The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Lindy West’s Big Fat Plagiarism Scandal

Posted on | March 28, 2019 | Comments Off on Lindy West’s Big Fat Plagiarism Scandal

 

File this one under “Annals of Leftist Autophagy.” Lindy West is a feminist who became notorious for promoting the 2015 #ShoutYourAbortion social media campaign, and she’s also a 300-pound “fat activist” who, in her 2016 memoir Shrill, asserted that America is afflicted with a “monomanical fixation on female thinness.”

Because Hollywood is desperate to appease feminists, Lindy West’s memoir got turned into a six-part series on the Hulu livestreaming network, and the problem with that — as anyone familiar with Shrill‘s hateful anti-male theme would immediately see — is that the book doesn’t easily lend itself to entertainment purposes.

To adapt Lindy West’s book to the screen, therefore, Hulu hired writers to pad out the script with scenes that are found nowhere in West’s book. And as might be expected, a plagiarism scandal ensued:

There’s a scene in Shrill . . . when Annie (played by Aidy Bryant) stands in a circle, surrounded by beautiful big naked bellies in bathing suits.
Annie hovers, shy and unsure of herself. She’s the only one not in a bathing suit and is, instead, fully covered in jeans and a blue button down shirt. She’s encouraged to dance, but waves it off. But then, after a moment’s hesitation, she starts dancing as Ariana Grande’s “One Last Time” swells. Seeing all of those beautiful fat babes dazzling in their bikinis unlocks something inside. She’s confident and comfortable and self-assured.
She’s radiant. . . .
Earlier this week, fat activist Virgie Tovar spoke out publicly against Shrill, claiming that the pool party was lifted directly from an experience she discussed in both her Tedx Talk and recent memoir, You Have the Right to Remain Fat. She called out West by name, angry at a white woman for stealing this personal moment from her past and not giving her, a woman of color, the recognition she deserves.
There’s just one problem: West did not write Episode 4 “Pool.” The episode was written by writer and humorist Samantha Irby, a queer black woman.
All three women — West, Tovar, and Irby — write and speak about their experiences as fat women. All have books to their name and strong social media platforms. For those of us, like myself, who advocate for fat acceptance and body positivity, they all carry familiar names.

Being an “advocate for fat acceptance and body positivity” in the feminist movement is an increasingly overcrowded niche — everybody’s doing it, and therefore the competition among such “advocates” is merciless. Virgie Tovar complains the left-wing “call-out culture” she tried to leverage against Lindy West got turned against her:

The fact that Lindy West or any of the other white people on Shrill team didn’t step up to take accountability and instead allowed this to become a fight between two women of color is truly despicable. . . . Irby’s actions have impacted me, have hurt me, and I know mine have hurt her too. I know that Irby’s experiences and mine are not the same, but I do know I experience racism too. Racism looks like not seeing yourself when you try to find stories that make you feel like you really exist. Racism is being told by a white woman that your work doesn’t matter enough to be part of the conversation you’ve dedicated your life to for a decade.

All it would have taken is an email, a phone call, a small payment and a writer’s credit to pacify Virgie Tovar, if the creators of the Hulu show had the presence of mind to do this in advance. But the recent boom in feminist propaganda TV means it’s amateur hour on these productions, and nobody in charge recognized that Irby had written a scene for Shrill clearly inspired by Tovar’s story. The larger issue (pardon the pun) is that feminists are reframing obesity — a serious health problem in the United States — as a sort of resistance to the patriarchy. While I have great sympathy for plump women who complain, quite rightly, about the endless bombardment of media images of skeletal fashion models, and advertisements for weight-loss products of dubious effectiveness, such legitimate complaints must be considered separately from attempts to turn “fat activism” into a political movement. To say that Lindy West (or Virgie Tovar or any other fat woman) is a victim of patriarchal oppression is transparently an effort to organize a new grievance lobby, to indoctrinate fat women with the belief that political activism is the solution to their personal problems. What this is about is recruiting constituents for the Democrat Party by convincing them that the way to fight back against fat-shaming “sexists” is to elect more Democrats.

