Jesse Jackson, Jr., affectionately, or otherwise, known as
“Triple J” in these parts, and his co-schemer and wife Sandi Jackson, were
sentenced yesterday for their crimes involving misuse of campaign funds and
failure to mention to the IRS their use of
such funds for such vital campaign necessities as moose heads, furs, Eddie Van
Halen guitars, Michael Jackson memorabilia, and a $43,000 watch. Yours truly contends that anyone who spends
$43 grand on a watch deserves to go to jail on general principle, but I
digress.
As regular readers know, I have been deeply intrigued by
this story for a long time. (See, inter alia
A SORT OF DEFENSE OFSANDI JACKSON, 2/21/13
and posts in a former blog to which they will direct
you.) So the sentencing of these two
felonious finaglers merits some comment from yours truly.
First, the sentences seemed a little light: a year for Sandi Jackson and two and a half
years for Triple J, both far under the maxima under federal guidelines. If the Chicago
Sun-Times Natasha Korecki and Lynn
Sweet, neither of whom could be considered hostile to the Jacksons ,
are to be believed, at least Triple J agrees that he got off easy. According to Ms. Sweet and Ms. Korecki in
today’s (8/15/13 , page 4) Sun-Times…
Jackson, Jr., 48, who
had been blowing his nose and sobbing during his remarks to the judge, appeared
to break into a half-grin as the news of the sentence settled in.
And it got better for the Jackson . Rather than both going immediately to jail
(and why has it taken this long?), they will go in sequence, with Jesse going
first and Sandi going after him. And
they got to decide the order of their incarcerations. Who else gets such treatment?
Still, yours truly is kind of surprised that Sandi Jackson
got any jail time at all. It’s not that
I don’t think she deserved it. But so
much of the Chicago media and
political establishments had bought into the “poor, poor put-upon Sandi
Jackson” line of baloney, along with the “these kids need their parents” pile
of horse dump that I feared, and suspected, that Judge Amy Berman Jackson (no
relation) had drunken the kool-aid.
Fortunately, she didn’t.
Second, Triple J’s still vague emotional/mental malady was
taken for the line of cattle detritus that it appeared to be. Prosecutor Matt Graves, referring to Mr.
Jackson’s purported illness, stated
“It’s quite clear
there’s no ‘there’ there.”
Some might reply that, of course, Mr. Graves would say that;
after all, he was the prosecutor in the case.
But Judge Jackson also gave the mental health angle no credence,
pointing out that there was nothing sudden about Mr. and Mrs. Jackson’s, er,
lapses of judgment, as would be the case if their thievery sprung from Mr.
Jackson’s mental condition. This was,
the Judge pointed out, a continuing pattern of pilferage, and stated that there
was
“…only once
conclusion, and that is that you (Triple J) knew better.”
Yours truly is no mental health professional, but neither
are the vast majority of people commenting on Triple J’s medical maladies. Further, none of the mental health
professionals the Jacksons were
able to produce were all that convincing.
Maybe those of us who are, to put it mildly, suspicious of Mr. Jackson’s
claims of the psychiatric equivalent of “the devil made me do it” are
wrong. Maybe Mr. Jackson really is
sick. If that really is the case, one
suspects that whatever it is that Mr. Jackson has will clear up quickly…very
quickly. In fact, one suspects that his
afflictions vanished as soon as his sentence was pronounced. But they may make a temporary comeback if
(when, probably) Mr. and Mrs. Jackson prepare their appeal.
Third, we have been hearing much about “wasted talent” and
“a promising career” of “a young man who had the ability to go all the way”
being “thrown away,” and other such bullroar from those die-hard liberals in
the local and national media who “just wanna believe,” and can’t be convinced
otherwise.
Yours truly never bought into this hype. Triple J was at best a passable
Congressperson, at worst a lazy, entitled son of privilege who was clearly in
over his head. Until recently, he had a
very good Congressional attendance record, but one wonders what he did other
than attend. In his 17 years in
Congress, he never managed to win a committee chairmanship, despite the
sycophancy most of his fellow Congressman showed him due to his last name and
the perception that it carries a lot of weight with black voters. He did manage to win a seat on the
Appropriations Committee, but his record of achievement in that all-important
Committee, like his overall record in Congress, was slight, at best. He made a lot of noise about what came to be
seen as his pet project, a third Chicago airport in distant Peotone, but there
is still no airport growing from the cornfields in that bucolic burg. He also proposed that each school child in America
be given an i-Pad, courtesy of you, the taxpayer. Hmm…perhaps we should be grateful that JJJ
was unable to get anything done. Even
his much lauded oratory was only so much fulmination, much art and little
substance, jargon and catch-lines amounting to nothing but pap and pabulum for
the already converted.
