Illinois: State Of Embarrassment

Forbes via Yahoo News ^ | 6 Dec 2011 | Joel Kotkin

[edpc]

Most critics of Barack Obama’s desultory performance the past three years trace it to his supposedly leftist ideology, lack of experience and even his personality quirks. But it would perhaps be more useful to look at the geography -- of Chicago and the state of Illinois -- that nurtured his career and shaped his approach to politics. Like with George W. Bush and Texas, this is a case where you can’t separate the man from the place.

The Chicago imprint on Obama is unmistakable. His closest advisors are almost all products of the Windy City’s machine politic: Consigliere Valerie Jarrett; his first chief of staff, now Chicago Mayor, Rahm Emanuel; and his current chief of staff, longtime Chicago hackster William Daley, scion of the Windy City’s longtime ruling family.

All these figures arose from a Chicago where corruption is so commonplace that it elicits winks, nods and even a kind of admiration. Since 1973, for example, 27 Chicago Aldermen have been convicted by U.S. Attorney of the Northern District of Illinois.

[edpc]

If the Chicago system had proven an economic success, perhaps we could excuse Obama for bringing it to the rest of us. Most of us would put up with a bit of corruption and special dealing if the results were strong economic and employment growth.

Wrong. We had that in the 90s. It brought the WOT to our shores in 2001. There's always a price for turning a blind eye.

[loveliberty2]

Picture this: a group of people in Chicago, April 19th & 20th, 2002, who describe themselves as being "intellectuals," declaring: "It will be both a celebration of ideas and a rigorous examination of the roles and responsibilities that intellectuals play in society."

Picture also that participants in two of the discussion groups include Bernadine Dorhn and State Senator Barack Obama.

Nothing is so pitiful and shameful that, in a country whose document of liberty was authored by a true intellectual, and was said by him to be a mere representation of "the American mind" of 1776--in such a country, in 2010, after over 200 years of basking in the "light of liberty" first shed by that document, we now have a group of people sitting around in Chicago and plotting how their so-called "intellectual" efforts will play a role "in society."

As Weaver said, "Ideas have consequences."

The ideas of 1776 resulted in more liberty and prosperity for more people over a longer period of time than ever had been experienced in the history of civilization!

The so-called "intellectuals" who occupy positions of excessive coercive power in Washington today will, if unstopped, precipitate another age of darkness in the world, where the ideas of liberty have been censored, and the teachings of Marx and Mao have been exalted.

Dr. Russell Kirk years ago warned us of what T. S. Eliot had labeled a "new provincialism--the provinciality of time, imprisoning people in their own little present moments." Picture the participants of that Chicago conference, and we have a visual of Kirk's words.

[Bluebeard16]

Bill Ayers was also listed as a speaker.