Astute readers will note that nobody is offering book contracts or TV deals to fat men complaining about their weight problems. The progressives who control the publishing industry and Hollywood have no sympathy for fat men, or for any men at all, really. Everything for progressives is now about promoting feminism, to widen the electoral “gender gap” in favor of Democrats. Do not be deceived.



 

Category: Hollywood, Sex Trouble

Tucker Carlson: CNN Dutifully Follows ‘Marching Orders’ From Nancy Pelosi

Posted on | March 28, 2019 | Comments Off on Tucker Carlson: CNN Dutifully Follows ‘Marching Orders’ From Nancy Pelosi

 

In his Wednesday opening monologue, Tucker Carlson explained that the real collusion is between Democrats and the “mainstream” media:

This past Sunday afternoon, we learned that the Trump campaign did not collude with the government of Russia. That was the conclusion of Robert Mueller’s investigation, an investigation that spent two years exhaustively looking into the question. This was very good news for America — we don’t have a spy in the White House. But it was apocalyptic for the Democratic Party and their press agents in the news media.
These are the people who would stake their reputations and their fortunes on the collusion hoax — and they were stunned. Befuddled politicians stammered on television, trying to figure out what to say about the news. Viewers of liberal media outlets didn’t want to hear anything about it. Huge numbers of them just quit watching immediately. On Tuesday night, CNN’s 8 p.m. show lost nearly 50 percent of its viewers.
For progressive channels, this was a catastrophe. Something had to be done. So into this disaster steps the Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi. On Monday, just hours after the collusion story collapsed, Pelosi announced that the Democratic Party would be switching gears. Going forward, Democrats would focus intently on health care, just like she disingenuously claimed they always had.
“We’ve never taken our focus away,” she said. “I hope that it focuses the press on these issues.”
“I hope the press focuses healthcare,” Pelosi said. She didn’t have to ask twice. At CNN, they were paying close attention to every word Pelosi uttered. To Jeff Zucker and the anchors who work for him at CNN, Pelosi isn’t just a politician, she’s the leader of the party — their party. The party under whose banner Zucker has said he may someday run for office.
When America’s most powerful Democrat speaks, CNN listens with pen in hand. These are marching orders, and the network swung into action immediately. The rundowns of every primetime show were scrapped and rebuilt. Gone were the segments about office towers in Moscow and Carter Page’s spying and Don Jr. going to prison. In their place, long editorials about health care. The Democratic health care plan is sensible and necessary, CNN told us. The Republican plan — cruel and heartless. . . .
Democratic officials pick the topic and the storyline. Their servants in cable news dutifully repeat it to the word, all day long.
CNN is not a news outlet, it’s a super PAC. It is running unregulated campaign ads 24 hours a day.

Watch the video:



 

Category: CNN, Fox News

In The Mailbox: 03.27.19

Posted on | March 28, 2019 | Comments Off on In The Mailbox: 03.27.19

— compiled by Wombat-socho

OVER THE TRANSOM
Ninety Miles From Tyranny: The 90 Miles Mystery Box Episode #572
357 Magnum: It’s Almost Like they Never Heard Of Capital Gains Taxes
EBL: A Bad Week For Rachel Maddow & MSNBC
Twitchy: Kim Fox Office Internal Memo Seeks Other Examples Of The Smollett Treatment (Updated)
Louder With Crowder: Watch Senator Mike Lee Mock The Green New Deal With Star Wars, Ronald Reagan Riding Velociraptor

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: My Trip To Louisiana
American Power: Leftists Destroy Everything
American Thinker: The Incalculable Damage Of The Russia Hoax
Animal Magnetism: Animal’s Hump Day News
Babalu Blog: Royal Twits Go Slumming In Style, also, TV Marti Goes On The Air In 1990, Begins Broadcasting To Cuba
BattleSwarm: How Qatar Buys Influence (And A Bit About The Saudis)
CDR Salamander: Well, That’s One Plan To Get To 355
Da Tech Guy: Two Guys Don’t Get Prosecuted, also, Flyover Country – The Real News About Floods
Don Surber: Obama’s Legacy Is The Smollett Case
Dustbury: Son, Can You Play Me A Melody?
First Street Journal: Only In The Age Of Special Snowflakes Would This Be News
The Geller Report: Obama Admin Pressured Ukraine Not To Investigate “Mega-Donor” Soros, also, “Libyan” Human Traffickers Force Slaves To Perform Unspeakable Acts
Hogewash: Senate Votes Down Green Nude Eel, 57-0, also, Team Kimberlin Post of The Day (Starring Johnny Atsign!)
Hollywood In Toto: Captain Marvel Strips One Essential Element Away
Joe For America: Judge Jeannine Returns To Fox News This Saturday, also, Chicago PD Revolts After Smollett Charges Dropped, Releases Smollett’s Arrest Record
JustOneMinute: Cut ‘Em Loose
Legal Insurrection: 9th Circuit Rejects Appeal From Kate Steinle’s Parents, Rules They Can’t Sue San Francisco, also, Greenland Glacier Reverses Course, Starts Growing Again After Years of Shrinking
Michelle Malkin: Crony State – The Obamas’ Chicago Fixer Tina Tchen
The PanAm Post: Colombia Denounces Russian Military Presence In Venezuela
Power Line: Democrats Punt On The Green New Deal, also, Less Than Full Disclosure From The NYT
Shot In The Dark: Cultural Nausea
STUMP: Chicago Update – Fun In Store For The Next Mayor
The Political Hat: Connecticut Posed To Make It Easier To Kill The Mentally Ill
This Ain’t Hell: Look, VA Did It Again, also, Trump Vows To Release FISA Docs Now That Mueller Probe Complete, Slams “Treasonous” FBI
Victory Girls: Mike Lee Trolls Occasional Cortex’s Green New Deal
Weasel Zippers: PA Democrats Slam Republican’s Christian Prayer As “Offensive”, “Islamophobic”, also, FBI Reviewing Dismissal Of Charges Against Smollett
Megan McArdle: What The Political Storms Over Brexit And The Mueller Report Have In Common
Mark Steyn: The West In Existential Crisis


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Category: Linkagery

“I seen my duty, and I done it.”

Posted on | March 28, 2019 | Comments Off on “I seen my duty, and I done it.”

— by Wombat-socho

Generally speaking, I don’t comment on the rare occasions when I use the banhammer on some fool in the comments. The departure of the unfunny, unlamented Guinspen, however, strikes me as a good time to remind people of the ground rules here.

Some years ago, when Stacy asked me to come aboard and help out when Smitty headed off to assume his duties as Admiral of the Afghan Seas, he asked me to take up the banhammer and maintain order in the comments, because this was not a task he enjoyed. I, however, having been a trained and seasoned jammer operator, Goon, and former /b/tard, enjoyed being unpleasant to people in the line of duty, especially if those people were being unpleasant to start with. For the most part, it’s been a fairly undemanding task. The vast majority of the commentariat here at The Other McCain are reasonably polite folk, and on the rare occasions when people lose their temper and start commenting with more anger than discretion, they usually respond well to requests to chill out.

Which brings us to the most recent dirtbag to get the boot. I don’t have a lot of rules, but chief among them is that y’all need to keep things polite and not get personal in your invective. If you forget this, I’ll ask you to knock it off, and if you keep it up, you’re gone. As I said previously, most of you do as I ask, and some of you have even apologized, which is nice. On the other hand, if you ignore the “Mod” tag on my posts, threaten to stop contributing to the Shoe Leather Fund, and try to insult me into the bargain*, you get whacked with the banhammer and your comments get deleted at my discretion. I’ll usually leave the offending comment up as an example for others.

So: be polite, think twice before you post in anger, and you’ll be fine. Give me a bunch of lip when I call you out, and you’re history. This concludes your block of instruction on comment courtesy; feel free to post as you will.

*If things have gotten to that point, insulting me is a waste of your time, because I don’t care about your opinion, angry idiot on the Internet.


