Chicago the new target for conservative ire?

Move over, San Francisco, there’s a new town for conservatives to hate: Chicago. President Obama’s ultimately unsuccessful attempt to get the 2016 Olympics for his hometown has caused an explosion of anti-Chicago commentary from U.S. conservatives, while John Boehner, the leader of the Republicans in Congress, played to his base by saying that Obama seemed to be forgetting that “he’s the President of the United States, not the mayor of Chicago.” Conservatives still find time to attack Hollywood for defending Roman Polanski, or New York for just being New York, but their heart isn’t in it these days. The new enemy is Chicago, which, as Fox News’s Sean Hannity put it, may not be “a city where we want the Olympics taking place.”

These pundits weren’t just arguing that, as Michelle Malkin said on Fox News, Obama’s quest for the Olympics was “all about paying back” his Chicago “cronies.” They argued that the city itself is the violent epitome of liberalism gone wrong. A typical headline on Matt Drudge’s popular conservative website read “CHICAGOLAND: Another boy critically beaten: ‘Blood all over street.’ ” Malkin posted a video of a gang war among mostly African-American teenagers in Chicago, and warned that “Community organizing has not stopped Chicago’s teen violence epidemic. The Olympics will not solve this long-festering problem, either.” The message is that Democratic liberal politics have turned Chicago into hell on earth. Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Fred Siegel summed up the current view of Chicago when he described it as a “mix of black-nationalist, gentry-liberal, machine- and mob-connected politics.”

When conservatives aren’t portraying Chicago as the crime capital of America (its murder rate has been rising in recent years), they’re portraying it as the birthplace of Obama’s incipient fascism, often using a line from the movie The Untouchables, “the Chicago way,” to describe Obama’s methods. Hannity recently said that Obama is bringing “Chicago thug-style politics” to Washington. It’s gotten to the point where a lot of opposition to Obama is phrased in anti-Chicago terms; Republican congressman Darrell Issa criticized Obama’s chief of staff Rahm Emanuel by accusing him of “resorting to the playbook of the Chicago political machine.”