By John Kass

Nov. 13, 2022

Oh, so you see the word “winner”  in a headline and you expected what, a photo of Gov. J.B. Pritzker, the Democrat and Commodius Maximus of Illinois?

Sorry.

J.B. isn’t a “winner.” What did he win, really? Yes, the corporate legacy media kisses his behind because they’re used to kissing it. And yes, he’s the governor, but he didn’t “win” it. He bought it. The  governor of a failed state that he bought with his inherited billions that he didn’t work for. He spread so much sweet oily cash around, that Democrats and their mouthpieces required insulin.

The winner is woman who didn’t have billions. She’s got brains and balloons, and those sensible shoes. She knows government unlike so many in politics.

Meet the new boss, same as the old boss, the new Borg Queen, Toni the Boss Preckwinkle.

Boss Toni holds Chicago, the current Chicago mayoral campaign, and Chicago violent crime in the palm of her hand. She keeps them there right in her lap, under her control, and she just might pinch their necks off if they vex her. Also in that lap of hers along with her pet judges, and the chief judge, her county prosecutors, the county sheriff who runs her county jail, is her former office manager, gofer, hatchet-woman and Jussie Smollett supporter, Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx.

With all those webs, Boss Toni controls the response to rising crime but media won’t put Boss Toni’s fingerprints near the scene.  Media shields her. Yes, she controls the Cook County Courts, and the judges, the state’s attorney, and Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart. That’s a boss.

Whoever wants to become mayor of Chicago will have to deal with her. And since crime is the main issue in Chicago, the next mayor will have to rebuild the broken police department, with Preckwinkle and Foxx out there either actively or passively thwarting that mayor.

It is a nightmare scenario. But if Preckwinkle and Foxx aren’t held in check, at least countered and politically isolated somehow, there will be no addressing crime at City Hall, and the city of Chicago will continue to circle the drain.

Boss Toni and the Illinois Black Legislative Caucus wanted that  No Cash Bail  Safe-T Act pushed through the legislature and signed by the governor despite 100 of 102 state’s attorneys warning that it is a disaster and will get worse when the jails open their doors in January. Toni got what she wanted. Crime rises, Chicago dies, the papers endorse her, and the people vote Democrat, giving support to the Safe-T Act against the interests of their own public safety.

Toni the Boss.

Resistance is futile.

Just ask Lori Lightfoot.

Wasn’t it Mayor Lightfoot who had her police chief criticize Kim Foxx, but then Lightfoot  stopped criticizing Foxx, and instead, did the remarkable: Lightfoot publicly crawled forward to endorse Foxx for re-election as Chicago was (and continues to be) overwhelmed by violent crime, with violent criminals not worried about the consequences because Foxx is the prosecutor.

Lightfoot endorsement of Foxx was the political equivalent of the mayor kissing Boss Toni’s ring. The mayor of Chicago might well have pushed a peanut up State Street with her nose. And Boss Toni, whipped by Lightfoot in all the wards when they campaigned against each other for mayor, got some of her own back.

The legacy corporate media sucks up to J.B. Pritzker, yes, and he has his presidential dreams, but I’m writing this to tell you that Boss Toni is the one shaping the future of Chicago.

During a crime wave, with Chicago under siege by violent crime, street shootings, carjackings, Preckwinkle boasted about reducing the size of the Cook County Jail population as if she were using criminal justice policy to campaign for minority votes.

Well, wasn’t she? She’s belongs to that leftist clique that argues law enforcement systemically racist because black and brown minorities are disproportionally arrested for violent crimes.

Yet what about the minority victims who are disproportionately shot by criminals? Does anyone care about them? Their bodies are disproportionately pierced by bullets fired by minorities, or their heads are broken by bats disproportionately wielded by minorities.

The Democrats cry race but do they stand up for the victims? Ask yourselves, why not? Is it that they don’t want to invite the wrath of the angry white leftists who tell them what do do? I’d suggest that the victims are also black and brown, and a little 7-year-old boy, Akeem Briscoe who was killed while sitting in his bedroom near Rockwell and Potomac deserves justice, too.

There was a gang shooting outside in the alley. A bullet came through the window and caught the boy in the stomach. He’s a racial minority. Where are the social justice warriors protesting for him? Doesn’t Akeem Briscoe deserve justice?

Remember that Boss Toni also controls the office of do-nothing prosecutor, her former chief-of-staff and protegee, Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx, who has repeatedly made a fool of herself, but with Preckwinkle behind her and leftist billionaire George Soros’ money behind her, she prospers.

And Boss Toni?

“She’s chairman of the Cook County Democratic Party and of the four legs of the Cook County criminal justice system,” said my friend Thom Serafin, longtime political analyst and founder of Serafin and Associates on The Chicago Way podcast.  As president of the Cook County board, “she controls the budget for the Cook County Sheriff’s office [Tom Dart], the judges’ budget [Chief Judge Tim Evans] and she controls (Cook County State’s Attorney) Kim Foxx’s budget.