Category: How This Here Internet Thingy Works

A War Against Human Nature

Posted on | March 27, 2019 | 1 Comment

Dana Pico calls attention to a recent exercise in anti-male hatred at a Maryland high school, amplified by the liberal media. Male students at Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School circulated a list rating their female classmates’ attractiveness. Some tattletale turned the boys in. “Dozens of girls decided to speak out, demanding a conversation with their male classmates about toxic masculinity,” the Washington Post reported.

Apparently, male admiration of female beauty is now considered “toxic,” you see. It is “objectifying” for teenage boys to take an interest in the physical attractiveness of teenage girls. This incident at a suburban high school was sufficiently newsworthy — “toxic masculinity”! — that the Washington Post published not one, but two articles about it, because there’s nothing else important going on in D.C., I guess. Dana comments:

Teenaged boys, reaching those years when they notice that teenaged girls are different from boys in some ways that are not quite as icky as they previously thought, have been forming opinions on which teenaged girls are more or less attractive to them. That’s how human sexual interaction begins, with one person finding another attractive in some way, and hoping that that other person feels the same about the first. This is simply normal, and a biological imperative; the human race would die out without it. . . .
In the end, one male student received an in-school detention, and one male student stood up in an long school assembly and was forced to made an apology.
And I’m sure that he learned his lesson! The lesson was: don’t put that kind of stuff on paper, where you can get caught for it.
But the male students will continue to judge the female students on their attractiveness, and the female students will continue to judge the male students on their looks, because that’s simply human nature.

You cannot eradicate human nature. You cannot compel people to conform to your ideological abstractions of “equality.” What you can do — if you bombard young people with propaganda and punish dissent — is permanently warp the personalities of a generation of youth.

And that’s what the radical feminist ideologues who control our educational system are doing. By punishing heterosexual boys for being heterosexual boys, in effect teaching them that it is wrong for them to be attracted to girls, they are destroying the character of these boys. Furthermore, by encouraging girls to celebrate the public humiliation of these boys, they are teaching girls to take pleasure in sadistic revenge.

From the perspective of the Democratic Party operatives running the public education system, this is excellent — these are the values and beliefs necessary to being a mindless progressive automaton. They are indoctrinating a generation of monstrous SJW zombies.

 

Category: Education

‘A Painful Gut Punch’ for MSNBC

Posted on | March 27, 2019 | Comments Off on ‘A Painful Gut Punch’ for MSNBC

 

For 675 days of the Mueller investigation, Rachel Maddow enjoyed her best-ever ratings, promising her audience of angry Democrats that the special counsel would soon rid America of the unwelcome presidency of Donald J. Trump. For MSNBC viewers, the result was a catastrophe:

Last Friday, Robert Mueller turned over the results of his titanic Trump investigation to Attorney General William Barr, and on Sunday, Barr released a summary of the report that was a painful gut punch to a vast swath of MSNBC’s liberal audience. The key sentence: “The Special Counsel’s investigation did not find that the Trump campaign or anyone associated with it conspired or coordinated with Russia in its efforts to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election.” . . .
In the face of this near-catastrophic setback, the MSNBC resistance bravely soldiered on. On the air that night, Ari Melber engaged in a spirited grilling of Trump attorney Jay Sekulow. Legal analyst Neal Katyal cautioned Chris Hayes not to view Barr as the final word on whether Donald Trump obstructed justice. Lawrence O’Donnell emphasized that “no one in the news media . . . has read a single sentence of the Mueller report.” Rachel Maddow, hands down one of the Mueller saga’s most voracious and detail-oriented chroniclers, kicked off her show with a monologue diving into 15 questions the Barr report left her with. “You knew it was gonna be this kind of night, didn’t you?” she began. . . .
“There was an omnipresent awareness that this was, strategically, a very important story for us,” one source said. “There was no market for skepticism about it. As a business model, they see the ratings, and we were getting rewarded for this every day. When we had a slow day, it was kind of like: when in doubt, call the lawyers on; call the F.B.I. people.” . . .
For MSNBC, what next? “There are shows that built their identity around this,” a journalist there told me. “Where does that go?”

One night in a casino in Wheeling, West Virginia, I shoved all-in on a full house. How could I lose? Then the other guy turned over four of a kind.

Disappointment is too mild a word for what that felt like. Of all the times I’ve ever busted out of a poker game, I’d never lost on a full house, and how often do you see quads in Texas Hold ’Em? Probably that’s what Maddow and the rest of the MSNBC gang felt when Mueller wrapped up his investigation without any further indictments and without finding any evidence of “Russian collusion” by the Trump campaign.

They had bought into the bogus narrative, sold to them by Clinton cronies like Sidney Blumenthal, that Trump’s election was inherently illegitimate, that various Russian shenanigans in the campaign (e.g., the hacking of DNC emails) had cheated Hillary out of her victory. Having assumed this as fact, and equally certain that various shady people associated with Trump must have been in on this Russian meddling, it seemed obvious to MSNBC viewers that Mueller would find proof of Trump’s guilt and then — poof! — Orange Man Bad would be gone. Anyone who expressed doubt about this narrative was dismissed as a right-wing stooge of the evil Trump regime, and this cult mentality (to call it what it was, and is) made it possible to ignore all the evidence that contradicted the narrative.

The weird provenance of the Steele dossier? The damning text messages between Peter Strzok and Lisa Page? The fact that Natalia Veselnitskaya, the central figure in the 2016 Trump Tower meeting, was evidently in cahoots with Fusion GPS, the Clinton-connected firm which commissioned the dossier? There was something distinctly fishy about all this, and I was not the first to discern that the Mueller investigation looked suspiciously like a cover-up, intended to conceal, obscure and/or distract from what looked very much like a scheme by the Clinton campaign, assisted by Obama administration officials, to entrap Trump campaign officials in a phony scandal. If the “Russian collusion” narrative was actually a Democrat false-flag operation, and Mueller’s investigation was actually intended to bury evidence of that scheme, then there never was any real “collusion” and, ergo, it would be impossible to produce evidence of a conspiracy that never existed.

All such doubts about the Mueller probe, however obvious they might have been to anyone who paid attention and was willing to consider the possibility that Trump was innocent of “collusion,” were forbidden within the ideological bubble where Rachel Maddow and other MSNBC personnel have been operating in isolation the past two years. Certainty of Trump’s guilt was mandatory among Democrats, and trying to talk sense to them was like trying to explain to Stalin-era commissars that Lysenkoism was scientifically invalid. So they shoved all-in on Mueller, the way I once bet my stack on a full house, and now they’re flat busted.

Rolling Stone‘s Matt Taibbi collects their chips:

Members of the media like [MSNBC’s Chris] Matthews spent two years speaking of Mueller in mythical tones, hyping him as the savior who was pushing those “walls” that were forever said to be “closing in” on Trump. Mueller, it was repeatedly said, was helping bring about “the beginning of the end.”
Over and over, audiences were told the investigation had hit a “turning point,” after which Trump would either resign or be impeached, because as Brian Williams put it, summarizing a guest’s take, “Donald Trump is done.”
This manipulative brand of news programming preyed upon the emotional devastation of liberal audiences, particularly the older people who watch cable. It told them the horror they felt over Trump’s election would be alleviated in short order. The median age of the CNN viewer is 60 and MSNBC’s is 65, and these people were urged for years to place their trust in [Mueller], who knew all and whose investigation would surely lead to impeachment and “the end.”
All you had to do was keep tuning in, because the good news could come any minute now! The bombshell is coming! Never mind that this is causing our profits to soar. Don’t wonder about our motives, even though outlets like MSNBC saw a 62 percent bump in viewership in the first full year of Russiagate coverage. Just keep tuning in. The walls are closing in!

(Hat-tip: Instapundit.) It’s kind of weird to see someone like Taibbi, who spent years in the left-wing swamp of Bush-era moonbattery, be the one to call out his fellow leftists on this. I suppose that, like conservatives chastened by the blunders in Iraq, Taibbi understands how important it is to call out the Elmer Gantry charlatans who’ve led the flock astray. Just as no conservative can ever trust Max Boot again, so also has Maddow blown her credibility on the Left by wagering everything on “Russia! Russia! Russia!” But I suppose most leftists are too stupid to understand how they’ve been hustled. After all, if they weren’t stupid, they never would have voted for Hillary, would they? Selah.



