By: Mark Glennon*
Chicago’s Mayor Lori Lightfoot should start acting solely in the city’s interest instead of playing politics, especially racial politics. That means exclusive focus on the crisis at hand.
A month ago she brushed off the threat of the the coming health and financial crisis, claiming Chicago was fully prepared and the federal government was overreacting. Her latest message is that use of the term “Chinese virus” is false and racist.
On February 26 Lightfoot accused the federal government of fear mongering and spreading panic, as the Chicago Sun-Times put it, saying,
I will candidly tell you that I was very disappointed with the comments of the CDC yesterday and members of the Trump administration around coronavirus…. We feel very well prepared to address this issue. And I don’t want people to take from the comments … at the federal level that, somehow, they should be worried and that we’re not prepared in this city. We absolutely are prepared… I don’t want to get ahead of ourselves and suggest to the public that there’s a reason for them to be fearful.
Note that she made those comments a month after the gravity of the China virus threat was entirely apparent. Why did she dismiss the warnings anyway? Does anybody doubt the motivation was to poke a stick in Donald Trump’s eye?
Would Chicago be better off now if Lightfoot had taken federal warnings at face value and started preparing accordingly? Given the desperate efforts now underway to set surge emergency care and expand hospital capacity, it certainly appears an extra month would have helped.
Yet Lightfoot somehow now has the guts to say this Sunday on Twitter: [Trump] please step up and be a leader. While you have been yammering about hoaxes and fake news, the COVID-19 pandemic has hit all over America. @GovPritzker and others have filled this country’s leadership gap. Lead or get out of their way.” Blatant hypocrisy.
On Saturday Lightfoot delivered this message on Twitter:
COVID-19 is not the “Chinese virus.” It is a worldwide pandemic. My administration stands with the Asian community in rejecting these falsehoods and racism. Chicago’s response to this pandemic will be determined by science and compassion, not fear and bigotry.
Was that to strike a blow against “falsehood and racism” or a political stunt that’s actually divisive, insulting and not in Chicago’s interests?
Some of us like the term “Chinese virus” because, aside from being an accurate and conventional way to label an epidemic (e.g., Spanish flu, Ebola and the West Nile Virus), it’s a means of putting more pressure on the Chinese Communist Party. We feel strongly because the CCP is the most dangerous force on the planet. It bears much or all of the blame for the pandemic. It has enslaved 1.4 billion people under the the most complete surveillance state in history.
We don’t think that makes us racist, and we don’t take kindly to people who say it does, to put it mildly.
We also don’t like word cops telling us how to speak — under any circumstances.
We all know what’s really going on here. Lightfoot, like many politicians, takes every opportunity she can to take a shot at Donald Trump, who uses the Chinese virus term conspicuously. She brushed off the early warnings from from the Trump Administration because, well, it’s the Trump Administration. It would never have been claimed that “Chinese virus” is racist if Trump weren’t the most conspicuous user of the term. After all, much of the regular media were calling it the “Wuhan” or the “Chinese” virus during the initial months of the outbreak.
She doesn’t care how many others she is insulting.
Trump is “divisive and offensive,” she said earlier. Yes, he is. But that’s precisely Lightfoot’s intention as well: Use race to stoke political division. And Trump knows that if he says something edgy his opponents will overreact, insulting not just him but much of the rest of the country. And so the cycle of division deepens.
Those who Lightfoot has insulted include not just Trump but many in Congress who are at least as hawkish on China as Trump and use the same language. But where does Lightfoot figure she will get the money she needs to address Chicago’s fiscal crisis? They will bail her out, she thinks. “This is a B-sized problem, meaning something that can only be solved with billions in needed stimulus support from the federal government,” she said in her speech last Thursday.
Well, Trump is nothing if not vindictive, and plenty of others in the federal government will remember Lightfoot’s words and actions when she comes asking for help.
Lightfoot inherited a fiscal catastrophe for which neither she nor any major officeholder has ever presented a solution. Chicago now faces the additional shock of a potential humanitarian crisis and an economic downturn that could rival the Great Depression — a downturn for which it was the least prepared big city in the nation.
