Orland Park Mayor Pekau’s lies cost him the election, again
Orland Park Mayor Keith Pekau is a pathological liar when it comes to politics and his achievements. Worse is that Pekau uses taxpayer resources as a platform to fund his lies, making false statements from the podium of the Village of Orland Park board meetings. These political statements are violations of the Village’s Code of Ethics, which prohibits the use of public funds for political purposes. Without his lies, Pekau has absolutely no achievements. His lies also cost him the April 4, 2023 election in which he backed a wave of candidates in an attempt to take over and then merge multiple governments into his personal control.
By Ray Hanania
Orland Park’s Mayor Keith Pekau is a hypocrite who has lied about almost everything.
Pekau took all of the achievements of former Mayor Dan McLaughlin and claimed them as his own. The reason is, Pekau doesn’t have any achievements of his own.
Pekau said he was going to be transparent but instead, he has closed the Village, denied public FOIA requests, politicized the appointment process,s including banning his critics from serving on public boards like the Veterans Commission.
Pekau is using his position as Mayor and all of the taxpayer-funded resources at his disposal to promote his politics, promoting his bid for Congress, and promoting his candidates in this past election.
Worse is that Pekau has been the primary slinger of mud, slander, and personal invective since his very first day in office. But he has embraced a strategy typical of liars, accusing his critics of being behind insidious name-calling and mudslinging.
It’s not just him. It’s his cabal of do-nothing name-calling cronies.
I’ll give you an example. In the week before the election on April 4, Mayor Pekau’s wife, Betty, got on the popular social media “Nextdoor” and Facebook and launched a personal attack against the son of former Cook County Commissioner Liz Gorman in which she called his mother a “Bitch.”
After Mrs. Pekau got backlash, because it exposed how she and her husband are hypocrites, she edited the word “Bitch” to “bitty.”
I noted her name-calling, posting an image of the original post and her edited post, attacking Liz Gorman, her son and the Gorman family. Using taxpayer dollars at a Village Board meeting, Mayor Pekau falsely claimed I was attacking his wife and ignored the nasty comments his wife made about a young man’s mother on a public social media page. He edited the video and posted it on YouTube and has refused to allow me to respond and challenge and expose his lies.
That enraged Pekau, who believes that all elected officials should be accountable to the public, except for himself, and he unleashed a vicious, personal attack against me on YouTube that was filled with all kinds of lies and made-up claims.
Pekau didn’t create the attack video as a politician. He did it as Mayor of Orland Park at a special Village Board meeting convened the day before the election to promote his candidates for the Orland Fire District (where I do media for $4,000 a month compared to the $22,000 a month he pays his PR people). Pekau hoped the taxpayer-funded meeting might boost their election chances. It didn’t.
Pekau violated the Village ethics ordinance, which he wrote.
Pekau asserted I “attacked” the police and police chiefs, another lie. I am consistently one of the strongest police advocates, including when it involves my own Arab American community.
I was the only one to defend the Oak Lawn police officer charged by Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx for beating an Arab teenager because that teenager had a gun in his grip and wouldn’t let go until he was forced to let go. I refuse to be a hypocrite just because the suspect is of my race. Anyone with a gun deserves to go to jail, and the police who arrested him are heroes.
That’s what journalists and columnists do. They hold elected officials accountable, including the most egregious ones like Pekau. Columnists write the truth not what makes people happy.
Without a shred of proof, he blames all that on the Gormans and anyone who criticizes him. He never mentions his mudslinging. I suspect Pekau’s people were behind more anonymous attacks than anyone else.
I had absolutely nothing to do with anything anonymous. When I write, I put my name on it. Always! And I don’t care if my views are popular or unpopular. I write what I believe. I may get things wrong sometimes, but I never make anything up.
In 45 years of covering politics, I have never encountered a politician like Pekau. He is symbolic of the kind of politician who fuels the growing hatred and divisiveness that continues to spread in this country. Pekau is no different than Brandon Johnson who lied about everything, re-spinning his clear calls to defund the police, defend the looters, and make the government fund all the needs of lower-income citizens rather than helping them to find jobs.
Pekau’s mudslinging cost him his run for congress. On April 4, he lost BIG TIME. Every contested candidate he backed lost, except for one on the School District 135 board. Pekau lost because voters see through his meanness, hypocrisies, lies, and his failure to achieve anything for the people of Orland Park.
Pekau did everything possible to take control of the Village Manager’s position and lost. The people in Orland Park are seeing through his lies.
In two years, hopefully, Pekau will be thrown out of office along with all of his lemmings, cronies, and minions.
(He has deleted my responses to his lies several times because he knows he can’t defend his lies. I will keep reposting my response responding to his pathological lies as he continues to spit them out.)
(Originally published in The Regional News NewspaperApril 11, 2023.)
(Ray Hanania is an award-winning former Chicago City Hall reporter. A political analyst and CEO of Urban Strategies Group, Hanania’s opinion columns on mainstream issues are published in the Southwest News Newspaper Group in the Des Plaines Valley News, Southwest News-Herald, The Regional News, The Reporter Newspapers. His Middle East columns are published in the Arab News. For more information on Ray Hanania visit www.Hanania.com or email him at [email protected].)
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Just to show you what a liar Mayor Keith Pekau is, all you have to do is visit the original Orland Fire Protection District Blog (2011-2017) where press releases (not including media contacts, media events or communications meetings) were posted for public viewing.
http://ofpdblog.blogspot.com/