Is Kifowit’s trash talk any more crude than Trump-era Republican rhetoric?

Yes, Stephanie Kifowit, the state representative from Oswego who implied this week that one of her Republican colleagues ought to have his family infected with Legionnaire’s Disease, was rude and tacky in her comments.

KIFOWIT: Her moment of 'infamy?'

It was good to learn that after an entire day of trying to defend herself (claiming she was misinterpreted), she came out with an apology to the family of state Rep. Peter Breen – the legislator whose family was supposed to be infected and drop dead!

YET I HAVE to admit that hearing all the self-righteous GOP rhetoric condemning Kifowit for her trash talk was even more sickening than anything the representative said.

For these are often the same people who are so eager to defend their Republican colleagues, and President Donald Trump himself, every time they spew something stupid and crude.

Particularly with regards to the president, they try to claim his crude talk on oh so many issues is just The Donald being blunt-spoken and honest. Saying it the way it really is, they’ll try to claim.

It’s almost enough to make me think they deserve to be smacked about with Kifowit-style trash talk. In this era our society is now in, we’re going to have many people saying stupid things. We’re all going to be owed many apologies.

BREEN: Really a victim?

I ALSO HAVE no doubt that the next generation is going to look back on my own and wonder just how we all could have been pathetic enough to think that such behavior was acceptable.

Probably similar to how many of us in society these days look back on old segregationist attitudes and ponder just how anyone could ever have been so backward as to think such thoughts were civilized and proper.

All of this was triggered Tuesday by activity at the Statehouse in Springfield, where the big issue being discussed was a bill meant to raise the financial limits that exist for how much the families of seniors who lived at a veterans’ home in Quincy could sue the state to compensate them for the loss of a loved one.

Breen, a Lombard Republican, said he thinks there are too many questions, and that raising the limits (from $100,000 to $2 million) could be financially damaging to the state.

SCHNEIDER: A little too self-righteous!

THAT IS WHAT offended Kifowit to the point where she said how bad it would be if a “broth of Legionella” were to be put into the water supply of Breen’s family.

Kifowit initially tried defending herself by saying she meant her statement as a theoretical example, and not as a hard-and-fast outcome that she was wishing for. But she got buried under mounds of harsh rhetoric implying how cruel and heartless she was for even suggesting the death of a political colleague’s family.

“Kifowit should be ashamed of her remarks,” said state Republican Chairman Tim Schneider. “Since Rep. Kifowit has refused to apologize to Rep. Breen she should resign from office, as these remarks are unfit for someone serving public office.”

Of course, Kifowit later came up with an apology. When combined with the fact that Schneider’s own political influence these days is minimal (he couldn’t even win re-election earlier this month to his government post on the Cook County Board), it’s not likely that anybody is resigning from anything.

FOR IF WE truly expected resignations from political people every time they said or thought something stupid, we likely wouldn’t have any officials left to fill government posts.

TRUMP: How many apologies does he owe us?

It may be the ultimate truth about comprehending the ways of government and politics – it’s all a matter of trying to avoid saying something stupid. Then again, one’s idea of what is stupid or offensive all-too-often depends on one’s own partisan political leanings.

Going back to the example of our president, who has made so many rude and crude comments on so many issues that I’ve lost count, he’s not about to resign because of his mouth. His Republican colleagues in Congress enjoy the fact that Trump’s presence strengthens their own political status, so they’re not about to hold him accountable.

Which means that on a certain level, Kifowit probably deserves a bit of praise for the fact that she apologized for her bout of diarrhea of the mouth that she suffered from Tuesday.

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Attorneys who prosecute for political reasons stink – no matter who does it!

There are those of a certain partisan political leaning eager to feed into a fantasy that a newly-elected state Attorney General Erika Harold would handle an investigation into the criminal behavior of Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan.

MADIGAN: Ending AG term w/ Gov. investigation

Of course, much of what these ideologues want to say is “criminal” amounts to little more than the fact that Madigan, as a Democrat, disagrees with many of the policies they’d like to see the state impose on all of us.

SO PERHAPS THERE is a touch of appropo to the fact that soon-to-be former state Attorney General Lisa Madigan is doing her own investigation against the man – Gov. Bruce Rauner – who has been aggressive in spewing the rhetoric that “Speaker Mike” is a crook.

Specifically, Lisa Madigan wants to determine if the outbreak of Legionnaire’s Disease that occurred at the Veterans Affairs facility in downstate Quincy in any way was worsened by neglect by the state that could constitute criminal behavior.

In short, is the man whose re-election desires are based on the notion that Mike Madigan is a crook really nothing more than a crook himself – one whose behavior resulted in aging military veterans in need of care becoming ill, or more than a dozen dying outright?

