Category: Rants

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The president is too stupid to get out of his own way once again. Reports indicate that Mitch McConnell advised him against Kavanaugh for reasons of "baggage," so certainly people inside the GOP knew this was coming. And now he appears ready to stubbornly insist on sticking with him even though every day nearer to the election reduces the likelihood of this vote happening.

It would be easier to withdraw Kavanaugh and replace him with an equally awful human being and end up with the same outcomes ten years from now.

If he sticks with him it only helps the Democrats – though it's worth pointing out that Schumer has not even put up a pretense of trying to delay this vote yet, so it's no sure thing he will ever start.

It seems like there are some Republicans who are looking for a way out of voting for this guy. Starting over with another new nominee allows another week or two to run off the clock. If this goes into October, the odds that anyone 1) wants to be in DC and 2) wants to cast this vote 4 weeks before the election are both very slim.

A lot of this involves straw-grasping and speculation, but it's the first scenario I can see that plausibly (although not probably) ends with Kavanaugh not being confirmed.
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In the end, cynicism born of experience leads me to believe everyone calling for hearings is going to end up voting for him anyway.
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If there is any positive outcome to be found here, it will depend on Trump being too dumb to back down until it's too late.

In the three weeks since its publication I've lost count of the number of legitimate journalists who have heaped praise on "The Mystery of Tucker Carlson" by Lyz Lenz for Columbia Journalism Review.

It is indeed a well written and thorough profile of the lil' guy's career. That said, its fundamental premise makes no sense.

To catch you up if you don't want to read a rather lengthy thing about Tucker Carlson, the argument is that a once "good" conservative pundit whose tone was Serious has turned into a shrieking, conspiracy-peddling white supremacist.

The first part of that argument is undermined by the fact that "good" conservative pundits – you know, the ones who can come on the shows without embarrassing everyone by braying like the Fox & Friends crew or Rush Limbaugh – are almost entirely a creation of the centrist media. Chuck Todd. Tim Russert. Chris Cillizza. You know, the Meet the Press types. They've been running out of Good conservatives lately, though. It's part of the reason they were so crushed when McCain died. There are very few Republicans they can bring on the show without ending up feeling bad about themselves.

So they anointed Carlson long ago as one of the Good ones on the basis of, I guess the fact that he wears a bowtie and has prep school manners. They did this with Jonah Goldberg too. But the thing is, both of them are actually very stupid people making much the same arguments – more politely and with bigger words – as Glenn Beck, Hannity, etc. Carlson is now and always has been a hack. He just played the George Will card; hacky arguments delivered through that leather-patches-on-elbows persona.

There is no doubt, though, that Carlson has gone off the deep end since he was hired by Fox News to replace O'Reilly in all but name. Rather than seeing this as a mystery, it underscores the more likely explanation: he is a grifter who will wear any metaphorical hat that enables him to cash in. When the non-Fox networks wanted George Will Jr., he dressed up like the biggest twerp on campus and got paid to do that. Now that times have changed – not to mention now that the juggernaut of right-wing media came calling – he's more than happy to change his tune.

Despite making a living off of what appear to be strongly held opinions, I'm convinced that most of these people will sing any song to any audience if it pays and elevates their profile. These aren't artists with an acoustic guitar and a story to tell; they're session musicians and frankly they don't give a shit what you ask them to play.