When Mr. Jackson first came to Congress in 1995, all we
heard about was what a terrific, wonderful, super hero of a young man he was,
truly outstanding, upstanding, and all around beatific in every conceivable
way. It seemed to yours truly that such
talk was just another orgiastic manifestation of the “just gotta believe”
phenomenon among starry-eyed liberals with not even a passing familiarity with
life on the ground in Mr. Jackson’s 2nd Congressional District.
We had heard nearly the same kinds of hosannas about Mel
Reynolds, Mr. Jackson’s predecessor as Congressman in the 2nd
District, when Mr. Reynolds defeated Gus Savage in 1992 to assume the
seat. Mr. Reynolds was described in
nearly the same beatific tones as Mr. Jackson.
Mr. Reynolds was a Rhodes Scholar and he was….,well, given Mr. Reynolds’
thin resume and an inability to talk in anything but empty platitudes or
understand the core of any issue, no one could come up with anything other than
his Rhodes Scholarship. In fact, Mr.
Reynolds’ only qualification for Congress, let alone the sainthood his true
believers seemed to be recommending him for, was that he was not his
race-baiting, anti-Semitic predecessor Gus Savage.
Mr. Reynolds went on to develop, or maybe just further
indulge from a position of power, proclivities toward teenage girls, especially
Catholic school girls (“I think I just won the lottery,” Mr. Reynolds response
when he was told by what turned out to be an informant that the informant could
set him up with a girl who attended a Catholic high school, is perhaps Mr.
Reynolds’ most famous utterance, but I digress.) and lie to law enforcement
about it. Consequently, he was provided
lodging in a federal facility and was
replaced by the equally underqualified Mr. Jackson. The same people who just three years before were
telling us how terrific Mr. Reynolds was began telling us that we had been
visited by an even more celestial personage in Mr. Jackson. I never believed it because there was never
any basis for it other than the “just gotta believe” attitude that affects
those whose minds are so open their brains fall out. But Mr. Jackson’s obsequiants may have had a
point; Mr. Jackson had at least one more qualification than Mr. Reynolds: not only was Mr. Jackson not Gus Savage; he
also was not Mel Reynolds. As H.L.
Mencken, one of the truly great figures in American history said,
“An idealist is one
who, on noticing that a rose smells better than a cabbage, concludes that it
will make a better soup.”
Fourth, there is much talk already about a Triple J
comeback. Don’t discount the
possibility. Young Mr. Jackson is not
yet fifty and he’ll be out in about a year and a half. He managed to win re-election by a landslide
in 2012 despite his absence from both Congress and the campaign trail in the
wake of suspicions regarding his dalliances with former Governor Rod
Blagojevich about Barack Obama’s old senate seat and, of course, the onset of his
mysterious maladies.
Further, as H.L. Mencken also said in a widely misquoted
observation…
“No one in this world,
so far as I know—and I have researched the records for years, and employed
agents to help me—has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of
the great masses of the plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office
thereby.”
So we have not yet heard the last from Jesse Jackson, Jr.
and his accomplice, Sandi Jackson. As
Mr. Mencken also said, perhaps gazing at the 2nd District from far
off Baltimore
“Democracy is the
theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good
and hard.”
And, perhaps having a vision of the not yet born Jesse and
Sandi Jackson, Mr. Mencken also observed
“Government is a broker
in pillage, and every election is sort of an advance auction sale of stolen
goods.”
Mr. and Mrs. Jackson are living, breathing, walking, talking
manifestations of the wisdom of Mr. Mencken.
See my two books, The Chairman, A Novel of
Big City Politics and The Chairman’s Challenge,
A Continuing Novel of Big City Politics, for further illumination on
how things work in Chicago and Illinois politics.