Or is all this rhetoric merely misuse of legal issues to try to punish one’s political opponents. Criminalizing politics – or at least the notion of being in an opposition party.

Ideologues would fight over whether Rauner … 

THAT MAY BE the scariest thought of all. Because it would put our society in the same league as many of the societies that we like to spew high-minded rhetoric about how superior we are to them.

To be honest, I don’t think Rauner has done anything blatantly illegal. Certainly nothing that ought to result in him spending the next few years following his possible Nov. 6 electoral defeat having to fight off criminal charges.

And while I don’t think that Lisa Madigan is somehow being a spiteful witch threatening to prosecute the man who keeps implying that her father is somehow worthy of criminal prosecution, you just know the conservative ideologues are going to want to view the issue in exactly such a manner.

… or Madigan is more of a 'crook'

If anything, Madigan’s actions are all the evidence needed as to why people who think that an “Attorney General Harold” ought to prosecute Speaker Mike are being downright ridiculous.

FOR THE PURPOSE of the state attorneys general is to serve as the lawyer advising state government on the limits of the law whenever they engage in their schemes on assorted issues.

In short, they’re there to defend state officials, not be the prosecutors. It really is the individual state’s attorneys across Illinois who ought to be taking on such criminal cases.

Which in this case means the state’s attorney for Adams County, Ill.; that Western Illinois place along the Mississippi River that would like to think it is still a significant port city – and not just the place where residents of the local veterans’ home died due to appalling circumstances.

Yet State’s Attorney Scott Farha has been quick to not only distance himself from any such action, he was even quicker to dismiss Lisa Madigan’s actions as being, “politically motivated.”

THAT MAY, OR may not be true. Yet it also creates circumstances where people can quickly conclude that Farha, as a Republican, is merely being protective of his political party counterparts – rather than trying to get to the truth of what happened in Quincy.

Did we believe Nixon when he said he was 'not a crook'

This has become a case where partisan politics is going to interfere with ever determining what occurred at that veterans’ home – and who was in any way responsible.

Trying to determine if Bruce Rauner was more of a crook than Mike Madigan was gets us tied up with side issues that most likely aren’t relevant to the case. They’re distractions.

Besides, those of us of a certain generation know that in politics, there’s only one man who deserves to be called a “crook” – that’s Richard M. Nixon. Although I’m wondering if President Donald J. Trump these days is giving him a run for the money for that label?

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EXTRA: Rauner "gettin' his kicks" down Route 66; or at least a part of it

I’m sure it’s meant in part to make our governor, Bruce Rauner, be some sort of regular-guy. Riding his motorcycle along the one-time Route 66 to Springfield, Ill., with stops along the way.

Illinois' governor riding his motorcycle Saturday along the old U.S. Route 66. Photo provided by state of Illinois

Rauner has made his third such trip on Saturday, with his ride supporting Illinois veterans’ organizations and the Honor Flight of Illinois. During his trip, he made stops in Dwight, Lexington and Lincoln, before finally arriving at the Illinois State Fairgrounds in Springfield Saturday night.

NOW I SUPPOSE it’s a noble-enough cause to make the ride to draw public attention to military veterans’ groups, along with police officers and firefighters and other public safety workers who are called upon in emergency situations to protect the public in crisis situations.

I just have to nit-pick one detail. Rauner began his motorcycle ride on the old Route 66 in the western suburb of Countryside (which is suburban Cook County).

Yet anybody who knows anything about the old Mother Road knows that the far eastern end of the old 66 was in downtown Chicago on Michigan Avenue at Jackson Street.

That’s what the “down to St. Louie, to Joplin, Mo.” portion of the “Get Your Kicks on Route 66” song refers to.

Route 66 marker remains in shadow of former Sears Tower. Photo by Gregory Tejeda

DOES OUR GOVERNOR really want to exclude Chicago from his trip? Does he think we have no veterans who’d like support?

Or maybe he just thinks Chicagoans would see through his stunt to appear to be a part of the “common man?” Or he just wants to appear amongst people who might actually think seriously about voting for him come November '18.

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Trump trumps Rauner when it comes to being wealthy fool full of himself

Anytime those of us in Illinois think our governor excels in the arrogance department with the way he equally refuses to compromise toward a new state budget, all we have to do to get a jolt of reality is take a look at Donald Trump.

Does Trump need boot in behind to shrink ego?

The New York real estate developer who thinks his wealth is evidence of his genius has managed to tick off so many people with his recent views on Mexicans. Now, he’s ticking off people who probably want to believe Trump knows exactly what he’s talking about on that issue.

