robert E Lee worry on the Union Generals being swapped out.
He famously said he was afraid that eventually they’d put in charge someone who he didn’t understand.
Me I’m afraid that one of these attempts will eventually succeed.
Of course I’m reaching the point where I think it it gets close enough to election day and the result seems a forgone conclusion and all these attempt keep failing someone in authority in government will just bite the bullet and do it himself.
That the country has fallen so far that I actually contemplate this is amazing to me and extremely sad.
Last year’s mayoral election in Chicago presents a media deja vu moment with national implications.
Yes, I’m talking about Kamala Harris.
Brandon Johnson, an organizer for the far-left Chicago Teachers Union while serving as member of the Cook County commissioner–a rubber stamp body controlled by board president, Toni Preckwinkle, a leftist like Johnson.
Paul Vallas, a centrist Democrat, ran a wonky white-paper dominated campaign that was centered on hiring more police officers and prosecuting more misdemeanors. He lost.
Johnson campaigned largely on platitudes. His political career is a creation of the Chicago Teachers Union, and aggressive campaigning by the CTU, including door to door work, identifying Johnson’s supporters, and getting them to the polls, pushed “Branjo” over the top.
Republicans? Are we doing that?
Back to my point.
As a commissioner, Johnson could only point one accomplishment in office, the non-binding “Justice for Black Lives” resolution that passed in 2020, which called for diverting funds from law enforcement to social services.
The extreme left loves symbolism. It also hates the police.
Chicago’s mainstream media, Fran Spielman of the Chicago Sun-Times is a notable exception, are compliant lapdogs for the left. If at all, they barely challenged Branjo on his thin resume and his far-left beliefs.
Before the first round of voting for mayor, Johnson was asked about his support of Defund the Police and cutting law enforcement, Johnson flippantly replied, “Ask better questions.”
Finally, at a law enforcement forum before the second round of balloting, Johnson was asked about his backing of the Defund movement. “I said it was a political goal,” Johnson replied, “I never said it was mine.”
So the media, even though crime was the biggest issue of the 2023 Chicago mayoral campaign, dropped the Defund issue.
The Chicago media barely vetted Johnson. Just as the national media didn’t do so on Joe Biden’s senility in 2020–and it all but ignored Hunter Biden laptop story. A year later, the national media elite is ignoring or minimizing the far-left political position of Kamala Harris, and her politically convenient flip-flops on them.
Reilly, who may be candidate for mayor in 2027, said that Johnson was en route to becoming a “one-termer” who was “woefully unprepared” to lead America’s third-largest city, and a mayor who is a beholden to the “radical left.”
The warning signs were there on Johnson for anyone who did some digging. But the Chicago media barely reported on them. Last week, a Fox Chicago reporter revealed that his City Hall staffer in charge of working with City Council and state legislators to advance the mayor’s agenda, Kennedy Bartley, made vile anti-police comments in a 2021 podcast, including calling law enforcement officers “f*cking pigs.”
This is Johnson’s inner circle. The mayor has resisted calls to fire Bartley.
Crime is still sky high since Johnson took over. Murders are down, but only a little bit.
Johnson has driven the Chicago train off the rails. Ironically–and the Chicago media ignores this other story–the mayor has a massive polite detail, said to number anywhere from 125-150 cops. Johnson clearly doesn’t want to defund his police protection.
Back to Harris.
Will the mainstream media drop its biases and finally vet the vice president?
Or will they wait, until a year or so after she’s sworn in, when another “woefully unprepared” office holder, one who is beholden to “the radical left,” fails again, for so-called journalists to finally sound the alarm about Harris? Maybe not. The media was all-in on Biden until his cognitive decline couldn’t be explained away after his June debate with Donald Trump.
Biden, whose mind was clearly slipping in 2020, is arguably a tool of the far-left.
Will Harris, arguably an intellectual lightweight, end up in the same position if she wins the presidency?
John Ruberry regularly blogs from just north of Chicago at Marathon Pundit.
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