The role of money in campaigns is greatly overstated in the minds of most Americans who pay attention to politics. There is a threshold, an amount of money that candidates need to raise to be competitive in a given race. Money raised beyond that amount can be spent strategically, up to a point of diminishing returns. And beyond that point, additional spending doesn't bolster the candidate's chances. A simpler way to think of it is that once a candidate has spent money on all the "right" things that a successful campaign should spend money on, all additional spending is just blown on advertising. Buying more ads is what you do when you have money and can't think of anything more productive to do with it (this is, of course, assuming that quite a bit of spending on advertising has already been done).
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We saw a great example of this in 2008 when the Obama campaign had so much cash on hand that they were, in the case of swing states like Ohio, buying every single ad spot in a 30 minute program. Believe it or not, once a viewer has seen an ad a dozen times, showing them the same ad several hundred more times has no additional benefits. It's just overkill at some point.
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Nonetheless, there are useful ways to spend a million dollars in any competitive race in the country right now. So it isn't entirely clear why the Democratic Party is spending that million bucks trying to help an unpopular and by any measure (other than their favorite, "she's better than a Republican") a very bad incumbent win a primary. I refer to the Rhode Island gubernatorial race, which is one of those statewide races Democrats have to go out of their way to find a way to lose.

I don't expect that party organizations maintain neutrality during primaries. Parties endorse candidates and have always done things to help those favored by the party to win. I simply do not understand why at this very moment, anyone could look at the races happening across this country and conclude that "Let's give Raimondo a million bucks to maybe fend off a primary challenger, because seriously how bad do you have to be in a deep blue state to not be able to win your primary as the incumbent governor."

Could that not be more productively spent in, say, the Florida gubernatorial race in which a competitive Democrat has the potential to break 20 consecutive years of GOP control of that office? Maybe spend that money on ground teams to pound doors, drag voters to polling places, and so on?
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Which does the Democratic Party have a deeper interest in: protecting an incumbent from another Democrat who very likely would hold the office anyway, or taking back something the GOP has held for two decades?

Parties as organizations make decisions that are not always outwardly logical because people in the party are not all equally influential. If you're in the clurb, the party may do things to help you even when it's not strictly rational.
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The favor will be expected to be repaid later. That said, it seems so clear that more benefit is derived from bolstering a race against a Republican than from trying to sway a primary where a very bad Democratic incumbent is in danger of losing because of her own actions and nothing more.

At the moment when Anthony Kennedy retired, I wrote a piece for The Week with a title that largely saves you the time of reading it: "Democrats cannot win the fight to replace Justice Kennedy. They can only prepare for the next battle." Now that Kavanaugh's confirmation process has begun, everyone has that familiar, desperate "Oh shit" feeling that prompts a search for a last second heroic solution. There isn't one. Gumming up the works in the Senate won't stop one nomination (although it certainly could have helped, if only Schumer had a spine, push back the timeline on some lower court nominations who were instead fast-tracked for no reason whatsoever).

This highlights a problem with our political culture that I think about more and more lately; everything is very short-term oriented and nobody is playing an effective long game.
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Instead of focusing on some miracle scenario in which Kavanaugh isn't confirmed (spoiler: he will be) why would Democrats not focus on preventing some of the lower court nominations by dragging their procedural feet? Well, part of the problem is that the current leadership simply doesn't know how to fight, has internalized losing, and accepts anything the majority chooses to give it as a victory. The current state of Democratic leadership is not dissimilar to the sad state of GOP leadership in the decade prior to Newt Gingrich's takeover (think people like Bob Michel). Rank and file Republicans of that time complained constantly that their leadership was content to be the minority, to finish second, and to accept table scraps from the Democratic majority. They received in return lectures about how they should be thankful for the scraps and proud of the leadership for "winning" them.

Now the parties have reversed roles. And losing to Mitch McConnell is so deeply branded into the psyche of this current generation of Democratic leaders that I think we're going to have to wait until everyone involved is dead before any progress can be made.

Whether or not he succeeded, Minority Leader Mitch McConnell would do absolutely anything – without limit from scruple or law – to stop the nomination process. Minority Leader Schumer doesn't have the same spirit. More importantly, McConnell has always had his eyes on prizes down the road in a way that the Democratic Party in Congress doesn't seem to have right now. Those lower court judges who just got fast tracked – perhaps one or two of whom could have been blocked with great effort – will bear fruit for Republicans down the road with the decisions they make.
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It would have been better strategically – and boy do Democratic insiders love them some strategizing 11th-degree chess – to recognize that Kavanaugh is a foregone conclusion and try to pave a better road in the future. Instead, they get nothing in the short term or the long term. Nothing is gained.

