Previously on World O’Crap: We were visiting RenewAmerica, where our server, polemic polisher A.J. DiCintio, was offering us a selection of light hors d’oeuvres off the poetasting menu. But the retired teacher and rhetoric honer only moonlights at RA, and I got to wondering about his main gig as “a Featured Writer for The New Media Journal,” a bedlam of impassioned right wing commentary brought to the online world courtesy of Managing Editor Frank Salvato. And who is that, you probably aren’t asking?
Why, here’s Frank now! Let’s give his bio a quick squint, shall we? “Frank Salvato is the Executive Director and Director of Terrorism Research for BasicsProject.org a non-profit, non-partisan, 501(c)(3) research and education initiative.”
Well, that sure sounds impressive, in a “yes, I’m the Director of an internet-based national security policy think tank that developed after 9/11 when I began adding anti-Jihadi insights to my Geocities site, The #1 Dolly Parton Fan Page!!! And Virtual Wig Museum.”
A brief examination reveals that BasicsProject.org is a site dedicated to the study of “Constitutional Literacy,” “Islamic Terrorism,” and “The American Fifth Column,” and their “education initiative” seems to primarily involve pimping Frank’s wife’s book, and selling a bunch of ranting lectures on CDs (“The beginning of the end of Planet Earth occurred on September 27, 1991, when President George H.W. Bush announced that the United States would withdraw its nuclear weapons from NATO sites throughout the western world if the Soviet Union would follow suit.”) Moving on:
“Mr. Salvato has appeared on The O’Reilly Factor on FOX News Channel, and is a regular guest on talk radio including on The Captain’s America Radio Show, nationally syndicated by the Phoenix Broadcasting Network and on NetTalkWorld Global Talk Radio.” And the best part? “Mr. Salvato is available for public speaking engagements.”
If he can actually borrow The Captain’s America costume (and can make balloon animals) I’m totally booking him for my next anti-terrorism symposium and birthday party.
Okay, enough with the bona fides! What febrile insight is burning a hole in your head today, Frank? I must know.
First, He Was a Community Organizer
When Barack Obama entered the 2008 Presidential Election scene, aside from recycling the Clinton mantra of “Hope and Change” (yes, Mr. Obama’s use of the campaign slogan was not original in nature), we were told that his most endearing credential was that he had navigated the “mean streets of Chicago” as a community organizer disseminating “hope”; that he had been successful in making the poverty-stricken neighborhoods of Chicago a better place to live, a safer place to live. As of April 25, 2010, the residents of Chicago have stood witness to 113 homicides. I suppose, for President Obama, all that’s missing is a “Mission Accomplished” banner.
In addition to being President and Commander in Chief, Obama is also a rogue cop who doesn’t play by the rules (I don’t know how he does it. He must have a Day Planner.). I was hoping, when I voted for him, that he’d work to avert a total collapse of the economy, reform the dysfunctional health care system, and repair relations with our allies, but mostly I hoped he’d take down the Russian mob in a running gun battle that’d lead inevitably to a fight on top of the old Railway Exchange Building with the massive Ukrainian killer known only as “The Cossack.”
While the notion of sending in the Illinois National Guard sounds good on the surface, as John Howell of AM560 WIND in Chicago contends, the first time a National Guardsman has to shoot a civilian the real fireworks will start. I’ll take that a step further, the real fireworks will start when a Chicago gangbanger shoots and kills an Illinois National Guardsman. Illinois Governor Quinn has since rejected the idea so we shall never know how much blood would have been running in the streets had these two scenarios played out.
What a…shame?
So, the issue of street violence in Chicago remains with no immediate prospects for improvement.
You’ve crossed the line, Mr. President! I admit — you’re a damn good cop and a decent head of a co-equal branch of the Federal government — but I got the Commissioner breathin’ down my neck! Turn in your badge and gun!
In 1985, Mr. Obama was hired as a community organizer by the Developing Communities Project in Chicago and given the position of director. The Developing Communities Project was a church-based organization comprised of eight Catholic parishes on Chicago’s infamous far South Side.
Like most young Muslim men, he began his professional career working for the Vatican. It’s a rite of passage, like starting in the mail room at William Morris.
According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics there were 666 instances of murder…in Chicago during 1985.
Satan was sending his only begotten son a message…in murder!
Mr. Obama worked at the Developing Communities Project from 1985 until mid-1988 during which time he increased the organization’s staff from one to thirteen and increased its operating budget from $70,000 to $400,000.
Again, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, there were 744 instances of murder…in Chicago in 1986.
Clearly, instead of social workers, Obama should have spent his community development budget hiring wisecracking, suicidal cops with hair trigger tempers and deadly martial arts skills.
And during his just-short-of three years with the Developing Communities Project…he allegedly set up a job training program, a college preparatory tutoring program and a tenants’ rights organization in Altgeld Gardens, a location that still exists in extreme poverty today.
So both Obama and Bush have lost major and protracted wars, the only difference being that Obama didn’t actually start the War on Poverty. (In the current President’s favor, while the Iraq War has produced no stirring songs like “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” “Over There,” or “Remember Pearl Harbor,” at least soldiers serving in the War on Poverty could march into combat singing Billy Preston’s “Nothing From Nothing.”)
Once again, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, there were 687 instances of murder & non-negligent manslaughter and 34,172 instances of aggravated assault in 1987.
In retrospect, it’s obvious that the “Developing Communities Project” was just a front for a revived Murder, Inc., and that whenever Obama would suggest to an underling, “why don’t you register him to vote?” it was really a euphemism, like “why don’t you take him for a ride?” or “fit him for a pair of concrete galoshes.”
