Let’s start this Monday on a happy note. Dack dook is dead!
I don’t know if I’ve got that pronunciation right. But I’ve got the facts right. Dack dook has been turned from a bad terrorist into a good terrorist. He’s assumed goat-barn temperature. His birth certificate has been revoked.
The IDF announced on Sunday that they took out Hezbollah senior commander Ali Mussa Daqduq. Details on the nature of the “strike” that brought the FO in response to Dack Dook’s many years of F(’ing)A were sparse, but I’m guessing that the cause of death was HVBS (“High Velocity Ballistic Suppository”) and that he’ll get a closed-casket funeral.
His resume is about what you’d expect from a jihadi creep – leader of the Golan Terrorist Network, killed lots of Jewish civilians and children, kidnapped and murdered 5 American soldiers, etc.
Good riddance to a bad goblin. (Also, I wish Trump would stop telling the IDF to quit retaliating when terrorists continue to fire missiles into Israel. As long as Dack Dook types are still messing with the shofar, they need to keep getting the horn, IMHO.)
Turning to a less happy story, Obama’s monstrosity of a “Presidential Center” is finally going to open to the public this Friday, so be sure to pick up your over-priced tickets and prepare to start camping out in lines around the block right now.
I’ve written a little about this before — I mentioned that you’ll know it’s open once the ominous, gigantic Eye of Sauron bursts into hellish flame atop it – but the telling details continue to roll out on a daily basis. It has become the physical embodiment of Democrat ideology, manifesting as it does the leftist trinity of ugliness, incompetence and financial corruption.
The ugliness strikes you immediately. This is the architectural equivalent of a typical un-eff-able AWFL you might see at an anti-ICE riot: a lumpy body, holding up a sneering, multiply-pierced face, topped by purple hair, and carrying a clearly obscene and yet obviously misspelled sign.
If this building were a person, you know it would hate its dad, and shout its abortions.
The land it desecrates – er, sits upon – was a National Register-listed park-scape designed by Frederic Law Olmsted, the master who gave us Central Park, the Biltmore Estate, and the Stanford campus, among many others. But what does he know, compared to Mr. “If you like your doctor, you can keep your Doctor?”
The monstrosity that Obama plunked down onto that space evokes the work of another well-known architect, Albert Speer, who designed the glowering flak towers in Berlin after the tide had turned against the Nazis in World War Eleven. (Don’t look now, but that reference has Graham “Maine Kampf” Platner as aroused as if he were flouncing through a field of porta-potties.)
It’s nearly windowless – one suspects because otherwise the poor souls who find themselves trapped inside it might hurl themselves out into the grim embrace of death. And it has words from one of Obama’s speeches silhouetted in gigantic letters that wrap around two sides of the building.
Fittingly, they are very hard to read. But this might be a case of form following function, since Obama’s speeches often made no sense, but when they did, they were hard to stomach.
All across the spectrum, the reviews are in, and they are not good. It’s been described as, “a fortified sci-fi prison,” a “stocky, truncated obelisk,” a “Klingon prison,” a “lecture in stone,” a “grim, repellent violation of all that is good and holy,” and “what would happen if Stalinist brutalism and Hitlerian self-mocking gigantism had a baby.”
Okay, those last two were mine. But I stand by them completely.
But it’s not just the ugliness, it’s the incompetence. Just like Newsom’s phantom bullet train in California, Mamdani’s “free” grocery stores in NYC, and Obamacare before it, the budget projections for Obama’s eyesore were a cruel joke. The building was originally projected to cost $300 million. That had crept up to $500 million by 2017, and then to $700 million by 2021, and is now coming in at around $850 million!
Which means that if an honest audit were ever done on its real cost – don’t hold your breath – the final tab will likely be an even billion or more.
And for that we get what one illustrious architecture critic has called, “an enormous granite bowel-movement defacing Chicago’s south side.”
Okay, that one was me again. And I still stand by it.
But those obscene, bloated budgets are where incompetence shades into financial fraud. The Obama Foundation was given a sweetheart 99-year deal on the land – over the heated objections of many little-guy area residents – for a payment of just $10.
And even after burning through a ginormous pile of cash, the Barack brain-trust has still managed to stiff a wide array of contractors, many of them black! The president of the African American Contractors Association said that at least seven black-owned subs have asked him for help over missing payments, some of which are in the seven figures.
It’s hard to untangle all of the lawsuits going on to try to get the elite leftists in charge to keep their word and pay their bills. (Good luck! And again, don’t hold your breath!) But the largest single lawsuit – against the structural engineering firm Thornton Tomasetti on behalf of a black-owned sub – is for $40 million, and the amounts various contractors have been promised but not paid appear to easily involve at least tens of millions more.
Hilariously enough, the black-owned sub is suing Thornton for having blamed delays and cost overruns on underperformance by minority-owned subs, and for having allegedly claimed that “firms that were not minority-owned could have completed the work without problems.”
To paraphrase Jay-Z – I know, if I’m not quoting Shakespeare or the King James Bible, I’m constantly quoting Jay-Z – it sounds like this project had 99 problems, and DEI was definitely one!
But don’t worry. Even if the ugly Obama-drome project screwed a bunch a bunch of working guys, you can rest easy knowing that his cronies in the Democrat elite were all greased with obscenely high salaries. Obama made his old Senior Advisor Valerie Jarrett the CEO, and last year she was paid $740,000! The executive VP of the project got over $600K, and the group’s “chief legal and people officer” (whatever that is) got $425K.
Did I mention that the Obama Center has put out a call for unpaid volunteers to work in his hideous monument? I’m not making that up. Val Jarrett is hammering checks for three-quarters of a mil per year, but Obama needs gullible peons to work for free.
If you still haven’t thrown up in the back of your mouth, consider that the Obama Foundation had promised that they would build the thing entirely with private donations from fat-cats and billionaires (who I’ve been reliably informed are really evil…unless they are nepo-babies or leftists, I guess?) They also assured Chicagoans – when they got that sweetheart price of $10 to buy the land – that they’d create an endowment of $470 million “as basically an insurance policy so the taxpayers wouldn’t get stuck with the bill.”
As a show of good faith, they started that fund by setting aside $1 million for that purpose at the ground-breaking in 2021.
Annnndddd…it’s still at $1 million, 5 years later.
Unexpectedly!
So to re-cap, we’ve got an ugly, wildly over-budget structure, built on graft, broken promises and the betrayal of the working class for the benefit of the rich and connected.
Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the Democrat party in architectural form.
By the way, I have two tickets for the Obama Memorial Flak Tower grand opening this Friday, and I am looking to exchange them for two tickets to the first game of the Indiana Bears in 2027. Any takers, please DM me.
Enjoy, Chicago!
Que Mala/Crockett, 2028!
0-0-0
If you enjoyed this column, please share it, and click Subscribe (on the bottom of your phone screen, or the right side of your computer screen) to receive a notice when new columns post.
Martin Simpson 
Keep up the Lord’s Work Mart ! Darrell
LikeLike