Is Jesse Jackson retired? Or was it that Al Sharpton couldn’t work a new assignment into his no-doubt arduous schedule?
Whatever the reason, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel yesterday snatched a second-tier race hustler off the waiver wire to act as “senior adviser” to his new Task Force on Police Accountability.
C’mon down, former Mass. Gov. Deval Patrick!
This is a native of Chicago who has himself been the victim of a senseless street crime. In his seldom-purchased autobiography, he claimed that as a youth on the mean streets of the South Side, somebody once bounced a Coke can off his forehead. An empty Coke can.
No really, he said that.
Mayor Emanuel is trying to save his own sorry political skin after the scandal involving his administration’s apparent cover up of the killing of a 16-year-old black man Laquan McDonald by a white Chicago cop just before Emanuel began his reelection bid. The video of the cop shooting the youth 16 times was not released until last week, months after the city settled out of court with the family, for $5 million. Shortly after the hush payment, Emanuel won a surprisingly tight race against an underfunded opponent.
So Monday Emanuel fired his police chief and appointed this new task force to investigate the practices of the Chicago Police Department. As for Deval Patrick, he now comes full circle. He began his career, such as it is, as what Tom Wolfe once described as a “mau-mauer,” a community organizer-type, an NAACP lawyer filing suits against the death penalty and prison conditions.
Now, after his failed governorship in Massachusetts, he becomes what Wolfe called a “flak catcher” – a bureaucrat paid to be taunted by the very mau-mauers from “the community” from which Deval sprung, sort of, considering that he was packed off at age 14 to the same exclusive New England prep school Ted Kennedy graduated from.
Patrick does bring impeccable credentials to his new gig as Head Flak Catcher. First of all, he will do what he is told.
Second, he’s tight with Obama. But even more importantly for the new job, he’s thisclose to David Axelrod, the Chicago political guru with ties to Obama and Emanuel. A former reporter for the Chicago Tribune, Axelrod masterminded Deval’s first bid for governor of Massachusetts in 2006, a content-free campaign that parlayed white guilt into easy victory, presaging what would happen nationally two years later.
None of this is a secret. This morning, in the Tribune, columnist John Kass wrote: “If there’s one thing Chicago needs, it’s yet another blue-ribbon task force led by a guy from Boston who knows Axelrod.”
But Deval is black, and he will do what he is told. He will stand behind the mayor and be what he has always been – window dressing. In an earlier incarnation, he was paid millions by both Coke and Texaco as he departed after brief stints in their corporate boardrooms. To quote Tom Wolfe once again, this latest assignment is all about “steam control” – keeping a lid on “the community.”
As for Deval Patrick’s actual credentials in law enforcement, they are somewhat less than negligible:
- On the sixth anniversary of 9/11, publicly referred to the genocidal terror attacks by Islamists that killed 3000 Americans as, among other things, “a failure of human beings to understand each other.”
- In 2008, he made robo calls for Roxbury state senator Dianne Wilkerson, who two months earlier had been photographed by the FBI stuffing $100 bills into her bra. When she was indicted for bribery, Deval called the charges “troubling.” After her release from prison last year, Wilkerson (Bureau of Prisons number 21757-038) tried to get a job at Boston 2024, the now-defunct outfit trying to bring the summer Olympics to Massachusetts. Boston 2024 had also planned to pay Deval $7500 a day to work as a lobbyist until the contract was reported in the Boston Herald. (No word from Chicago City Hall on whether the new “senior adviser” will be collecting a stipend.)
- In his final days as governor last December, he pardoned a number of criminals, including a former gang-banger named True-See Allah, who was convicted of attempted murder in 1989 for a shooting that left the victim paralyzed.
- Gutted the state’s Criminal Offender Record Information (CORI) Act, making it much more difficult for the public to learn the records of ex-cons. Patrick’s administration described the “new screening criteria” as blocking 57,029 attempts by citizens to obtain criminal records of ex-cons in the final 30 months of his term. This, the Patrick administration bragged, meant that the jailbirds’ bids for “housing, financial aid” etc. “were not compromised by the dissemination of irrelevant” rap sheets.
