JOHN KASS, IN THE CHICAGO TRIBUNE: In Facebook torture, victim’s eyes terrify most.
There’s a lot to unpack from Chicago’s latest racial outrage, the Facebook Torture Case, and it’s ugly, so let’s get to it.
You know the news. Four African-Americans were charged Thursday with hate crimes in the alleged kidnapping and torture of a bound, white and mentally disabled young man.
Police said they beat him, forced him to drink toilet water, jabbed at him with a knife and cut his scalp, shouting “F—white people!” and “F— [Donald] Trump!” and laughing while smoking blunts and streaming it all live on Facebook.
I watched some, not all of that video, the way they brutalized that young man, the terror in his eyes, hearing their laughter. And I realized these were human beings, amusing themselves with the pain of a mentally disabled man. There are many words for this, but irredeemable is the one that comes to mind.
Ridiculous. As Hillary made clear, it’s Trump supporters who are irredeemable, and these people clearly opposed Trump.
Plus:
There are other elements of this heater case that should be acknowledged, like the politics of this thing. It’s crawling with politics now.
It’s partly a racial thing so let’s talk race. If the races were reversed, and a mentally disabled black kid were tortured by white barbarians, the political left would be screaming that over-the-top political rhetoric from the right had trickled down and encouraged the brutes. You can argue with me about this, but that won’t change it.
Yet it’s the other way now, isn’t it? And the political right is arguing that anti-Trump rants from the left — including casting white males as the political enemy — have given license to this kind of thing. The two sides will slap-fight each other over this on social media, in anonymous and hateful comments under online news stories, and they’ll slap each other in the journals.
And this is how we craft political weapons from human misery.
But there is another kind of politics at work here, as well, the politics of Chicago musical chairs. From the moment the torture video went viral, picked up by the cable news networks and replayed, over and over, and as talking heads debated whether “evil” was the appropriate word, Chicago politicians hunkered down.
You weren’t in the meetings and neither was I, but you can envision them huddling in three distinct groups: One group with Mayor Rahm Emanuel and his people; another with new Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx and hers; and a third with Eddie Johnson with his white shirt supervisors and detectives. And in each one, there must have been some staffers, staring at their phones, wondering if this heater case would burn their boss when the music stopped.
Foxx seemed to never miss a camera during the Laquan McDonald controversy. When that video finally surfaced after the mayoral election, showing the white cop shooting a black kid 16 times, Foxx won her election.
She was all over the news then, but for this case, she was rather reserved, though her office pressed the charges.
And Emanuel, hoping to rehabilitate himself with black voters after the way he handled the McDonald fiasco, waited until the water was warm.
Most of it was left to Johnson, and he made sure to hit his main political talking point early in his Thursday news conference, as the charges were read and national news was made.
Why are Democrat-run cities such cesspits of political violence and political incompetence?