The mayor of Chicago has the police.

“Chairman Preckwinkle will be a major player in how this campaign is going to evolve,” Serafin said.

Indeed.

And Preckwinkle cruised to victory the other day, endorsed by the former Republican paper and endorsed by the NPR paper, just like a boss or Queen of the Borg from science fiction.

In real life in Cook County, Preckwinkle controls the jail, the county sheriff and the Cook County Courts through Cook County Judge Timothy C. Evans. Her protegee and hatchet woman is Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx. Violent crime  is destroying the city, and yet the papers, even the formerly conservative newspaper I once worked for, endorses her.

She surveys her realm like a boss.

Yes, Preckwinkle was defeated in every Chicago ward four years ago by Lori Lightfoot in their mayoral campaign. But that was about two words: Eddie Burke.

Burke held a fundraiser for Preckwinkle, and she hired his son for a $100,000 county job, and she was finished. But Lightfoot the corporate lawyer had no little experience in government and she’s not patient like Boss Toni. Lightfoot has been a disaster.

Lightfoot wouldn’t have defeated Preckwinkle if Eddie Burke hadn’t blown up. And still, she was endorsed for re-election by those who should know better.

In the recent Tribune’s editorial endorsement of Boss Toni, there were these chilling couple of lines.

“When we brought up the now-pervasive fear of violent crime in Chicago during our conversation, and the possible impact of legislation eliminating cash bail, Preckwinkle made the point that residents in more affluent neighborhoods are now getting a taste of what it has been like to live in the Chicago ZIP codes that have heard gunfire and feared carjackings for years. She made that observation with a sardonic chuckle.”

A chuckle? I wish the paper elaborated on that chuckle. But it didn’t. A sardonic chuckle enjoying people being hurt? Boss Toni enjoys the violence visited upon the wealthy and the white after they were shielded from street crime for years. Now we’re all her victims.

She pushes the end of cash bail and the Safe-T Act. The Illinois Republican Party could have built a campaign against crime, against Preckwinkle, but they were either too lazy or not interested to do it. And the people voted overwhelmingly for her and against their own interests.

What can you do with a people motivated by race, who vote against their own interests?

You know else was a big winner?

Chief Cook County Judge Timothy Evans.

Years ago, Boss Toni took him out as 4th ward Alderman. I was there.  Mayor Richard M. Daley was overjoyed at Evan’s demise at Toni’s hands. And now the woman who took Evans out leads him by the nose.

This past January, Evans made a public fool of himself by making excuses for the self described Latin Kings gang-banger Emilio Corripio, who was charged with killing 8-year-old Melisa Ortega of Little Village. The child was walking with her mother on 26th Street when Corrippio spotted a rival gang on the street and allegedly pulled his gun and began firing.

I was there at the Union League Club of Chicago when Evans began babbling about the Latin King’s brain that couldn’t distinguish between right and wrong.

“They don’t have the pre-frontal cortex that is developed, and the pre-frontal cortex of the brain, does not, itself fully developed until you’re closer to the age of 25 years of age,” said Evans. “This kid is 16. There’s no way that he would have the prefrontal cortex already developed. So, while I can’t talk about that particular case, I’m just talking about the typical 16- year-old, he doesn’t have that part of the brain developed that makes it possible for him to distinguish between the right thing to do and the wrong thing to do.”

Really Tim?

And you still have a job and a mouthpiece and nice fat pension?

That’s Boss Toni’s servile chief judge. And he was overwhelmingly retained for another term.

Though the newspapers don’t shine much of a light, in Lightfoot’s leadership vacuum they’ve gone with Boss Toni, but those of you who follow CWB Chicago you know there is a problem. The reason so many of us are opposed to the knee-jerk policy of the Pritzker and Preckwinkle’s Safe-T Act is that we’re already seeing such bad policy expressed in Cook County with Evans’ bail policy.

   You wouldn’t know if you just read the no-longer conservative establishment paper or the National Public Radio Times. But if you read CWB, you get a sense of things.

CWB has that amazing series chronicling violent criminals released on low or no bond, only to be arrested again for killing or trying to kill someone else.   Pritzker portrayed critics of his Safe-T Act as racists, but that’s just not true. Just consider the CWB  horror stories, like this one:

“#44: Chicago man shot and killed 2 people at a party while on bond for attempted murder, prosecutors say.” Number 44 is another one of those who’ve been accused of killing, shooting or trying to kill or shoot others while on out bond awaiting trial for yet another pending felony case.

Violent crime is the number one issue in the race for mayor, and the race for mayor begins, there are some questions  you might want to ask yourselves:

Like how will Boss Toni play this out? And how fairly and thoroughly will the city’s news media cover it? And can Chicago survive Boss Toni and a corporate media that has thrown in with her?

What’s at stake is greater than the ambition of a few politicians. What’s at stake is the survival of Chicago itself.

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(Copyright 2022 John Kass)