In mid 1988, community organizer Obama decided that he had done such a good job for the good people at the Developing Communities Project that he bid them “adieu” (mission accomplished) and set out to see the Continent of Europe for three weeks and then the ancestral African nation of Kenya for five weeks before starting his education in the law at Harvard University.
I too was in the habit of hanging enormous “Mission Accomplished” banners on my cubicle whenever I quit a job. It wasn’t until years later than I learned this was considered a faux pas in corporate culture, and that most professionals opted for a more bespoke and dignified departure — an awkward ice cream cake party in the conference room, a joint smoked in the stairwell, followed by the traditional stapling of multiple photocopies of your ass to the supervisor’s office door.
The most often accurate Wikipedia explains community organizing this way:
I’m torn; ordinarily I’m a sucker for an Appeal to Higher Authority, like Thomas Aquinas, James Madison, or Wikipedia, but I just looked up Frank Salvato, and according to the most often accurate source on the Internet, he doesn’t exist!
“Community organizing is a process through which people living in proximity to each other are brought together into an organization that acts in their shared self-interest…community organizers generally assume that social change necessarily involves conflict and social struggle in order to generate collective power for the powerless…”
It begs to be asked; wouldn’t the unbridled murdering of members of a community be in the utmost of “shared self-interests” of a community? Wouldn’t the senseless slaughter of the youth from poverty stricken Chicago communities rank right up there with, let’s say, teaching ACORN the Alinsky method of pressuring financial institutions into making bad home loans to people who could never pay their mortgages or registering fictional characters and dead people to vote?
Certainly, Obama would have had a far more positive and lasting effect on his community if he’d stopped with the airy fairy efforts to promote home ownership and voter registration in low income areas — since inner city poor people are either imaginary, deadbeats, or just dead — and spent his time and resources passing out guns. The truth is, he tried to join the Black Panthers, but he couldn’t pass the typing test and looked lousy in a beret.
For those who believe that the years of the Obama Community Organizing Experience saw an anomaly where serious crime is concerned:
1990: 850 murders/non-violent manslaughters
1991: 925 murders/non-violent manslaughters
1992: 939 murders/non-violent manslaughters
1993: 845 murders/non-violent manslaughters
1994: 928 murders/non-violent manslaughters
1995: 824 murders/non-violent manslaughters
1996: 789 murders/non-violent manslaughters
1997: 757 murders/non-violent manslaughters
1998: 703 murders/non-violent manslaughters
1999: 641 murders/non-violent manslaughters
2000: 631 murders/non-violent manslaughters
So, it would seem, one of the most important issues facing the communities serviced by Mr. Obama’s organizing – the unacceptable level of violence resulting in homicides – was either left unaddressed or, if it was addressed, was done so in such a poor fashion that the slaughter continued to increase in the years after his “organizing.”
Yes, it would indeed seem that the murder rate in Chicago rose during the Reagan and Bush I administrations, peaking four years after Obama stopped working for a local Catholic social welfare agency, and declined during the Clinton Administration (as all violent crime rates did throughout the country). If I may quote George Sanders: “You have a point. An idiotic one, but a point.”
So, for all you Progressives and Obama-apologists, all you Alinskyites and all of you “hope and change” junkies
(The great thing about addressing your remarks exclusively to the demons in your head is you can use your inside voice, and your neighbor isn’t always threatening to “stuff that megaphone so far up your ass you’ll fart like a foghorn.”)
I ask, which is more important: to make sure those who can’t afford mortgages get them so the rest of the nation can bail them out down the road or securing the neighborhood streets from gang violence?
Instead of bundling risky sub-prime mortgages into exotic financial instruments, Bear Stearns should have formed an army of street wise vigilantes, and then sold them as derivatives.
Is it more important to make sure that you get people who have no fact-based understanding of the issues registered to vote or to make sure that when little Jimmy walks home from school he doesn’t end up kicked to the curb with a bullet in his head?
Well, people who bring the force of their numbers to bear on the ballet box (white people, older people, older white people) tend to get more in the way of government services, including better schools and an increased police presence. But I still think Obama should have skipped his time in the Illinois State Senate and gone on a vision question abroad, where he could have honed his body into the ultimate weapon, and returned to haunt the mean streets of Chicago as a nocturnal avenger.
Many among the electorate have come to understand that President Obama and his administration have their priorities mixed-up. I would point to the absolute failure of his “community organizing” – as it pertains to the most important job of a community organizer, keeping the members of the community alive – and say he had his priorities mixed-up long, long ago.
But, hey, if the number of registered voters trumps the body-count, then I guess he did one hell of a job.
I know we’re all the sum of our experiences, but I’m not sure just how much we can extrapolate from a President’s early job history. After all, Bush didn’t waste his young adulthood helping the poor. He coasted through school, went AWOL from the Texas Air National Guard, failed a military drug test, subsequently got busted for cocaine and driving while under the influence, and ran a succession of business ventures into the ground, which might have led many observers to predict his presidency would be an historic flop, when in fact it was a world-historical disaster of unprecedented scope, from which we and and the rest of humanity are still suffering. So I think we should extend the same courtesy to Obama that we did to Bush, and give him a chance to reach his full potential.
[i]As of April 25, 2010, the residents of Chicago have stood witness to 113 homicides.[/i]
In a day? In a month? In a year? What is the national rate for homicides? Context, please?
Left by Hysterical Woman on May 3rd, 2010