 

Category: Donald Trump, MSNBC, Russia

Never Date a Kardashian

Posted on | March 27, 2019 | Comments Off on Never Date a Kardashian

 

How lucky can a guy be? Kris Humphries is 6-foot-9, a 13-season NBA veteran with the good looks of a male model, a successful businessman who owns multiple restaurant franchises. By all rights, Humphries should be a role model, the object of universal admiration, and yet he will never live down the one mistake in his life — he dated Kim Kardashian.

Humphries not only dated her, he married her in a two-part reality-TV episode, a 2011 marriage that last less than three months before Kardashian filed for divorce and started dating Kanye West a few months later. Tabloid reports claimed that the Humphries-Kardashian wedding was merely a publicity stunt staged by Kris Jenner to promote the Kardashian “brand,” and the damage this catastrophe inflicted on Humphries’ reputation left him with deep psychological scars:

Look, I should have known what I was getting into. I was definitely naive about how much my life was going to change. But the one thing that really bothers me is whenever people say that my marriage was fake.
There’s definitely a lot about that world that is not entirely real. But our actual relationship was 100% real. When it was clear that it wasn’t working … what can I say? It sucked. It’s never easy to go through the embarrassment of something like that — with your friends, with your family…. But when it plays out so publicly, in front of the world, it’s a whole other level. It was brutal.
I didn’t know how to handle it, because I never thought I was going to be famous in that way. . . .
I’ll be honest, I dealt with a lot of anxiety, especially in crowds. There was about a year where I was in a dark place. I didn’t want to leave my home. You feel like … I don’t know … the whole world hates you, but they don’t even know why. They don’t even know you at all. They just recognize your face, and they’re on you.
There were so many times when I was in a gas station just buying a water or something, and the cashier would give me a look, and I could just feel it coming.
“Hey, are you … That Guy?”

What happened to Chris Humphries could happen to any guy who, through overconfidence, mistakenly imagines it can’t happen to him. Humphries failed to ask: “Am I about to marry a narcissistic sociopath? Have I stumbled into a scam? Is this all a set-up? Am I a chump?”

The key to spotting a hustle is to remember this rule: If something seems too good to be true, it’s probably neither true nor actually good.

A good-looking woman can con a guy who would never let himself get conned in any other situation. Remember the old Johnny Rivers lyric:

Beware of pretty faces that you find.
A pretty face can hide an evil mind.

As hard as it may be to walk away from that kind of honey trap, you risk complete destruction if you don’t stop, step back and think about it.

Young men need to beware. It’s a dangerous world out there, and America’s parents must warn our sons: Never date a Kardashian.



 

Category: Celebrities

Texts Show Michelle Obama Aide Intervened in Jussie Smollett Case

Posted on | March 27, 2019 | 1 Comment

Former Obama aide Tina Tchen (left); Cook County prosecutor Kim Foxx (right).

The stench of corruption in Chicago surrounding the Jussie Smollett fake “hate crime” case has enraged the police chief, the mayor and everybody else with a sense of justice and propriety. Suspicions have focused on Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx, who exchanged text messages with former Michelle Obama chief of staff Tina Tchen shortly after Smollett perpetrated his clumsy hoax:

Just days after Jussie Smollett told Chicago police he had fought off a pair of attackers who targeted him in an apparent hate crime, Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx tried to persuade Police Supt. Eddie Johnson to turn the investigation over to the FBI.
Foxx’s call to Johnson came after an influential supporter of the “Empire” actor reached out to Foxx personally: Tina Tchen, a Chicago attorney and former chief of staff for former First Lady Michelle Obama, according to emails and text messages provided by Foxx to the Chicago Sun-Times in response to a public records request.
Tchen passed Foxx’s number to a relative of the actor, and the ensuing conversations with the family member were cited by Foxx last month as the reason she recused herself from Smollett’s prosecution . . .
Text messages show Tchen contacted Foxx on Feb. 1, three days after Smollett said he was jumped by two men as he walked home from a sandwich shop near his Streeterville home. Tchen texted Foxx to set up an early morning phone call.
“I wanted to give you a call on behalf of Jussie Smollett and family who I know. They have concerns about the investigation,” Tchen wrote in a text sent before 5 a.m., seeking to set up a call with Foxx before Tchen left on an 8 a.m. flight to New York.
A few hours later, Foxx received a text from a relative of Smollett, who said she’d received the number from Tchen.
In an interview with the Sun-Times this week, Foxx said that the family member expressed concerns about leaked information about the investigation — information that media outlets attributed to “police sources.”
“They had no doubt about the quality of the investigation, but believed that the FBI would have a tighter lid on the information,” said Foxx, adding that Johnson initially seemed receptive to the idea of turning the case over to the FBI.

