Guess We're Not Real Americans Over Here...

Fuck the Weekly Standard. The Olympics would have brought jobs to Chicago, which is currently being hit slightly harder by the recession than most other large cities in America. But we're all a bunch of corrupt liberal bastards. And Obama's the antichrist. So I guess we can all just go rot. Oh, and this guy can go fuck himself,* too. Chicago didn't "deserve" the Olympics because they have bad schools and a kid recently got beat to death? Really? Okay, it's time for a bit of education. A couple of kids die at the beginning of every school year in Chicago. There are a spate of articles and commentaries on the local news asking if violence is an epidemic among teenagers. As I recall, last year was the worst its ever been. These stories never make the national news. Or if they do they're a footnote on a CNN crawler somewhere. Yet this year a single death made it on to the national news cycle right before the IOC's vote and all of the sudden there is a wave of killings in Chicago. Look, one unnecessary death is one too many. There's no way around it. But in the grand scheme of things this is not out of the norm for life in Chicago or any other major city. In fact, it's probably better here than it is in Rio, but that gets conveniently ignored. If you drive out of Chicago to the suburbs, meanwhile, you'll find bright, new schools where top-notch teachers are getting paid up to six figures a year to teach in classes with all the best equipment. There's a reason for this. Illinois schools are funded according to property taxes paid by the town (I'm sure it's slightly different in Chicago itself, and the schools are funded according to the taxes of whoever lives in that school's footprint or something). Rich towns have good schools. Houses in those rich towns are then sold partially because the realtor says, "Move here and you'll get to send your kids to Wheaton Warrenville South/Nequa Valley/New Trier." So the people with the means to live in the good communities with the good schools move to those communities. And money pours in to schools that already have plenty. There is a very easy solution to the problems of Chicago's schools. Send them some of the money from Waubonsee Valley or Oak Park. But no. That would be Communism. And we can't have that. So instead we can cluck at how nobody's helping those inner city kids. But it's okay, because they're inferior to us rich suburbanites. Look how they go and kill each other on the playground after school. It's horrible, truly horrible. How can people be such animals? Of course many of the same people who are fake outraged at the tragic death of a teenager in Chicago are more than happy to send other teenagers to the other side of the world and pay them to kill poor people in Iraq or Afghanistan. But that's different, because it fulfills America's goals or something. And imagine how the family of Derrion Albert is feeling. His tragic, pointless, disgusting death has been thrown around as a political football. His legacy may well end up being, "Oh, yeah, Derrion Albert. The kid who cost Chicago the Olympics." It's completely untrue and completely unfair. For all the hype the odds were stacked against Chicago. It seems like the Olympics are in America every other time around and they've never been in South America at all, so Rio has a leg-up there. And the IOC has been quite angry with the USOC for many, many reasons, so Chicago had negative marks against it through no fault of its own. I'm not actually surprised we lost. I'm most surprised that we got knocked out first. I mean, who even remembered Madrid was in the running? And who expected Tokyo to get it on the heels of the Beijing Olympics last year? The hypocrisy and stupidity of this whole thing is astounding. The right was cheering the failure of an American city to do something that would have brought jobs and money. They spent the last two news cycles holding up the death of a single person as a reason to avoid Chicago in 2016 while complaining that Obama isn't sending enough people over to Afghanistan to die. Of course last week the big scandal was that the President was leaving the First Lady to lead the delegation and she'd be out-powered by the Spanish, Japanese, and Brazilian heads of state who would be in Copenhagen. But when Obama decided to head over himself it was terrible, since he shouldn't be wasting his time with such trivialities while Americans were losing their jobs. You know, some Americans that could have gotten Olympics-related jobs. Honestly, I'm appalled at all of this. Chicago was shocked when we were the first knocked out this morning. But we'll be just fine. It's probably already business as usual all over the city and suburbs. What's appalling, though, is the glee with which so many are piling on and attempting to kick the city while it's (not actually) down. I don't get any of it. ------------------------------------------ *He's on HuffPo, so he's probably a liberal, proving that reflexive anti-Chicago stupidity is truly a bipartisan stance. Maybe we can bring Obama and McCain together in shared hatred of Chicago. Maybe we can get Bachmann and Franken to join hands and sing a rousing chorus of "Sweet Home, Chicago," ironically while plotting the destruction of the city. Let's bring this country together the only way we know how: through mutual hatred.