They seem, at the highest and therefore most self-destructive level, unable to let go of the 2004-era belief that voters will reward Democrats for playing nice. Reach across the aisle. Be the bigger people. They go low, we go high. And Schumer in particular keeps trying to wring moral victories out of caving to the GOP and hoping they'll do something nice in return.
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They won't. They never do.

Politics is, for people who say Decorum and Bipartisanship are important, entertainment.
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It is not. It is a blood sport, and people's lives are literally on the line. If you don't want Brett Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court, you have to stop that from happening at the beginning of a long process, not at its culmination. If you don't want kids in cages, you can't wait until the kids are in cages to figure out a solution. All the groundwork to getting kids in cages and a right-wing takeover of the Supreme Court was laid over the past 15 to 20 years.

There's just not a lot that can be done to fight the cancer once it has metastasized. We are now reaping the rewards of poor choices made during three decades of Democratic strategy focused on moving to the right to win people in the center while the GOP just kept moving farther, farther, and farther right, and the equally misguided strategy of assuming that in the name of honor and decorum there are certain depths to which conservatives would not sink (hint: there aren't). The best phrasing I've ever heard for their miscalculation is: The Democrats are pointing at the rule book screaming "A dog isn't allowed to play basketball!" while a dog dunks on them over and over again and the crowd goes wild. American voters don't give a shit about decorum, procedure, rules, and bipartisanship. If they did, Democrats wouldn't be the minority at almost every turn across the country right now.

If there is any hope for the future, it is in laying a better groundwork today and in the next decade to bear some fruit in the late 2020s and beyond. It's too late to stop what's happening in real time.

To the delight of headline writers everywhere, a man named David Pecker turns out to be the editor of the National Enquirer and other trashy tabloid media outlets. We learned this last week when Mr. Pecker (snicker) was granted immunity in exchange for, presumably, answering questions about Donald Trump.

My father spent nearly three decades as a prosecutor. I enjoy having conversations with him about criminal investigations, high profile trials in the media, etc because he always seems to know what is going to happen. And over time he has confirmed all of the prosecutorial cliches about criminal matters – the foremost among them being that individuals refusing to testify against their colleagues in crime is almost entirely a creation of fiction writers and Hollywood. In real life, "First to talk, first to walk" applies almost without exception.

Trump seems legitimately upset about some of the people – including attorneys, former legal counsel, and fellow celebrity gossip column types whom he probably thought really, unironically were his friends. Oddly enough, all of these people like Pecker most likely are sincere believers in Trump and allies in whatever the Great Man has done throughout his life.

But here's the thing: just like all animals are innately afraid of fire, I believe all humans are innately terrified of prison. David Pecker probably never had any intention of spilling dirt on Trump, but I'd be willing to be David Pecker also never thought of himself as a person who might be charged with a serious crime. Unlike, say, a drug trafficker or a murderer who knows he/she has broken the law and is potentially in very deep shit, a lot of these white collar types live in a fantasy world in which nothing they have ever done is wrong. Or, more charitably, they may sincerely be unaware of white collar laws they've violated.

So here's David Pecker, Trump ally, sitting in a conference room somewhere with his high-priced lawyer and ten Federal prosecutors.

The Feds explain to him, calmly and coldly, that they have enough evidence to charge him with a grab bag of felonies – violating IRS or SEC reporting requirements, for example. The kind of technical-details crimes that I'm assuming most of the truly wealthy could be charged with if some prosecutor were willing to dig hard enough.

And now David Pecker, Trump ally, who has lived a wealthy and "successful" and immensely privileged life and is now an old man, is for the first time in his life picturing himself in prison. Or even simply picturing himself in a courtroom facing the remote possibility of prison. It must be, in a way few of us can appreciate first-hand, terrifying. I believe without judgment that all of us would do just about anything to avoid going to prison. Because going to prison seems fucking horrible, minimum security white collar prison or not.

And so he talks. As soon as immunity is offered he jumps on it without a second thought, encouraged enthusiastically by his high priced attorney. What seems like yet another example of the total absence of loyalty among the rich is, in the cold light of reality, a natural reaction to a set of circumstances you or I would react to identically. If they were face to face, I have no doubt that Pecker could tell Trump without lying, "I like you, Donald, but I can't go to prison to protect you.
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Everybody talks. And I understand completely why everybody talks, because I have no illusions that I would do the same thing in similar circumstances. I don't think that makes me a bad person; I think it makes me a human being who is afraid of things that are horribly unpleasant.

Every major city has attempted to improve – in a "let's not actually address the problem" sort of way – community-police relations in recent years by establishing some sort of ostensibly civilian review or oversight board.
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In theory, this provides a layer of accountability over law enforcement who otherwise seem to act with impunity. In practice, these organizations are loaded up with carefully selected, inevitably very old or very white (preferably both) people whose reflex is to make excuses for police no matter what they do.
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When your Review and Accountability Board judges that every police-involved shooting is justified, it doesn't take people long to figure out that it might not be a source of independent oversight after all.

Seattle offers us an outstanding example of the phenomenon when its review board ruled not merely that the Seattle PD killing of 20 year old Tommy Le was justified because police "thought" he was holding a knife (it was a pen) but also that even if they HAD realized he was holding a pen it would have been justified anyway because a pen “can be used as an improvised weapon. Aimed at vulnerable parts of the body, like the face or throat, it can cause serious bodily injury if used to stab someone.”

The report similarly concluded that Le was advancing on the officers – a linchpin of their case for having used lethal force against him – without addressing the autopsy report indicating he was shot in the back twice.

Le clearly was on drugs when confronted – he was screaming and referring to himself as "The Creator" – so it's not inconceivable that he might have been hard to handle. But if police cannot handle a stoned kid holding a pen with anything short of shooting him three times, then that is a remarkable indictment of how bad the Seattle Police are at their jobs. It's certainly not a justification for their actions.

The review board's statement is exceptional here.
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It doesn't stop, as it could have, at whitewashing the shooting. Everyone expects that when police departments and their apologists investigate themselves they will conclude inevitably that the officers "feared for their safety" and thus had no choice but to shoot the suspect however many times they felt appropriate. But they go on to state that even if a set of circumstances that did not exist had existed, the shooting still would have been justified. The officers asserted all along that they believed he was holding a knife.
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Hey that's great, but even if you guys knew fully well that it was a pen you can still plug the kid because, hey, a pen can be a super dangerous weapon too, in certain scenarios we've seen in movies.

It's useful signaling to the police to let them know just how far the institutions that allegedly oversee them will go to cover for them.

A while back I owned a sports car. A legitimate two-seater with room for perhaps a moderately sized flat box (the Dunkin Donuts party pack type) in the back atop the engine and, in the frunk (front trunk) a compartment sized to hold precisely one carry-on sized suitcase. It was, beyond any shadow of a doubt, the least practical car on the planet not named the Lotus Elise (which is like that, but doesn't even have soundproofing).

Occasionally people would point out to me – as though it had not occurred to me independently – that it was not a very practical vehicle. "You can't fit anything in that!" they said, as if my decision to purchase and drive it was driven by cargo capacity. It would be every bit as stupid for me to remind a Honda Odyssey minivan owner that his vehicle couldn't beat anyone in a drag race. One could safely assume that this was not a relevant concern to the Odyssey buyer, nor is it fair to criticize a vehicle designed to carry many passengers safely for being kinda slow.

As you've probably figured out, this post is about Nancy Pelosi.

Wait. What?

It struck me recently that there is one important aspect in which nearly all criticism of Pelosi recently has been unfair, and it's not the simple "Well she's a woman" point that has been made a great many times. It is unfair in a sense to criticize Pelosi on the grounds of not being enough of a fire-and-brimstone leader when in ordinary political time there would be zero expectation that a House minority leader or Speaker would fit that mold.

That simply isn't what they're for. Criticizing Pelosi for not leading the charge into the front lines of the GOP with her sword out and her hair on fire is technically accurate – she's not – but misses the point of whether anyone should consider that a realistic thing the House Minority Leader might do. It isn't.

Think of how incredibly, almost painfully, dull most of the people who have occupied House leadership positions for either party have been throughout history. There is a reason Speaker, Majority / Minority Leader, etc are not springboards to higher political office or places to groom future presidential candidates.

Bob Michel? Tip O'Neill? Paul Ryan? Sam Rayburn? Dick Gephardt? All people who had some good qualities and filled their House roles well, but my god can you imagine a more boring dinner party to be at? House leaders are technicians and parliamentarians.
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There's a good reason they make terrible presidential candidates when they try.

So the question is, why does it make sense to hold Pelosi's blandness and rather tepid approach against her?

It doesn't. The problem is that there is a leadership (not formally, but Big Picture) void in the Democratic Party. Obama and Hillary Clinton were the two most obvious figureheads and now both are Private Citizens; you can't be the party's focal point when you're on the outside. Sanders is too polarizing and also too old. The Democratic Senate leadership is a joke (and also ancient). The only Democrats generating excitement outside of their own constituencies are people like Beto O'Rourke and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez who, it bears noting, haven't won anything yet (Beto has held some lower offices, but the Senate race is anything but a sure thing).

People gravitate toward the names they know, and for better or worse Nancy Pelosi is just about the only recognizable name in a leadership position in the Democratic Party at the national level. With Trump turning the GOP into a cult of personality, it is natural to look for a Democratic counterpart. There isn't one; whether there should be is a separate question. It certainly isn't going to be a congressional lifer, if such a person exists.

In short, expecting Nancy Pelosi or any House leader to be inspiring is a bit like expecting your accountant to be inspiring. It's not only terribly unlikely but also very much beside the point.

Yes, I believe all of the Democratic leadership in the House and the Senate need to find successors under the age of 70 and start fading away. No organization, political or not, should feel comfortable with such an old group of leaders. Imagine any big corporation having nobody under 70 on the Board or in a management role. But in the immortal words of Dennis Green, Nancy Pelosi is what Nancy Pelosi is, and that's OK. It is not reasonable to expect her to fill a void that someone like the House Minority Leader would not, in any remotely reasonable set of expectations, be called upon to fill.

What went through Omarosa's or Michael Cohen's minds when they started secretly recording conversations at work? I can't tell you that. But I can tell you what was going through mine.

To nip any untoward rumors in the bud, the following predates my academic career by years. So no need to cast about looking for a culprit among the many wonderful academics at any institution I've ever been associated with. Or, let me spell it out: This is not about anyone in higher education, period.

In my early post-college life I worked directly for a ownership-level person at a company and that person was engaged in illegal activities that require, and will receive, no additional detail here because the specifics are not relevant. What is relevant is as follows:

1. I was being asked to do things that were either not legal or were highly suspect
2. I was about 22 and in a position with no power, dependent on the whims of one or two people for continued employment
3. I needed the job, as it paid above-average and I had recently graduated from college with not-insubstantial credit card debt. Basically whatever part of my college tuition and living expenses for three-plus years I couldn't borrow or pay for with earnings during summers and part-time during the school year, I charged. I did what I could under the circumstances in which I found myself.

So the first obvious question is, why not just quit? "Why didn't you quit" is a question often asked rhetorically that gives away a great deal about the privileges of the questioner.

I didn't quit because like the vast majority of Americans I lived essentially paycheck to paycheck and didn't have another job offer handy. If there are people out there in the early 20s who can afford to quit a job and support themselves without one for an indeterminate time, I was not one of them.

