Some people should pipe down before they make fools of themselves

Let me state up-front that I’m not mocking Paul McKinley because he did time in prison.

McKINLEY: The GOP nominee

Personally, I can find something admirable about the man who, despite having done significant time in prison for burglary, armed robbery and aggravated battery convictions, has managed to win the Republican Party’s nomination for the Illinois Second Congressional District.

HE GOES ABOUT now trying to use himself as an example to young people of how NOT to behave. “Don’t be like me,” might as well be his motto. It is a noble goal. And I don’t doubt that some people are able to make something significant of themselves after enduring incarceration.

A criminal conviction ought not to be an automatic exclusion from a future life.

But I do get a thrill, a chuckle, a serious laugh from the thought of those conservative ideologues who like to bash and rant and rage and who were prepared to go through the next few weeks trashing Democratic congressional nominee Robin Kelly as a “corrupt Chicago Machine pol” replacing another pol who’s supposedly/probably/most likely on his way to prison.

Only to know that their preferred political party is the one that managed to come up with the convicted felon on the ballot; and one whose actual criminal activities debatably were worse than those of Mel Reynolds – whose own bid for political office/redemption ended in failure on Tuesday.

HECK, JESSE JACKSON, Jr.’s use of campaign money to buy himself a load of celebrity memorabilia to decorate his office comes across as petty by comparison to crimes that got decades of time in prison as punishment.

Supposedly, Kelly was going to be tarred and feathered with rhetoric related to the fact that after leaving the Illinois General Assembly, she was chief of staff to Illinois Treasurer Alexi Gianoulias – whose own bid for a U.S. Senate seat in 2010 got smeared with the fact that the Broadway Bank his father founded went under financially.

I even recall the speculation that the bank loaned money for real estate projects to a man with mob ties and criminal convictions, although Giannoulias claimed he had nothing to do with those loans and no one ever came up with evidence to the contrary.

Yet to the ideologues who don’t really care about fact to support their partisan rants, they will now lambaste anyone associated with Giannoulias as “corrupt.”

INCLUDING KELLY. TAKE the Chicago Daily Observer website – which never misses a chance to leave the partisan spin out of its efforts to tell us the “news” of the day.

They gave us the blurb Wednesday morning that read, “Robin Kelly, former Chief of Staff to failed bank owner Alexi Giannoulias, has continued the Democrat tradition of putting dicier members of the dicey Chicago political establishment in the 2^nd Congressional District.”

That was the extent of their morning-after Election Day report, other than to then take a couple of paragraphs from the Chicago Tribune to give us the fact that Kelly won the Democratic primary the night before.

To people who really want to perceive the world that way, they deserve to have to be associated with McKinley’s record (he was paroled in 1997, and the bulk of his arrests since then for misbehaving as part of political protests have resulted in dropped charges) – which will make any of their attempts to talk about political corruption sound cheap and tinny by comparison.

THIS ELECTION WILL be the political mismatch along the lines of when then-Mayor Richard M. Daley had to run against Ray Wardingley (a.k.a., Spanky the Clown).

Not that we won’t hear nonsense talk being spewed during the general election portion of this campaign cycle.

For McKinley is the candidate who is in love with the phrase “corrupt Chicago machine.” The appearances I saw him make at select campaign forums during the primary season literally devolved him into working that phrase into the answer he gave to just about every question.

What does he think of a proposed pipeline from Canada through the United States that would pass through western Illinois? “I’m convinced that the corruption of the city of Chicago will find a way to divert the pipeline and steal away every dime,” he retorted.

NOT EXACTLY A man who’s going to be bashful, or all that concerned with the truth. Although it will go far in explaining why voter turnout likely will stink even more for the April 9 elections than they did on Tuesday.

There’s only so much nonsense-talk our minds can consume before we all just tune it out!

  -30-