Monday, November 27, 2017

He's baaaaaaaack!!!

By Damien Hi
     Watching one zeppelin-sized media career after another go up in flames, like so many Hindenburgs exploding — fwump! fwump! fwump!— as their revolting sexual excesses are disclosed, I nevertheless felt secure. Think of it as the shy guy dividend.
     Alas, being a predatory creep isn't the only way the past can rear out of the dust and bite you.
     I was shocked last week to see someone completely unexpected back in the headlines, back on television, an accusation in human form aimed in my direction.
     No press conference, yet. No hazy, half-remembered charges. That's coming, no doubt.
The only thing to do is to be proactive, try to get ahead of the scandal.
     Sigh.
    Todd Stroger.
     I'm innocent. I swear. Stroger is not my fault, though people at the time blamed me.
     "Even Stroger's supporters were worried in the final three weeks of the campaign as to whether African Americans were going to turn out heavily for Stroger," the Chicago Defender wrote in July 2006. "Were it not for the controversy created by Neil Steinberg's column in the Chicago Sun-Times blasting his health status, which invigorated the Black community and drove many of them to the polls, President Stroger likely would have lost."
     That was referring to Todd's father, John, and if you're wondering how boosting the chances of dad meant helping junior, well, how quickly you forget.


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13 comments:

  1. Toddler is running for just one reason. He would like to get back into the county's pension system, because he's turning 55, which is the absurdly early retirement age, which forces the taxpayers to shell out an extra 12 years of retirement pay, compared to when you can retire on Social Security at full benefits.
    In addition, I wonder how much he & his sister split from all the secret bank accounts John Stroger created to hide all the bribes he took over the years, especially from the ones for the $600 million that was spent on the new County Hospital, which was disgracefully named after Stroger, especially since it was then Cook County Board President Richard Phelan who actually caused it to be built.

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  2. I also benefit from the "shy guy dividend," although I think the greatest impediment to my gaining lasting infamy as a sexual predator is lack of opportunity. I've been fortunate in never having been in a position to command sexual favors from anyone. Not that I've ever refused the few chances I've been offered to be a cad -- I remember them vividly and with horror, as if I had been one of the "teachers" in Milgram's famous experiment who continued to administer electrical shocks to the "students" way past the level of supposed safety.

    john

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    1. I'm not sure it's possible for us to judge ourselves in this regard. Being the shy guy type certainly would likely diminish the number of times we've inadvertently caused women to feel threatened or harassed. I was making this case with my wife the other day and it seemed to aggravate her quite a bit that I was proactively defending my virtue. She thought that it was not a man's place to decide whether his behavior had harmed women or made them feel harrassed. Her point is that this type of behavior has been normalized to such a degree that men don't realize they're doing it and that standing idly by while other men engage in this Behavior without objecting to it is nearly the same as The Men Who misbehave. Clearly we all have a long way to go before our interpersonal relationships are completely acceptable and not fraught with negative consequences especially for women

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    2. I think that's carrying self-effacement to the extreme, leaping from a world where these things are ignored to a world where every guy is implicated, by proxy. Weinstein certainly KNEW he was doing something wrong, or should have, after he paid out the first million. I'm not saying I never caused a woman discomfort by, oh, asking her out, asking her to dance, etc. Just that I never, to my knowledge, carried it beyond the limits of propriety. One "no" and I was down the road.

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    3. I was Reading an article that was an interview with Quentin Tarantino. I guess all the films that he directed were made with Harvey. It turns out Quentin's girl friend Mira Sorvino had been accosted by mr. Weinstein. Quentin says that looking back on his lack of a spine in his continuing to work with Harvey was an enabling Behavior. It's men that do this to women and we know that men do it we are men and wanting to feel good about ourselves because we're not guilty of such abhorrent Behavior isn't the important thing. It's what men have done to women and how other men have turned a Blind Eye to it or laughed about it or engaged in it while they were having a night of heavy drinking when they were younger. I'm just saying my wife's point is we don't really get to judge ourselves struck a chord with me. I'm just trying to listen and not speak about how women feel about this.
      No means no and that's certainly a first step toward being respectful.
      I guess maybe sometimes it's wrong to even ask. When looking at the power dynamic between men and women men are almost always in a position of strength, I think that's hard to deny

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    4. Except physically, when it is a question of rape, men aren't usually in a position of strength when the two parties are contemporaries. The power dynamic usually seems to involve older, powerful men hitting on young, vulnerable women, which is particularly repellant. It were probably best that, when reaching a certain age all of us came to feel about sex as did the first Earl Chesterfield, who wrote about it in a letter to his son, " the pleasure is momentary, the position ridiculous, and the expense damnable."

      Tom

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    5. Tom: I wish I could come up with half the literary allusions that you roll out so readily and aptly. I should check on this before I say it, but I think son didn't pay much attention to dad's immortal advice.

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    6. No wonder so many women are complaining about how they've been treated. Maybe you've heard about the #metoo movement . This story is not about men's careers being blown up . It's about women's lives being altered, ruined and destroyed by the actions of men . And men's inability to understand that we all play a part in it.
      Maybe y'all should start a #notmemovement.

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  3. John Stroger was kept hidden behind guards at Rush ICU, and allowed no visitors, to prevent anyone from discovering the extent of his incapacity. All in an effort to retain power within the family.
    That was a critical primary - we were forced to attend to Cook County politics (by pulling a Dem ballot and voting for Claypool vs J Stroger for Cook Co Pres) or State politics (by pulling a Rep ballot and voting for someone to challenge Rod B for gov). I wish primaries allowed split ticket voting. We were not served well by that election cycle.

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    1. Yet we have the effrontery to claim that such and such a place is not ready for democracy, which by the way was not what our founding fathers tried to create, far from it. Many of the safeguards against mobocracy built into the U.S. Constitution further the corrupt aims of the rich and the powerful.

      john

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    2. It wasn't just the ICU. I remember, when he came home from the hospital in a wheelchair, his acolytes formed a double line from the curb to his doorway to prevent anyone from actually seeing him. When you have to keep an officeholder literally hidden from the public eye, something is wrong.

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  4. I'd like to read the column blasting John Stroger's health status.

    Todd doesn't have a chance. No sane voter would even consider.... Oh, shit. I said the same thing about Trump.

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