Given this, I felt strongly that:

1. Someone might end up being arrested or going to jail, and it was NOT going to be me.

2. I was in a weak position in which I could, I imagined, be blamed for something I did not do and was not my fault
3. I needed to protect myself somehow and make it clear that I said no when asked to do certain things, and I needed something more than my word against a wealthy white guy's word to prove it.

This was pre-smartphone, but owning to some writing I did for a now-defunct sports website, I owned a small digital recorder. And on a couple of occasions – maybe three total – I used it to record conversations wherein I was extremely uncomfortable with some of the things being discussed and in which I was being involved against my will.

I didn't ask to be there, in other words, and I didn't want to have anything to do with it. But short of quitting and walking out the door, I didn't see how to avoid it.

Nothing that involved me ended up coming of this, at least as far as I was affected. I left the job as soon as I could, and what legal consequences followed had nothing to do with me. I was relieved, obviously, and had not enjoyed what happened one bit. At the same time, however, I believed I had done the right thing to protect my own interests.

Obviously there is an angle with White House employees that wasn't a factor for me – the potential to sell-tell, or financially profit from taking recorded conversations to a tabloid or writing a book. Simply put, nobody cared about me or the job and nobody would have any interest in hearing the conversations.

In short, there are a small number of reasons someone might record a conversation:

1. Profit
2. Blackmail
3. Ass Covering in an environment where illegal things are happening

Apparently everybody is secretly recording everybody else in the circle of people around Trump, which is probably the least surprising thing we could learn. From the outside we can't assign one of these motives. All I can tell you is that from my perspective, profit or "blackmail" never even entered the picture. The dominant, and in fact only, consideration was that I recognized an illegal activity when I saw it and resolved that 1) I was not going to participate in any way and 2) I was not going to be the one punished for it, if it came to that.

My guess – and it is solely a guess, of course – is that the covering of one's own ass preoccupies the thoughts of everyone near or inside this White House. The president is a con man and a grifter, and no doubt he attracts some fellow grifters whose interests in recording conversations or collecting "evidence" may be to profit from it later. But I think a very basic human tendency in a workplace where employment is at-will and one is at the mercy of more powerful people is to recognize when something fishy is going on and ensure that if someone ends up going to jail or being called to account in the future that person is someone else.

I need to preface this, as I have developed the power to foresee comments, by emphasizing that I have enjoyed every single minute of this long vacation I have been fortunate enough in circumstances to take. Would do again in a heartbeat and would not trade it for anything. Also, this is not a post about beverage ice, which no longer requires discussion because I am so unbelievably correct on that point.

It's hot here, guys. Balls hot.

Every day of this trip I've sweat through all of my clothes and peeled them off at the end of the day wondering if I jumped in a lake and just don't remember doing so. Here I was expecting that famous Adriatic / Mediterranean climate, and instead it's eerily similar to "pit stains by noon" season in Chicago. So I am not surprised to see a headline like "Europe’s summer was so hot that tropical flamingos laid eggs for the first time in 15 years." There have been record highs everywhere. It was 95 in Prague. 97 in Vienna. And reader, I shit you not, my car thermometer (for what that's worth) registered 37 Celsius in Slovenia of all places, which is over 100 F. That isn't "hot for Europe;" that's just hot.

The highs matter here because this part of the world is, very reasonably and logically, not equipped to handle "Balls Hot." It's never this hot here, so why should they bother air conditioning everything or organize any of their routine around it being literally too hot to move for part of the day. It would be like building a home with a double-thick door up on stilts on the off-chance that it is ever -50 F in Chicago. It just wouldn't make sense.

No, things are set up quite logically for an area where summer means "it might hit the low 80s, but don't worry because if it does we can just sit in the shade until it passes." I can promise you that the sipping a barely-cold beverage in the shade when it's 95 is, well, it's still pretty fucking hot. That's the difference between peaking at 85 and peaking nearer to 100.

