John Kass: Rahm can’t spin his way out of the Chicago street gang wars

Englewood in 2016

John Kass of the Chicago Tribune is right on the money in his Tuesday column. And the Democrats in Chicago have a dirty street gang secret that goes back more than a century. Just as Daniel Day-Lewis' "Bill the Butcher" had his feet in politics as well as the criminal world in Gangs of New York, so do Chicago's street gangs.

Rahm, Kass argues, won't be able to spin his way out of Chiraq bloodshed.

From Kass' column:

City Hall calls it “gun violence,” and media cooperates by calling it that, too. But calling it “gun violence” allows Chicago’s political class off the hook.

There are many guns in the suburbs. But the suburbs are not killing grounds. What’s going on in Chicago are street gang wars.

And Cook County’s one-party political class seems incapable of addressing it; from the prosecutors who don’t prosecute, to judges, to the police brass trying to keep their jobs, to Chicago aldermen.

Some aldermen are terrified of the street gangs, which have been intertwined with Chicago politics since the first thugs got out the vote on the first Election Day.