- Hired as a $150,000 assistant cabinet secretary a flamboyant, platinum-haired gay lawyer named Carl Stanley McGee. McGee was arrested in 2007 in Lee County Florida and charged with sexual battery of a 15-year-old boy in a steam room. The case was eventually dismissed, the Boston Globe reported, after “McGee paid a private settlement to the family of his alleged victim.” In 2012, Deval attempted to bring his friend back into state government, picking him to become executive director of the new State Gaming Commission. A public uproar ensued, and McGee was not appointed.
- In 2013, after the arrest of surviving Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, Deval went alone in a chi-chi bistro in West Stockbridge named Rouge, where he chowed down on duck confit and Chardonnay. “I was actually quite drunk, by myself,” he told the Boston Herald.
- The next morning, after reading Tsarnaev’s jihadist suicide note, he went on CBS’ Face the Nation and lied that he had no idea of the motives of “those two young fellas.”
- Trivialized massive welfare fraud in Massachusetts as “anecdotes” and “leakage.”
- As an NAACP lawyer, once sued the state of Maryland for serving inmates in the maximum-security prison meals that he claimed were too cold and milk that was too warm. Also mentioned in his complaint underinflated basketballs and the fact that lifers had only one basket to shoot at.
- Gave $5,000 to the legal defense of convicted rapist Ben LaGuer, who was seeking a DNA test to prove his innocence, which he got, which proved Deval’s pen pal was… guilty.
- Fired his own chairwoman of the state’s Sex Offender Registry Board last year because she wanted the name of Deval’s brother-in-law, a convicted rapist, included on the list.
- On his watch a rogue chemist at a state crime lab admitted to falsifying 34,000 drug tests, leading to the mass release of scores, if not hundreds of convicted drug dealers, as well as payouts of tens of millions of dollars for false imprisonment.
- On his watch, state health officials failed to detect problems at a compounding pharmacy in Framingham that shipped out tainted steroids which, according to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), killed at least 64 people and sickened hundreds more.
- As soon as he became governor, Deval ordered the purchase by the state of a new Cadillac as his official vehicle, leading to one of his nicknames, “Coupe Deval.” Later he agreed to partially pay for the Cad. A few years later, when yet another new vehicle, a sleek $52,000 SUV, was purchased for his personal fleet, a “testy” Deval told reporters that the State Police had decided to upgrade his wheels, and that he had nothing to do with their decision.
- Was forced to fire his entire parole board, including his campaign driver, a former cop in his hometown of Milton, whom he had appointed chairman. The board had cut loose a killer doing three life terms for murder, after which the career criminal murdered a Woburn police officer during a jewelry robbery. The fired cop, who is black, was then hired as an $80,000-a-year “assistant to the vice president” of Bridgewater State University, whose president was also black. The college said they had been impressed by the cop’s work with the local NAACP.
- Deval was such a rabid supporter of racial-preference laws that even the ultra-liberal New Republic magazine wrote in 1994: “Rather than honestly confronting the costs of affirmative action, Patrick has blithely endorsed the most extreme form of racialism.”
- Despite degrees from both Harvard College and Harvard Law School, was unable to pass the bar exam until his third try. His lieutenant governor, Tim “Crash” Murray, also repeatedly failed the bar exam.
- Appointed a Democrat hack to an $87,000-a-year job as director of the Mass. Highway Safety Division, which is supposed to promote safe driving. She resigned after it was reported that she had 34 entries on her driving record, including seven accidents, four speeding tickets, one citation for driving without a license, and had failed on occasion to pay her local automobile excise taxes.
- Issued an executive order in August 2014 forbidding the Mass. State Police from asking illegal aliens about their immigration status. The new Republican governor has yet to rescind the order.
- Without legislative approval, Deval illegally diverted $27 million in state funds to off-budget accounts to pay for his junkets, I mean trade missions.
- Refused to release public cell-phone records of his lieutenant governor after “Crash” Murray wrecked his state car while doing 108 m.p.h. in his pajamas at dawn. After Murray was forced to resign, Deval then appointed the public safety secretary who stonewalled the press to a $159,000-a-year state judgeship.
Is it too late for Mayor Emanuel and his minion Axelrod to call the bullpen to bring in Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton?