In my novel King of the Jungle, which was serialized here at The American Spectator and is now available in Kindle, paperback, and hardcover format at Amazon, I noted a criminal incident with political implications that came out of Chicago. It turns out I was a little too imaginative in predicting the next thing.

In the book, the incident stirring political passions was a drunk-driving illegal Honduran running over a black kid on the South Side, with the political implications emerging as disastrous for the Joe Deadhorse (read: Obama/Biden) regime in its efforts to gin up Democrat turnout in the Windy City. (READ MORE from Scott McKay: Donald Trump Backs Mike Johnson. Here’s Why the Rest of the GOP Must Follow Suit.)

It’s early, but so far it seems that was way too ambitious on my part. It appears the criminal incident out of Chicago the country is supposed to be talking about is more of the same old, same old Fake News crap the regime has dined on and served to America for the past 15 years.

It’s not an illegal immigrant with too much cerveza in him. It’s a garden-variety gangbanger with not enough brains in him. His name was Dexter Reed.

Just a Traffic Stop Gone Horribly Wrong?

What happened here? It’s likely the cops were looking for Reed for some reason. He wasn’t a model citizen — Reed was scheduled to make a court appearance this month after accepting a pretrial diversion for three charges arising from his brilliant decision to bring a .357 Magnum to a music festival at the United Center last year (Reed’s behavior was enough to motivate someone to call 911 and report him to authorities). Beyond that, there isn’t a lot on him.

But the plainclothes Chicago PD tactical unit which pulled him over has written up drivers for traffic violations fairly regularly and the word on Reed was that he didn’t have his seatbelt on. So perhaps this was a routine stop gone horribly wrong. (READ MORE: Glenn Youngkin Deals Blow to Radical, Awful Constituency)

It turns out that Reed had obtained his gun — which he fired first at the cops, hitting one of them in the forearm before he was ended by a hail of police bullets for his trouble — illegally.

Now, one might argue that neither seatbelt violations nor illegal guns should be a thing. This column will contest neither stance. But in Chicago the voters — and particularly voters who dominate in precincts like the one in which Reed was killed by the Chicago Police — like a whole lot of government. That means a whole lot of power to stop you and ruin your day over something like not wearing your seatbelt or carrying a gun with insufficient governmental permission. The ACLU sued CPD last summer over its stop-and-frisk policies which, according to the ACLU, weren’t so productive in finding guns and/or drugs on the friskees.

It might have been somewhat icky that the police pulled him over. But Dexter Reed is dead because he shot a cop and there were four of them on the scene when he did it.

Butch and Sundance did the outlaw thing a lot better.

The Reed Story Is More of the Same

What’s irritating about this is how tired it is. It’s yet another case in which the blindingly obvious lesson for the living is that it’s a very bad idea to live your life the way Dexter Reed did and it’s an even worse idea to live it the way he lived his last few seconds.

Instead, we’re getting the same old, same old from the people who can’t stop the hustle. The Chicago Sun-Times wrote:

Alexandra Block, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois, said the police department’s approach to a federal consent decree has amounted to “a box-checking exercise” — and the promises of overhauling the culture haven’t been kept.

“The message that officers informally get is, go in guns blazing. … And that’s the way they’re actually operating in the culture that they are seeing every day,” Block said. “So the consent decree process is being completely divorced from the actual on the ground experience of community members who are stopped by these officers.”

Oh, and of course we had to have this headline from the Washington Post:

Police fire 96 shots in 41 seconds, killing Black man during traffic stop.

Isn’t it obscene?

No, you can’t shoot a cop and then cry “Racism!” over how many times the cops shoot back.

But then, of course, you can. Because it’s an election year and these are the same people who burned down parts of practically every big city in America over the fact that police were present and attempting to restrain and arrest George Floyd at the time the three-times-fatal dose of fentanyl in his system was proving fatal.

That happened in the last presidential election year.

The presidential election year before that, you had not just riots but actual terrorist attacks against police over the death of Alton Sterling who was fighting with a cop over control of a gun when he was shot. Or don’t you remember Gavin Long and his ambush of three law enforcement officers in Baton Rouge? Or the other murders of police officers in Dallas?

We get this every four years now.

My mistake was thinking drunken Hondurans would shake the narrative, at least in the pages of a somewhat believable, if highly satirical, election-year novel.

No, no.

We’re reminded by the Dexter Reed case that nothing has changed. It’s still the war on police, and the endless supplies of racial poison poured into a black community which, but for the constant ginned-up outrage over the cops when the danger in the black community is clearly from outlaws within that community.

That’s what you get in an election year.

Hopefully, America is sick of it.