Comedians have been having a ball for the past two weeks making light of Toronto’s crack-smoking mayor, Rob Ford, comparing him to former Washington, D.C. Mayor Marion Barry and describing him as a crack-puffing, Chris Farley look-a-like. Funny stuff.
However, on the East Side of the Mississippi, a not-so-funny spectacle took place, recently, as disgraced former St. Clair County judge Michael Cook pleaded guilty to heroin possession and being a drug user in possession of a firearm – make that 45 firearms, to be exact, including 16 rifles, 17 shotguns and 12 handguns, which all must be forfeited, according to his plea deal.
And almost bumping into Cook, at the same federal courthouse in East St. Louis, was Washington Park Trustee Darron Suggs, who also pleaded guilty to a scheme to defraud the federal government of Medicaid funds by claiming hours of undelivered personal assistant services.
I can’t speak for Toronto, Canada, but these are precisely the reasons voters on the IL side of river (and elsewhere) are so skeptical, pessimistic and apathetic when it comes to participating in the electoral process.
Here we have an ex-judge who epitomized hypocrisy and poor judgment as a drug-addicted jurist who presided over and judged others and an untrustworthy trustee who sucked the blood of the poor through fraudulent activities.
It doesn’t get much lower than that, folks.
Michael Cook just re-emerged from an exclusive drug rehab facility in Minnesota just in time to make his plea arrangement and will probably (after serving about 18 months) resurface in some cushy job as the result of the considerable influence his rich father, Belleville attorney Bruce Cook.
Darron Suggs, after serving as much as 10 years in prison, will exit prison without the pedigree of Michael Cook and will probably be done politically, as well he should be.
What seems to be a constant, unfortunately, is that whether it’s Belleville, Washington Park, Alorton or East St. Louis, the political elite and their sycophants never seem to learn the lesson that crime doesn’t pay.
And why should they? As long as the political godfathers and the well-connected continue to hook up these political vultures and hypocrites with appointments, jobs and golden parachutes no sooner than they remove their prison garb, there is no incentive for them to reform.
I reflect on the number of mayors, police chiefs, crooked cops, appointed officials and other political operatives whose guilt I’ve written about over the last two decades, and I become nauseated at the gall, the temerity and just sheer ignorance of these characters, as well as the amnesia of the voters who allow it to happen.
Do I have a solution? Of course I do, the same solution that I have preached, written and ranted about over these same number of years: accountability.
But if the voters, the taxpayers and the casual observers of politics continue treating political corruption and malfeasance as if it were some spectator sport, then we will continue to be appalled every time we watch the news, read the newspapers or simply wonder why our government remains perpetually broken.
Email: jtingram_1960@yahoo.com; Twitter@JamesTIngram.
