Weeks after Illinois Sen. Mark Kirk aired his desire to “crush” Chicago’s most violent street gangs, Rep. Bobby Rush (D-Ill.) shot back Wednesday with harsh words for the Republican senator’s plan.
During a Wednesday interview with the Sun-Times, Rush blasted Kirk’s plan to get the feds to intervene with the city’s gangs as both “headline-grabbing” and an “upper-middle-class, elitist white boy solution to a problem he knows nothing about.”
Kirk and Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin had recently met with Zachary Fardon, the nominee for U.S. attorney in Chicago, urging him to press hard on the city’s gang leaders.
Rush apparently thought better of his remarks, later contacting the Sun-Times via email to put his harsh words in context. According the paper, Rush wrote a follow-up that read:
“Kirk’s “current plan does not include the option to create jobs, provide affordable and safe housing, quality health care and improve schools in urban areas, BUT certainly a plan to incarcerate 18,000 black men is elitist. Why is incarceration the sole option instead of rehabilitation which is proven to work and not locking young men up.”
Read more at the Huffington Post.
(Photo: the Huffington Post/AP.)
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