You can’t go home again, Richard
Now that he’s had his sorry political butt handed to him on a silver platter, in one of the worst cases of sour grapes outside a Grimms’ fairytale, Mayor Richard Irvin suddenly seems to be willing to settle for little old Aurora.
Be still my beating heart!
Even sycophantic alderpersons Patty Smith and Sherman Jenkins welcomed the Mayor “home” and explained that, borne of the lessons from that larger campaign, Irvin would propel the City of Light to new heights.
Really?
As the great Judge Marilyn Milian would invariably respond, “Ni tu mismo te lo crees!” And nobody else does, either. They could sing his praises until choirs of angels descended upon that building on Downer Street, but not even that heavenly host couldn’t change the fact that Richard Irvin has been exposed as:
- A pathological liar
- Both a conservative and liberal fraud (Not an easy thing to accomplish!)
- A womanizer with at least five baby mommas
- A mayor who hires his girlfriends to six-figure city jobs
- The poster boy for pay-to-play politics
- A man of beyond questionable ethics
- A Mayor who undermined an FBI investigation of Aurora CIO Michael Pegues
Ain’t it funny how Ms. Smith and Mr. Jenkins completely ignored how Irvin painted himself as a Trump Republican for the better part of a year because Aurora voters certainly won’t be forgetting about it anytime soon. Not with me regularly reminding them, anyway.
With the honeymoon officially over, Irvin will likely draw a serious Hispanic candidate in the 2025 mayoral race, and that eventuality will mark the end of his dubious political career.
Irvin tried to blame that meddling Governor Pritzker and his dog for his embarrassing third place finish, but the truth is, even his own constituents couldn’t be bothered to hoist their ample posteriors off the couch to cast a ballot on his behalf.
First, it takes real skill to get just 19 percent of your home county vote. And second, some Aurora precincts saw less than a 1 percent Republican turnout while the rest averaged an abysmal 7 percent participation level with the Irvin/Bourne ticket lucky to hit 30 percent mark in any of them – in Irvin’s hometown!
Can you say “repudiation?” I knew you could!
So, Irvin’s best efforts to camouflage this pile of manure by tying a bright red ribbon around it is not nearly enough to disguise a stark $50 million political defeat that puts Irvin on a par with the worst electoral debacles in the annals of U.S. history. George McGovern anyone?
Richard always did want to be a legend.
Beacon-News propaganda
The worst part of Irvin’s self-serving attempt at a comeback is the Aurora Beacon-News’ complicity in that regard. “Reporter” Steve Lord, who lends an entirely new meaning to the term “phoning it in,” wrote the headline piece extolling the Mayor’s return to Aurora, mainly in Irvin’s own words.
Lord penned this propaganda despite the Chicago Tribune, the Beacon’s parent paper, exposing all manner of mendaciousness and malfeasance throughout Irvin’s disastrous primary campaign.
And the fact that Lord did this is particularly egregious because he’s a veteran full-time reporter who really oughtta know better. So, either he’s angling for Irvin to hire him or his lips are so firmly attached to the Mayor’s ass that they’ll need to be surgically removed.
And that same admonition holds true for the Beacon News staff/freelance columnists, too. While Irvin turns city hall into his private playground they “cover” topics like:
- Clearing backyard buckthorn
- Birds
- Eddie Munster
- Slavery
- A retiring disc jockey
Apparently, there’s nothing else happening in the city of Aurora. I realize the Beacon-News is a shell of its former self because the Tribune won’t put a dime into it, but that doesn’t mean you should simply shrug your shoulders and give up.
Don’t ever compliment Elgin’s Community Task Force on Policing
Because just like it is with a drunken escapade, you’ll seriously regret it the next day.
I stipulated to the following last Thursday in regard to the task force’s proposal to create a citizen’s board to review Elgin Police Department disciplinary proceedings:
As long as that board truly represents the basic Elgin demographics and maintains members with some law enforcement background for that critical 360-degree perspective, I think it’s a great idea.
Of course, as is par for the task force course, the very next day I learned that the official proposal language dictated this nine-person board must consist of:
No fewer than four (4) members of the Board shall be Black/African American.
No fewer than three (3) members of the Board shall be Hispanic/Latinx.
No fewer than four (4) members shall be women.
which, once again, IS PATENTLY ILLEGAL.
The vast irony there being the statutes that prohibit this kind of government board deck stacking are the same statutes that preclude old white male politicians from keeping women and minorities from serving on those same boards.
Then there’s this!
Considering they’re just 5.4 percent of Elgin’s citizenry, on what planet should 44 percent of the review board seats be reserved for African Americans? Not only does this utterly unapologetic public bigotry put white folks to shame, but it’s very difficult to fathom when it comes from the same folks who’ve had to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous intolerant fortune for their entire lives.
This is just another fine example of the pot and kettle forgetting that they come from the same material. And just two white folks? Apparently we Caucasians all think alike and can’t be trusted to make an independent judgment.
For the 93rd time, where are Kearns and West, the task force moderators? Why on God’s green earth would they allow the kind of illegal proposal to make it through the whole process knowing it would destroy the miniscule credibility this group has left when it became public.
I’ve said it before. If this is the best they can come up with after almost two years of deliberations, then it really is time to pull the plug. That September 1st task force dissolution date can’t come fast enough.
But don’t believe everything you hear about the task force
There’s a rumor rumbling through Elgin that a Kearns and West moderator personally removed Courier-News reporter Gloria Casas from the task force’s July 23 public listening session. And it’s just that – a rumor with no basis in fact.
Mayor Kaptain was there and he told me that no one said a word to him about anyone being removed, and Ms. Casas, who was gracious enough to return my call, similarly expressed that nothing could be further from the truth.
The moderator simply asked her to identify herself to the various folks if she participated in the proceedings. Faced with an unending litany of stories to cover, Gloria left the meeting shortly after it started.
So far, the task force on policing has shown they have no problem coming up with some rather fascinating propositions completely on their own, so they really don’t need any help in that regard.
