DEAR BOOTLICKER

A LETTER TO GREG BOVINO

Dear Greg,

We’re writing because you turned lying into a public-service function and bootlicking into a moral philosophy.

Because in a Chicago courtroom, under oath, you admitted what the camera had already said: you lied about being struck by a rock to justify launching tear gas into a crowd of civilians.

Because when Judge Sara Ellis stripped away your story frame by frame, the performance collapsed — the brave officer exposed as a frightened man in borrowed armor.
And because after all of that, you still had the gall to show up for work, still draped in the costume of authority, still pretending that obedience is a virtue.

You’ve become the poster boy for the new authoritarian aesthetic: shiny, humorless, allergic to truth. You strut through immigrant neighborhoods as if goose-stepping were part of the patrol manual, confusing intimidation with order. You believe that if you look tough enough, the lies you tell will start to sound like law.

Your lie wasn’t creative; it was clumsy. You told the judge you’d been hit in the head with a rock before you gassed the crowd — as if that single, imaginary pebble could turn cruelty into policy. Then the footage rolled, the timeline collapsed, and there you were: a man tossing gas before the phantom rock ever flew. You finally admitted it, like a magician confessing the rabbit was dead before the trick began.

You are not a commander, Greg.

You are a prop. A mannequin dressed in government fabric. A man who thinks “law and order” means “anything I can get away with before someone rewinds the tape.”

You’ve mistaken compliance for courage so completely that even your conscience must need a security clearance to enter your own skull.

There is, however, one thing you do exquisitely well. You have refined the act of boot cleaning into a fine art.

No one polishes authoritarian footwear quite like you. You don’t merely obey; you serenade power with a tongue trained in acrobatics. Each lie is a slow, circular buff, each denial a loving swipe across the leather of someone else’s ambition. It’s practically balletic — a choreography of submission performed with military precision.

You could teach master classes in the craft. “Bootlicking 101: How to Shine the Regime While Pretending It’s a Reflection of Your Own Bravery.”

You’d fill auditoriums with bureaucrats eager to learn how to varnish deceit until it glows.

Even the boots you clean seem ashamed of the attention. They squeak when you walk away, not from polish but from embarrassment — as though the leather itself is trying to whisper, Please stop, Greg, we’re already shiny enough.

Your kind of courage exists only under fluorescent lighting and surrounded by yes-men. The moment the light becomes daylight — when there’s a camera, a judge, a transcript — you shrink. You become the administrative version of a vampire: allergic to evidence, surviving only in the dark bureaucracy that shelters your excuses. When honesty appears, you hiss and hide behind “protocol.”

You’re still out there, commanding raids, acting like the court order was a mere inconvenience instead of a federal rebuke. That persistence doesn’t make you strong; it makes you a symptom. Systems built on fear always recycle their servants. You are the replaceable part that thinks it’s the engine.

History will not footnote you with valor. It will catalog you as a lesson: the man who mistook a boot for a mirror and spent his life polishing the wrong side.

Enjoy the shine, Commander. Every reflection you see now is the truth staring back — dull, honest, and impossible to buff away.

Sincerely,
Rook T. Winchester
Closer to the Edge

---

Here at Closer to the Edge, we don’t lick boots — we write about the people who do.

Every subscription helps us keep the spotlight on the sycophants, the liars, and the bureaucratic contortionists who mistake obedience for honor.

Subscribe if you’re tired of the sound of tongues on leather and want to fund journalism that bites back.

Because the only thing we ever polish is the truth.