She’s not helping.
*Mark Glennon is founder of Wirepoints.
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Naming the virus for its origin is not racist, it’s factual. I’m waiting for people to come to the same question I have-if you accept the official narrative that it originated in a bat at the market in Wuhan, how did the bat get it? I’m sure it’s coincidence the market was just down the road from the level 4 bioresearch facility. And we don’t find out until last week the market was torn down in early January.
Bats carry coronavirus. They are disgusting. Even our bronze age forefathers knew not to eat bats. Its literally in the Old Testament, it says don’t eat owl, vulture, hawk or bat, as they are all ‘unclean’. That’s where it came from, the biolab is purely coincidental.
Yes sir. Spanish Flu, West Nile, Zika. All of these virus names come from where it was thought to have originated. Not racist until Donald Trump said it.
Excellent piece! I have observed in the past several years that the Democrat party is simply a bastion of projection. They repeatedly do what they accuse everyone else of doing. They are not leaders; but glorified ward heelers. Pritzker getting on Twitter to whine about Trump is comical. Can you imagine a Fortune 500 CEO doing this to get what he needs to help a company mired in crisis? Pritzker is not a leader; he’s always been a follower, and he desires only to be Mr. Popular. This state is in very dire straits, and we have no leaders up… Read more »
The guy spent more of his own money to basically buy the office; he spent more than any other person in history to buy a governorship. He’s a political newbie, has no idea what he is doing; he makes decisions based upon the comments to his twitter feed and comments. His twitter comments are mostly “good job JB, shut it down!” He calls anyone that disagrees with him a carnival barker. He gets in a pissing match with another fellow billionaire in DC (Trump) , except that Trump has all the resources of the federal government, and IL has nothing.… Read more »
Lightfoot’s TDS will soon be overcome by the complete financial failure of the City of Chicago. It will be amusing schadenfreude watching her try and suck-up to Trump for a federal bail-out.
Please don’t use the words Lightfoot and suck up in the same paragraph. Ewww.
Yes, this idea was also evident in the President’s response to Big (Fat?) Boy’s tweet criticizing him a couple days ago … LL has way bigger fish to fry. Negotiations with the police and fire, with 21% funding of their pensions, LOL!
“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”
C.S. Lewis. Nice.
Outstanding. Going into the file I keep of great quotes.
Mayor Lightfoot– stop pandering to your base. They aren’t going to leave you under any circumstances.. You just got elected. Trump is not going to win Illinois. Stop yelling “racism”, “xenophobia” and “homophobia” every time the sun comes up. Focus on the things that matter now– getting the virus under control and getting a handle on the impending doom for Chicago finances. Your statement a few days ago about City finances was sophomoric. Just because no single revenue line item is not more than 13% of the total is irrelevant. If many of those line items drops by 20 or… Read more »
She knows who her base is. As long as she can paint the bogeyman and turn the noses of the ignorant masses in Trump’s direction, there will always be somebody else to blame for the outright failure of their own character and worldview.
The hallmark of any modern liberal is absolutely never admitting you were wrong. About anything.
What bothers me is there is no reason to think there won’t be another deadly virus after this one. We’ve been warned about our unpreparedness for a pandemic but those were ignored as much as warnings about unfunded pension liabilities. Of course it came from China. This is Microbiology 101. Deadly new diseases happen when germs make the jump from animals to humans. Watch the you-tube vid ” Hollywood and Society at large on Lockdown: What’s Going on, and What’s Next?”
100% agreed with this piece.
Lightfoot has TDS and unfortunately, that’s almost incurable, and also terminal.
Go to hell, Lori.
Anyone who thinks Lightfoot and those in her circle wouldn’t much rather break bread with CCP party leaders, who preside over the most racist and repressive society on the planet, than Wirepoints creators and its readers just isn’t paying attention.
They don’t have a clue that the devil makes good on a few [short term] things, then throws you under the bus on the main agreement at the end while you writhe, knowing your coming destruction. And even if you refuse to believe it, you still wither away, which is the inescapable pain of your insolence.
I love your handle, btw, chumpchange (-: