Somehow I got stuck, between the rock and the hard place and I’m down on my luck. – Warren Zevon – Lawyers, Guns and Money
The truth is your county board member doesn’t amount to all that much because there’s only so much one person can accomplish in light of their 23 peers. Thus, the key to those larger governing bodies is to keep an eye on the electoral trends and vote accordingly. In the Kane County case, though they’re still a small minority, there’s a growing MAGA component that really needs to be stopped before that board devolves into another Trumpian quagmire.
The problem is, at least in the KC board district 16 Republican primary, the term “lesser of two evils” has lost all meaning. Here’s what I mean.
On the one hand we have 18-year incumbent Mike Kenyon, who, among his many tragic flaws, regularly falls asleep at board meetings. It’s a topic we’ve covered at semi-length.
On the rare occasion he’s actually awake, Mike puts just enough effort into the gig to collect the $25,000 salary with the Cadillac health care benefits that go along with it. Between farming and politics, Mike never met a government dollar he didn’t want to take.
Of course, as is the case with all red-blooded American elected officials, and particularly Republicans who get caught with their pants down, Mike took great umbrage at my characterization of him as one of the seven dwarves. He even went as far as sending a campaign mailer indignantly claiming the proximate causes for his public somnambulism were his dairy farming daily 4:30 a.m. start and he recently underwent cancer treatment.
First, if anyone believes our multi-millionaire board member gets up to milk his cows in the wee hours of the morning, then you’re even more gullible than his Trump-touting primary opponent. Even if Mike does get up that early, my feet generally hit the floor between 4 and 5 a.m. and I have no trouble staying awake during the day.
Second, while I have a great deal of empathy for anyone who has to endure the cancer scourge, if the treatment renders you unable to fulfill your public duty, then you need to step down in favor of someone who can. There’s absolutely NO excuse for sleeping on the taxpayers’ dime. Public officials resign for health reasons all the time.
Then there’s the pesky fact that Mike’s been falling asleep on the dais since I started covering the county board back in 2008. It’s become a 16-year county board running joke among the other board members.
But as bad as Mike Kenyon has been, and he continues to be, leave it to his primary opponent, Eric Stare, to make him look like a stellar public servant by the most cursory comparison.
Stare, an Elgin Township trustee, leads off campaign interviews by proudly proclaiming the 2020 election was stolen, a delusion that automatically relegates his IQ to somewhere in the 40 to 50 range. My theory has always been, if the Democrats had the wherewithal to subvert Trump’s reelection, then why are Mitch McConnell and Lindsay Graham still in office?
That lack of any significant brainpower makes it impossible for Stare to think for himself, so he falls in line with whatever the Grand Cheeto has been thinking for the last five minutes. Should Stare somehow manage to get elected, we know exactly whom he’ll serve and it won’t be the citizens of Kane County.
Then Stare goes on about how “the bible doesn’t condone gays,” despite Jesus never mentioning a word on the subject. And ain’t it funny how loons like Stare cite the bible to justify their political fetishes when I could write an entire column on how he abrogates the more obvious caveats on a daily basis. Loving your neighbor as yourself, for example.
Can you say, “Raging hypocrite?” I knew you could!
But the worst part of Stare’s brand of political flights of fancy is his theory that we should go back to paper ballots and still somehow lower taxes. Like a good Luddite, Eric told the press he “doesn’t believe in those machines.”
Of course he doesn’t! But he believes that a national election was “stolen.”
The hilarious irony there is, paper ballots are far more prone to political shenanigans than their electronic counterparts, just ask any former Cook County Machine minion. Not to mention the potential human error involved, and it would take weeks to tally those 235,000 2020 votes. And potential recounts would take even longer.
That would more than double the County Clerk’s election budget forcing the County to raise taxes, not lower them. That’s what happens when you refuse to apply critical thinking, so you simply repeat whatever a demagogue says without any consideration for the deleterious consequences.
So, what’s the bottom line? After some serious consideration, I’ve come to the only possible conclusion. And that is that I’d rather watch Mike Kenyon fall asleep at every board meeting than have to bear witness to Eric Stare serving while he’s wide awake.