FOR NOW, TRUMP is going after military veterans – specifically Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., whose public image relies heavily on the fact that he served during the Vietnam War and did a lengthy stretch as a prisoner of war.

There are those who give McCain so much credit for the fact that he was incarcerated by the North Vietnamese faction and endured more than his share of torture.

Trump recently went out of his way to mock McCain, saying he deserves no real praise for his military record. Although I suspect his real criticism is the fact that Trump donated money to McCain’s unsuccessful 2008 presidential bid.

Which means he wasn’t able to “buy” the ability to tell the president what to do. That is really what interest the overly-wealthy corporate types have in electoral politics – they want to have their business interests reinforced!

OF COURSE, IN the case of Trump, he has a decades-old track record of having an over-bloated ego and sense of self-importance – the motivation for his latest bid for the Republican nomination for president in next year’s election cycle.

McCAIN: How heroic is he?

Just as Rauner got tired of trying to buy political influence through campaign contributions and went ahead and got himself elected to a political post, Trump is trying to do the same.

Yet I don’t think Rauner has the nerve to pull off the trash-talk that Trump has given us; nor would he then follow it up by spewing stupid-talk about how others ought to apologize to him for having the nerve to think that he is wrong to begin with.

That is what we have got from Trump – he thinks people critical of his Mexico rhetoric have done him wrong, and now he thinks those upset with his criticism of McCain ought to bow down and beg forgiveness for having the nerve to say he’s wrong.

RAUNER: What does he think of The Donald?

FOR THE RECORD, I’ll agree that McCain’s military record often gets exaggerated by political partisans who want to score political points on Election Day. They want to think every Republican official warrants praise, while also blasting any military veteran (remember John Kerry from ’04) who winds up becoming a Democrat.

But trying to trash McCain bolster his presidential dreams just comes across as tacky.

Because I always thought the fact that McCain endured the mental strain of incarceration in the service of his nation was worthy of some respect. I suspect that Trump – if he ever had been put in that situation – would have cracked within minutes.

The wimp!!!

I KNOW SOME people are eager to make much of this by saying it actually benefits Trump. After all, there are polls showing Trump doing well in Iowa and New Hanpshire (the first states to express themselves in the upcoming election cycle) and leading nationwide.

That nationwide lead is only 17 percent – or roughly one of every six people who think of themselves as Republican. That’s a lot of Republicans who don’t want Trump, along with all the people who don’t think of themselves as being a part of the GOP.

Many of those Republicans are going out of their way to avoid saying anything – they don’t want to give the Democrats they invariably will challenge any ammunition to be used against the Party of Lincoln.

Although it makes me wonder if, in his private moments when he’s in the Executive Mansion, Rauner’s shuddering in disgust is a combination of Trump’s latest ego-bloated statements AND the decaying condition of his official residence!

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Holiday ‘blues’ leaves many for dead; but not in a way we’d honor and respect

It was Memorial Day on Monday, and we were supposed to be paying tribute to those people who served in the military and wound up making the “ultimate sacrifice,” as some people like to phrase it.

Yet I wonder if we’d have been better off paying some sort of tribute to those of us Chicagoans who wound up getting caught in the crossfire, so to speak, and being shot – if not outright killed.

FOR WHILE MANY people wanted to talk about long-ago casualties in places like Khe Sahn, Normandy Beach (we’re only a couple of weeks shy of the 71^st anniversary of D-Day) or Fallujah, certain of our own streets seem to be just as deadly.

For it seems that during the holiday weekend, there were nine people killed by gunfire and at least 34 others wounded. Unless you prefer to believe the Chicago Tribune, in which case, it was 41 people.

There’s always the chance that the figures could go higher by the time you actually read this, since one of those wounded may wind up becoming a fatality.

Now I’m not implying there’s something special about these holiday weekends that causes more people to become fatalities. I recall my own days of full-time police reporting back when I was with the now-defunct City News Bureau. It was back then that I learned to dread holiday weekends.

NOT BECAUSE I cared about the fact that one year, I worked every single major holiday that “real people” were given off as paid holidays.

But it was because of the tendency to pay extra close attention to every single incident of mayhem that occurs at such times. Not only running totals of every single auto accident, but of just about any incident that occurs in someone’s death.

Sometimes, I wonder if such attention somehow causes higher numbers of incidents. Or maybe we’re just made more aware of how deadly conditions can be in certain parts of Chicago.

Because it becomes way too easy to ignore for those of us who don’t live in certain parts of Chicago – which a Tribune story on Monday managed to define as being from the north end of the Bronzeville neighborhood south into the Englewood neighborhood.

