Black politicians have to learn how to wink and nod like white ones. They are entirely too obvious in their corruption, as in freely discussing the jobs they expect to get as payoff for supporting Todd Stroger for county board president.

“If percentages are based on jobs, then I’m doing damn good,” Ald. Howard Brookins (21st) was overheard telling Ald. William Beavers (7th) [at a victory party], referring to the vote he got out for Stroger and the county jobs he expects in return.

“I expect him to reach out to a good guy like me for recommendations for qualified candidates in top jobs he has control over,” Ald. Isaac Carothers (29th) said, complaining about the lack of West Siders among 26,000 county employees.

Even with FBI nosing around, such supporters as Brookins and others are expecting rewards, not to mention Stroger’s “godfather,” Beavers, who won his own county board seat and will be Stroger’s “muscle,” per S-T.

Race pride is all well and good, but jobs and the power that comes from controlling them are what keeps machines oiled.

Meanwhile, S-T sins against the light with this editorial comment, with which they are stuck in view of their ridiculous campaign endorsement:

By electing Todd Stroger president of the Cook County Board, voters handed him and the Democratic Party the responsibility for cleaning up the mess that is county government. The question looms about whether he is sincere about doing that, or whether he filled his campaign with empty promises of reform merely to defeat Republican Tony Peraica.

Perish the thought.

Sun-Times’s Mark Brown and Mary Mitchell see mainly race in the county board presidency race.

The political divide between Chicago residents and Cook County suburbanites — and between blacks and whites — was on stark display

said the one.

[T]he outcry over the way Todd Stroger ended up on the ballot resulted in a [black] backlash and cranked up loyal Democratic ward bosses,

said the other, even if nobody knows better than blacks “how poorly county government is working.”

Mitchell is saying blacks also know better than anyone else how to cut off their noses to spite their faces.

[T]hese are the people who can tell you in great detail what improvements are needed at Cook County Jail because a disproportionate number of African Americans have relatives locked up there.

A lot of African Americans can also point out the failures at John H. Stroger and Provident Hospitals because many black families have depended on these hospitals for medical care over the years.

And, unfortunately, the faces of the youth detained at the Juvenile Detention Center are also overwhelmingly African American.

It didn’t matter, says Mitchell, because inheritance works for others, mostly white, and they bowed to “the tit-for-tat factor.” That’s dumb, but Mitchell doesn’t say so, letting it go at presumably informed analysis.

The most she allows herself, and we should appreciate her restraint, is to hope Todd Stroger “comes into his own” as board president.

As for Brown, it’s not new that blacks and whites vote differently, “but there had been signs in recent years that [a city/suburban, black/white split] was starting to fade as Democrats increased their numbers in the suburban areas.”

Not this time, when corruption was the dividing issue. It bothers him to see the vote “break down along racial lines” for any reason, however. Why? Because “no matter who wins, [this election] has disrupted the alliance that I think has produced the best results for Chicago and Cook County residents, that being the collaboration of progressive white Democrats and African Americans, often in conjunction with independents and Republicans.”

The best results? Not for residents and users of county jail, hospitals, and juvenile detention center, per Mitchell. He worries that this racial divide will interfere with defeating Richard Daley for mayor. But rather than enabling Daley, it demonstrates Daley power.

In any case, he entertains nothing like Mitchell’s fond hope for young Stroger, expressing his own fervent hope that “nobody actually expects [him] to bring real reform to county government.” In this he also parts company with his own paper’s deeply mysterious editorial board.

Euros and Democrats blame us for our bad image abroad, but so does at least one prince of the church. That’s Cardinal Francis George of Chicago, who told a seminary audience in Chicago 10/29:

“The world distrusts us not because we are rich and free. Many of us are not rich, and some of us aren’t especially free. They distrust us because we are deaf and blind, because too often we don’t understand and make no effort to understand.”

“We have this cultural proclivity that says, ‘We know what is best and if we truly want to do something, whether in church or in society, no one has the right to tell us no.’ That cultural proclivity, which defines us in many ways, has to be surrendered, or we will never be part of God’s kingdom.”

He has talked this way before. In September, 2002, at a downtown club luncheon sponsored by Lumen Christi Institute, a U. of Chicago campus organization, and the Catholic Lawyers Guild, he fingered the U.S. government as the enemy. (Scroll down to “CARDINAL GEORGE OF CHICAGO ON BEING CATHOLIC IN AMERICA”)

Church leaders could one day be prosecuted for refusing to ordain women and bless homosexual unions, he told this audience, adding that he hoped they would be with him when he went to jail. The going-to-jail scenario is something he could not have imagined two years earlier, he said. He did not say what changed his mind, except to identify it with a pattern of expanding domestic “police power.”

