Oh, how sweet. If I point out that corruption is endemic to politics everywhere, I’m accused of being naive, and if I point out that Chicago is actually much more than its corruption then the city gets lumped with other cities which happen to be currently in the spotlight for corruption. Can’t win for losing, as they say.
BTW, the term “Chicago politician” has a specific meaning in Chicago. I was informing you of that fact. No need to tell me that your definition trumps reality.
I’d love to know: what utopia do you call home? Must be a paradise of virtue.
That is one possibility, there are a couple of others:
You see this one in foreign policy posturing a lot: normally, you gain the status of ‘the good guys’ by doing good guy stuff. However, there is some sort of psychological inversion where people come to believe that their good-guy status is axiomatic, and that because they are the good guys, whatever stuff they do must be good guy stuff. The ones who fall into this in good faith sometimes suffer painul crises of faith when something too ghastly to ignore happens, the more aggressive ones not so much.
In a partial variant on that one, you can also see people abandon objectives in favor of team allegiance. If the cops are the thin blue line against criminal scum and disorder, anything that helps team cop ‘win’ must be good. A barbaric assertion of dominance against a member of the enemy team would be precisely such a gesture. Absolutely contrary to the objectives of justice; but a symbol of abject dominance over the away team.
It’s also possible that he just aquired a taste for violence and the knowledge that nobody cares too hard when perps get beaten down a bit. The people who serve nothing more noble than our poultry supply tend to get inured and start drop kicking chickens and things, it’d be no major surprise to see that occur elsewhere, especially when the targets are presumptively ‘bad’.
You know what doesn’t surprise me? People who ape wingnut talking points about Chicago and Obama, then throw in a disclaimer to “prove” that they’re not a wingnut themselves.
The officer probably got mixed up while performing maintenance on his gun and ended up using truffle oil – isn’t that stuff supposed to be irresistible?
I love how when someone says something that goes entirely against your assumptions about them, you dismiss it as a “disclaimer”.
Yes, I criticize Obama for his Chicago background, as well as for various administrative choices that have been present throughout his tenure. No, I’m not a reality-divorced Truther or an “Obama-care”-bashing proponent of putting profit before basic health care for the nation’s many poor and underprileged. Is it really so hard to imagine someone being a supporter of the guy, but also being somewhat critical of his background?
Ultimately, I’m essentially neutral about the guy - he’s pretty much your average modern president, fitting well into the trend of blandness that’s been going strong since the 70s. He’s done some things that I agree with, others I disagree with, but he hasn’t really surprised me at all, and overall he’s done what all the rest have done - catered to the moneyed interests who pull the strings.
If my disliking Chicago for being a giant corrupt mess (which everyone seems to agree it is), and my finding fault in Obama for having cut his political teeth there, makes me some sort of a wingnut in your mind, I guess my only option is to be thought badly of by you.
In fairness to @Glitch how do we know Obama hasn’t taken the 'Nuge up on the invitation to fellate the 'Nuge’s machine gun? The scandal gets bigger with every new rail we find! There are so many names for this scandal as well; we can start with Sodoghazi.
How funny…that’s exactly what was going through my mind too!
It could be an excuse to rail against Obama, or it could be a generalized hatred against “libruls”, but it feels like the primary impetus for the prejudice in this case is the us-vs-them social redlining that still holds sway in the Chicago metropolitan area. (Remember when it was “greater Chicagoland area”? I like that phrase better.)