THE PLACES WHERE the “Chiraq” label isn’t all that much of an exaggeration, and where our city officials wish they didn’t have to devote so much time and attention.

The image many of us want of Chicago

Better for them if they could think the seedy side of Chicago is the so-called “Bundy Fountain” that foreign tourists ask to see, and which the rest of us know as Buckingham Fountain.

It would be sad if it turned out that Memorial Day went into the mindset of a significant number of Chicagoans as a bloodbath. Since it seems several of the shootings and at least two of the fatalities were on Monday proper.

The day that some people are devoting to trying out a special sauce to go with their holiday barbecues will be the day that some families remember as the one where a loved one died.

ALTHOUGH I’M SURE it won’t be thought of that way. In fact, I’m sure some people will want to think of such a thought as being overly morbid. Perhaps even subversive.

They’d rather think of death on this holiday weekend in the abstract – as in something that occurred on a battlefield overseas and where noble words about “honor” and “duty” can be tossed about.

 

The great shame of the bloodshed that occurred in Chicago this past weekend is that many of these were young people – the fatalities were as young as 15 and the wounded included a 4-year-old girl.

The way some view holiday's death

People whose lives were cut off prior to reaching their prime; before they could even have a chance to serve their country and possibly make that “ultimate sacrifice” that would probably be the only way that would cause some in our society to recognize their worth as human beings.

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Judge had to decide if law enforcement guideline was enough to warrant crime

I have to admit to being somewhat surprised when I learned Wednesday of a Cook County judge’s ruling that acquitted a suburban Park Forest police officer of a reckless conduct charge in the death of an elderly man.

Prosecutors emphasized during the criminal case of Craig Taylor that his use of a shotgun loaded with beanbag rounds did not strictly comply with the guidelines for using such a weapon – which is supposed to be a non-deadly way of subduing a potentially violent person.

SPECIFICALLY, THEY POINTED out that the officer was about six feet away from his target when he fired five rounds into the man’s torso – causing injuries with internal bleeding that ultimately caused his death the following day, although it should be noted he refused medical treatment that could have saved him from the injuries.

As investigators with the state’s attorney’s office pointed out at the time of Taylor’s indictment, such a weapon is not supposed to be used any closer than 15 feet from its target; because such a blow could be so hard that it would be deadly at such close range.

My point is that I expected the bench trial for Taylor at the courthouse in suburban Markham would have focused heavily on that technicality. When combined with the fact that the victim’s family was heavily emphasizing his age (95) and his military service record (he was in the Army Air Corps during World War II), I expected the outcome to be some sort of technical ruling that would say he had to be found guilty of a crime, any crime.

But that didn’t happen!

JUDGE LUCIANO PANICI wound up issuing a ruling that said Taylor’s use of force during a 2013 incident at a Park Forest nursing home “was not excessive.”

Which then allowed the criminal case for which a trial was held last month to focus heavily on the fact that the deceased man had been abrasive to the nursing home staff (which is why police were called in the first place) AND had pulled a knife that he used to threaten police officers.

In my own experience of covering cops, crime and courts during the past quarter of a century, it usually comes out that any sense of an officer feeling threatened by someone with a weapon justifies the use of deadly force.

As in Taylor and the other officers who were with him back in July 2013 would have been justified reaching for their pistols and trying to shoot the man dead!

IT MAY HAVE gone in Taylor’s favor that he said he took his target’s age and physical condition (he was living in a nursing home because he wasn’t physically capable of living on his own any longer) in not reaching for his pistol, but instead trying to use the beanbag-loaded shotgun instead.

During Taylor’s trial, some said he should have tried to show even more restraint – such as using the shield he was equipped with to merely knock the man down.

Although I suspect if he had, we’d still be hearing intense complaints from the man’s family about how their elderly, war hero relative was brutalized by a police officer.

Which means there was no way this incident was going to turn out in a way that would have satisfied the man’s family.

I UNDERSTAND THEIR feelings of loss. Nobody wants to lose a relative. But this case had devolved to the point where it seemed like they were more interested in taking down a police officer who had no prior record of criminal behavior or improper incidents on the job.

That is why I can’t help but feel a bit of relief for the ruling that Panici made on Wednesday. He didn’t let a technicality (the six-foot distance versus 15-foot guideline) pressure him into deciding on a “guilty” verdict.

Not that I expect the elderly man’s family to be content. They still have a lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court – one that will seek to break this police officer financially, possibly for the rest of his life. His legal troubles are far from over.

But the judge wound up keeping this unfortunate incident of two years ago into a completely illogical legal catastrophe; which is what a “guilty” verdict and prison time for Taylor would have created.

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