George Gascon – Corruption by Any Other Name

We’ve all heard of tales of corrupt district attorneys.

Leander Perez ruled Plaquemines Parish (a parish is what they call a county in Louisiana) with an iron fist and even by Louisiana standards his level of corruption was eye watering.

The fiercely segregationist Democrat raked in enough cash from the other politicians he owned to be able to buy even more politicians.  His vote fixing was blatant, he stole somewhere in the neighborhood of $100 million dollars – between 1940 and 1965 or thereabouts, so about $1 billion dollars today –  in oil lease royalties, and he stayed in office for nearly 40 years before switching over to leading the parish commission and putting his son in as DA.

Every aspect of life in the parish – it surrounds the mouth of the Mississippi River and goes north toward New Orleans – was controlled by Perez; he was the kind of pol who would fix a ticket for you and then stop by eight years later and dump toxic waste on your property and you wouldn’t say boo.

And the bayous and marshlands trailing to and from the Mississippi had more than alligators floating in them.  

He was so bad he was actually ex-communicated by the Archbishop of New Orleans; he was the archetypal power sleaze elected official that movies are made about.

He even smoked cigars.

Click here for his photo – it has to be viewed on the Smithsonian’s website.

As to fictional DAs, there is Ellis Loew from the fantastic film noir L.A. Confidential. While exuding a certain amount of panache Perez never did and actually getting his comeuppance – you may remember his character being dangled out a window by Russell Crowe – Loew is the picture of the smooth dismissive big city dirty politician who thinks he is untouchable.

A little more recently – and much more real – is Democrat Mike Nifong of Durham County, North Carolina.  Nifong slandered a group of Duke University lacrosse players and charged them with rape for political reasons.  He had been appointed DA in 2005 and faced a tough election in November, 2006. 

It was in March of that year he brought the charges against the students and he squeaked through the November vote only about a month before it was revealed he knew of and purposefully hid DNA evidence that would have cleared the students.

Nifong was shortly thereafter removed from office, disbarred, jailed for a time, lost $180 million dollars’ worth of student lawsuits, and went bankrupt.

So he, too, got his comeuppance.

Will George Gascon?

Granted, there have been no reports of bodies found in the LaBrea tar pits or even of personal enrichment.  But – like other dirty DAs – he serves only to specifically further himself and the interests of a set gang of groups and people as opposed to serving the interests of the community at large.

His gang, his cronies, his enforcers are not bag men and sleazy cops and underworld overlords (kinda,) but progressive activists wedded to a farcical and dangerous ideology and – like Loew, Nifong, and Perez – he will stop at nothing to advance those interests, that ideology.

The list of his gang members is a litany of organizations that have played and are actively playing leading roles in the decline of the city and the state in general.

Big labor, the Democratic Socialists of America, the decarceration mob, the homeless-industrial complex, community “nonprofits” that are actually get out the vote operations, and certain “burn it all down” moneyed interests that infest the west side and act that way out of a feeling of guilt about being rich (these are typically not the people who made the money, just the people who use the money other people made for them.)

Gascon has purposefully helped create an environment in which his compatriots can thrive – more homeless means more money for the complex, more social anxiety about saying “the wrong thing” leads to more self-censorship, more misplaced guilt means more donations, more problems mean the need for more people to solve them, and more hesitant cops means more intentional chaos on the streets.

Until a society has had enough and pulls up people like Gascon and Perez by the roots, that chaotic gray area created is a very convenient place from which to pull strings. While Perez stayed in power for 40 years by being personally ruthlessly detailed, Gascon merely creates the atmosphere in which others can take care of the ruthless details.

For most in power, the goal is permanence.  For those involved in a fetid corruption of society like Loew and Gascon and Perez, permanance is not just a goal but an absolute necessity and anything can be justified in that pursuit.  For when the power finally ends, there is hell to pay and the repucussions go far behind merely not being in office anymore.

But the cabal goes beyond Gascon and may be beginning to see him as expendable, hence “George-lite” DA candidate Jeff Chemerinsky who, if elected, will keep the odious social justice campaign alive but occasionally convict a criminal and treat his employees better.

Gascon is personally less important than the hive and if he has to go, so be it.  His two “allied” county supervisors who are up for election next year – Holly Mitchell and Janice Hahn – have a choice:  endorse him or blame him.  One expects it will be discovered by Hahn and Mitchell that Gascon – if his re-election is looking as bleak as it is now, is the reason for everything wrong with Los Angeles County, from crime to homelessness to the bus being late to that crack in the sidewalk you almost tripped over.

In other words, while he is in fact to blame to much of the recent disaster he will be blamed for everything else, too (the other supervisor up, Kathryn Barger, may follow suit but she won’t go as far and she has been properly opposing Gascon and his policies from day one so, unlike, Mitchell and Hahn, she will not be a hypocrite when she criticizes him) to allow the wokeblob to stay in power.

He can be sacrificed, if need be.

Fitting, as Gascon has sacrificed the safety of the people of Los Angeles County on the altar of his – and his mob’s –  twisted ideology.  He has done so as dismissively as Loew dismissed Russel Crowe’s character:  

“So what if some homo actor is dead?  Boys, girls, ten of them get off the bus every day.”

Re-writes of that line for Gascon could run along these line:  

“So what if some rich guy is inconvenienced by getting his watch ripped off his wrist?  He can just get another one.”

“So what if some guy goes free without bail and rapes someone the next day?  Keeping people out of jail is more important than some unfortunate incident.”

“So what if they’re not really a non-profit?  They are part of the movement.”

“So what if the so-called ‘regular’ people in the community suffer?  They’ve been privileged too long.”

“So what if stores get robbed?  They’ve got insurance.”

“So what if hundreds of homeless people die every year?  They make my friends money.”

Anything or anyone can be sacrificed for the ideology, for the gang, for the greater good, or, in this case, the greater evil.

Perez’s ideology was loathsome segregationism, Nifong’s was woke electioneering, Loew’s the worship of the status quo, and Gascon’s ideology is loathsome de-civilization.  The constructs may be different, but all are the same in that they do not involve serving the entire community, do not involve being independent, do not involve putting politics aside, and do not allow for even the consideration of what is called justice.

All of which can be said about George Gascon.