Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot is an incompetent boob, but do not hold your breath waiting for her or members of the corporate press to admit it.
They would rather blame her many faults and failures on the boob in the White House.
MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell, for example, gave the mayor a platform this week to shift responsibility for Chicago’s staggering violent crime rate to President Trump.
“I want to also ask you about the violence this past weekend in Chicago,” said Mitchell, “at least 60 shootings. The president jumped all over this, comparing it to — saying that the city is worse than Afghanistan. Your reaction as you’re trying to come to grips with all of this, of course?”
Lightfoot responded, “Well, look, if you go back over many years, President Trump has said a lot of disparaging things about the city of Chicago. He likes to use us as a political punching bag. But if the president was really committed to helping us deal with our violence, he would do some easy things.”
She added, “One is, he would push for universal background checks. He would push for an assault weapons ban. He would push to make sure that people who were banned from getting on airplanes can’t get guns. This is the kind of thing that federal leadership can do.”
“Banned from getting on airplanes?” Is she suggesting that terrorists are committing all of those shootings?
Trump pledged this week at a White House roundtable with law enforcement officials that he will do whatever is necessary to reduce the violent crime rate in Chicago, even if it means going in personally and taking command of the city.
“Numbers are going to be coming down even if we have to go in and take over cities because we can’t let that happen,” the president said. “When you have 20 people killed, 22 people killed in one weekend in Chicago. When you have 88 shootings, it’s not even conceivable.”
Ten people were shot and killed this weekend. Fifty additional people were injured in shooting-related incidents throughout the city.
“That’s worse than Afghanistan, I hate to say it,” Trump told law enforcement officials this week. “That’s worse than any war zone that we’re in by a lot. It makes them look like tame places by comparison.”
On MSNBC, Mayor Lightfoot blamed the federal government for Chicago’s shooting deaths.
“As long as we are challenged with having states surrounding us, notably Indiana, that has very lax gun laws, where somebody can drive across the border and literally load up a vehicle with military-grade weapons and bring them back to the city of Chicago, we’re going to continue to be challenged,” she said.
The mayor added, “Fundamentally, we have too many illegal guns on our street, and that is a direct result of a failure of federal leadership.”
Mitchell did nothing to challenge Lightfoot’s assertions, including the mayor’s dubious claim about Indiana. Note that its “lax gun laws” have not led to Chicago-style levels of violence in most of the Hoosier State’s larger cities.
You know, for people who spend a lot of time complaining that the president would make himself into a king, they sure seem quick to assign him authority where he has none.