Overseas, in his 12 years (1974–86) as a Rome-based world traveller for his religious congregation, the Oblates of Mary Immaculate — something he mentioned also in the recent sermon — he felt welcome as a Catholic, except in communist countries, but suspect as an American. In the U.S. he found the opposite was true, he added, not explicitly excluding Chicago, where being Catholic is definitely not a disability. Indeed, he finds it “hard sometime to be both Catholic and American,” he said, enunciating quite an extreme position.

Americans’ “cultural blindness” to the resentment others feel will destroy us “as a nation,” he said in 2002. Other nations resent us because we “oppress them,” he said, or they think we do after “50 years of intense communist propaganda. Be that as it may, “we can’t impose our way of life” on others, he said, without specifying how we do that, and “we live in a fool’s paradise if we don’t realize” that.

In his recent comment, he said, “There aren’t many places where I can say that, there aren’t many places where I would want that to be said for me, and I wouldn’t want to be quoted outside of this context.” But the alert and energetic religion writer for the Sun-Times, Cathleen Falsani, was in the congregation taping him, and two days later he was front-page stuff in a city where the front page has special meaning. How naive can a prelate be to speak to a church full of people as if it were just us chickens?

He had apparently felt that way at the Union League Club in 2002, where in the middle of the chickens was a fox in the person of an old, old religion reporter who took notes, for gosh sakes.

And he did so also in remarks a few months ago at a gathering of philosophers at U. of Chicago, where he offered “a strange, Manichean interpretation of twentieth-century history” as understood by a writer in left-leaning Commonweal Magazine. The writer objected to George’s “conflating spiritual and political power in a way that will prove unhealthy both for the church and for the world.” George had said secularization of Europe had started with Woodrow Wilson’s attempting to make the world safe for democracy and in the process excluding Pope Benedict XV from the peace talks.

It’s an interesting enough point, but more interesting is why George goes off on tangents, conflating, to seize on a handy word, his role as religious leader with one as geopolitical commentator.

Finally, there was George’s bizarre order issued in June 2002 from an Oak Park pulpit that cameras should be removed and pencils should be put down by reporters, whom he likened to communist spies.

Two months later a Chicago priest, lashing out in a sermon against critics and news reports of his leadership of a home for troubled youth, quoted George: “This is the time, this is the season, for picking on Catholics,” telling the priest, “John, they’re coming after you.”

Why stop at him? I think the cardinal would like us all to be very careful.

* On reading Sun-Times about Mike Ditka Wine:

Soon TBA: Jim Bowman Wine. Piquant and zesty, sure to rouse the laziest taste bud, and good for you too. Chockful of vineyard and crushing-floor vitamins. Grapes beaten down by bare-footed Venetians stomping to tune of “Figaro.” Soon, at your nearest drug store or cheap-wine location.

* On reading Chi Fed of Labor endorsement ad (from people who HATE Wal-Mart) filling page 7, not linkable:

Union candidates don’t wear glasses: Baby Todd S., pictured, is shown unusually lens-free. Only two Republicans make an appearance, of 37, all county candidates. Only Stroger has pic, being flagship union candidate, held most important by biggies with ad purse strings. The two Republicans are Elmwood Park president Peter Silvestri for county board, and Jill C. Marisie running uncontested (so why endorsement?) for judge. The latter is the late mobster Jackie (the Lackey) Cerone’s granddaughter, for what that’s worth. Her father, Jack P. Cerone,

earned a reputation as a labor lawyer, fighting for union workers in numerous contract fights with Chicago city officials — from the 1980s when he fought for Laborer garbage collectors and seasonal street cleaners to the late 1990s when he salvaged victory for the Decorators Union in a trade show row.

Thus the Pittsburgh Tribune Review, in a 10/22 story about his taking over a Pittsburgh brewery. He’s a solid union man, to be sure.

* On reading about ex-Socialist now Green Party goober-natorial candidate Whitney excoriated and warned against by Republican opponent Judy Barr T.:

He says he wouldn’t shoot self in foot by volunteering his Socialist past but wouldn’t deny it either. Has plausible defense: As young man with care for “working man,” he fell for socialism, later rejected it. Which is a recommendation, if anything. His are “mainstream” ideas, he protests.

But what’s not socialism-inspired about them?

1. Mandated wages — as gross an interference in property ownership as the supposed mainstream will reveal

2. Higher income tax — the more you earn, the more you pay

3. Universal tax-paid health care — same-old same-old for all and consequent health care dilution.

Each is government-induced wealth distribution that undercuts overall prosperity.

* On reading about “Bishop” Arthur Brazier (consecrated by what other bishop, reporting to what presiding bishop or pope or even district conference?), distinguished pastor of black mega-congregation Apostolic Church of God on S. Side, telling members to ignore reports of corruption and vote for Blago anyway:

How would you Episcopals or Catholics or Methodists (or members of Congregation B’nai whatever) like that? Not very much, I ween.