And it raises the troubling question of what precisely the effects will be if 95 degree summers become the new normal in places that have not previously experienced it. It's not automatic that it will become normal, of course. This year could be anomalous, and it's not unprecedented (note the "in 15 years" in the WaPo headline). But what happens when a region prepared to handle Hot is suddenly upgraded to Hot-Hot?

The thing is, this kind of heat kills people. Talk about the Mediterranean breeze all you want, but elderly people in un-air conditioned apartments are not all gonna make it if they had to experience 2-3 months of the mid-90s. I have lived in one place where summer means that it's 98 every single day from Memorial Day to late September (Athens, GA) and dealing with it requires building a lifestyle around it.
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Everything is air conditioned to "Ice Station Zebra" levels because you couldn't get anything done while the sun is up otherwise.
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And of course it helps a ton that Americans do most of their place-to-place travel in an air conditioned car. So although it is definitely a hot, sweaty experience, it's survivable.
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People in Texas and Arizona are getting used to 110 being a long-term normal high and they survive the same way.

If Europe's continental climate turns into the American Midwest – the brutal extremes of summer heat and winter cold – patterns of energy consumption are likely to change in ways that will require beefing up infrastructure.
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Many homes and apartments here are far too old for structural changes to deal with hotter weather – I get the sense that a place like Budapest or Prague has the buildings it has, and isn't about to tear them down and build new ones.

But nothing changing isn't going to be an option. Believe me, the fat, pampered American and German tourists were not the only ones reeling from the heat. The locals looked equally stunned, and neither group seemed to find "Sit for a second and have a warm Coke" satisfactory as a solution. America has exported a lot of things to Europe, and a lot of it has been questionably useful (Burger King, Lil' Pump, etc). I hope we don't add our sometimes insane climate to the list.

As a Chicago resident I largely ignore the salacious crime reporting about the city, which routinely and blatantly ignores 1) that crime is actually down by nearly any measure and 2) that other American cities far outpace it in crime rates and focusing on Chicago is part of a political agenda.

That said, I'm not blind to the fact that the city obviously has problems. Those problems start with the CPD, which has so completely lost the trust of most residents who aren't white and 65 that cooperation between victims, neighbors, and police is nonexistent. Successive mayors' offices have been an even more significant problem, redlining areas of the city that are declared not worth saving and pouring resources into "good" areas.

My Avondale neighborhood is *not* some ultra-gentrified island of privilege.
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There are no Fancy Restaurants and we just got our first Hip Person Bar a couple months ago. I pay less than $1000 / month for a 2-br apartment, compared to the $1500-2000 that would cost in Wicker Park, Logan, or Lakeview. I am one of maybe five non-immigrants on my block, the vast majority being Polish or Mexican families who park their work trucks out front at night.

The neighborhood has not had a murder in four years. In a city of millions with something of a crime problem, that's amazing. It's not because I rub shoulders with real estate titans, Bears players, John Cusack, and Chance the Rapper. It's because the neighborhood is part of the city map that has not been written off by the city and county governments.
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The schools are open. The street lights work. The streets get plowed in the winter. Public Transit service is ample and works. OK, the streets themselves still look like they were recently bombed by the luftwaffe but you get the point.

Compare that to Garfield Park or West Lawn and it's not real hard to see the difference.

This weekend, a staggering 66 people were shot in 48 hours, including one three-hour span with 30 shootings. That is an average of one every five minutes. Meanwhile, when I'm home I and my neighbors walk the streets at all hours.

People in the city understand that "the person who pulls the trigger" is ultimately to blame. But they also understand that the root cause of the chain of events leading to that is the underlying economics of race and class in the city. Close the schools, abandon the neighborhoods, refuse to hire "those people," and then act real surprised when gang activity becomes the primary form of entrepreneurship in blighted areas. Maybe don't resign yourself to two large swaths of the city being "blighted areas" and you might see less appalling crime statistics. Just a thought.