People are angry about this gross miscarriage of justice:

 

Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel stood shoulder-to-shoulder with his city’s police force Tuesday afternoon, denouncing prosecutors for dropping charges against “Empire” star Jussie Smollett and slamming the episode as a “whitewash of justice.”
Chicago Police Superintendent Eddie Johnson and Emanuel said they were not only furious with the outcome of Tuesday’s surprise hearing but also blindsided by the decision itself, with the officials only learning Smollett wouldn’t face charges for allegedly faking a hate crime at the same time the public found out.
“Where is the accountability in the system? You cannot have – because of a person’s position – one set of rules applies to them and another set of rules apply to everyone else,” Emanuel said. “Our officers did hard work day in and day out, countless hours working to unwind what actually happened that night. The city saw its reputation dragged through the mud…It’s not just the officers’ work, but the work of the grand jury that made a decision based on only a sliver of the evidence [presented]. Because of the judge’s decision, none of that evidence will ever be made public.” . . .
Emanuel also said: “[This case] sends a clear message that if you’re in a position of influence and power you’ll be treated one way and if you’re not you’ll be treated another way.”
Johnson blasted the prosecution for not consulting with cops and hinted the episode could further strain the relationship between the department and prosecutors.
“I don’t know what’s unusual for the state’s attorney but we found out about when you all did,” Johnson said. “Prosecutors have their discretion of course, we still have to work with the state’s attorneys office — We’ll have conversations after this.”
But Johnson made sure to add, unequivocally: “At the end of the day it was Smollett who committed this hoax.”

Let’s not mince words, eh? Somebody got bought off here, and there needs to be a FBI investigation of the corruption in Cook County, starting with Kim Foxx. Furthermore, federal prosecutors need to pursue charges against Smollett for the hoax “white powder” letters:

Although the state-level criminal charges were reportedly dropped against actor Jussie Smollett, it remains unclear whether the federal government is still investigating whether he was involved in sending a death threat to himself at “Empire’s” Chicago studio.
Before Smollett claimed two men attacked him with a chemical substance, the studio received a letter addressed to the actor containing a white powder, which turned out to be aspirin. A lawyer and a former police superintendent said the mailing the letter could be considered a terroristic hoax under federal law.
The letter used similar language to the supposed physical attack. Its return address said “MAGA,” and it said “You will die black fag” using letters cut out of magazines.
When Smollett’s alleged accomplices in faking the assault were arrested, police took a magazine and a book of stamps from their home.
A source told CBS2 that the letter was at the root of the better-publicized physical attack, saying “When the letter didn’t get enough attention, he concocted the staged attack.”
Two federal officials told ABC News in February that the FBI and the U.S. Postal Inspection Service were investigating whether he was involved in sending the letter. One said the letter was being analyzed in the FBI’s crime lab.
A lawyer told CWB Chicago: “If they have Smollett on the letter, he’ll be facing ‘terroristic hoax’ charges, a felony. There may be federal obstruction charges as well. If they want to bury him, they can.”
CWB also reported that the U.S. Postal Inspection Service was working with the FBI on the mail case and quoted a police officer saying that criminal investigators with the postal unit can be aggressive and deploys sophisticated techniques. “Those postal guys are the real deal,” he said. “They can do amazing things and aren’t afraid of the work.”

My hunch is that Attorney General William Barr’s going to be under pressure from You Know Who to make something happen in Chicago.



 

Category: Chicago, Corruption, Crime
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