CHICAGO TRUTH - AT 11:34 P.M. ET:  We don't usually quote Britain's premier leftist paper, The Guardian, but the paper has done a fine job of describing the horror of Chicago, President Obama's home city, in 2009:

Fourteen children have died violently in the last year within walking distance of the Obamas' home. In all of Chicago, 42 children of school age have been killed, most at the end of a gun and all a short drive from the president's house. The youngest was three, the oldest 18.

The centre of the blood-letting is the city's poor and overwhelmingly black South Side, precisely the spot where Michelle grew up and Barack set out on his self-proclaimed "improbable journey" as a community organiser in his 20s. The geographical compactness of the carnage is spelled out inside the offices of the Black Star Project, an education programme for young black people. On the wall is a big map of the city. In the middle of the map, close to Lake Michigan, is a letter "A" pinpointing where the Obamas live. Yellow stickers cluster around the "A" like darts around the bullseye. Each one stands for a child under 18 who has died violently. The stickers all lie within black neighbourhoods of the city, while the white neighbourhoods are sticker-free.

And...

"The number of children who are dying here in the city of Chicago is astronomical," says Black Star's director Phillip Jackson, quoting the figure of 605 children shot – wounded or killed – in the city over the last year and a half. "Stop and think about it: these are children! This is a catastrophe. And it's happening right in front of our eyes."

By his reckoning, some 13 soldiers from the city have died in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. The number of children lost to violence in the city during the same period is 290.

COMMENT:  What a tragedy.  And the president of the United States was focused, two weeks ago, on a black professor in Cambridge who was offended by the lawful actions of a police officer.

Why is that horror happening in Chicago?  In part, it is happening because the nightmare isn't being correctly addressed.  Murder has been dramatically reduced in New York and in some other cities.  But not in Chicago. 

One reason may be that Chicago is the home of some of the worst frauds and hustlers in the African-American community, who show an interest in the lives of black children only when they're taken by a white.  Overwhelming, they're taken by black shooters, and so they don't have the proper political value.

This problem will continue until the people of Chicago come to their senses, as New Yorkers did, and throw out the old political establishment, replacing it with the Chicago equivalent of Rudy Guiliani and Mike Bloomberg.  I'm not holding my breath.

August 10, 2009