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Every now and then a Democrat will make sense. Too bad the rest of the left can’t follow suit. But in this case, a left-leaning CNN political contributor nailed the problem with Democrats’ approach to the crime issue. But unfortunately, his words will fall on deaf ears, and there is a reason for that.
Paul Begala, a Scholar at the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics, made an appearance on HBO’s “Real Time” with host Bill Maher. During the conversation, he noted that while red state and rural areas have problems with crime, he would like for “a Democrat to stand up and say, you know, some people belong in jail.”
He pointed out that it is Democrats who “supposedly care about who are victims of crime here.”
Maher highlighted a Los Angeles Times article reporting on crime rates in Portland, Oregon, and asked Begala: “This is a big Achilles’ heel for the Democrats, is it not?”
Begala answered in the affirmative:
They need to get out in front of it. They need to — I want a Democrat to stand up and say, you know, some people belong in jail. … And by the way — and it’s not the 10-year-old girl in Indiana who got raped and needed to have an abortion to save her life. That’s who they want to put in jail on the other side.
Begala continued:
Democrats, first off, they do have a story to tell, Bakersfield, CA hometown of Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), voted for Trump, Republican mayor, much higher murder rate than Rep. Nancy Pelosi’s (D-CA) San Francisco, why aren’t Democrats talking about that? If this — Third Way is a think tank, they did a study, even if you take the cities out, the seven states with the highest murder rate, all Trump states. The 25 states that went for Trump have a 40% higher murder rate than the states that went for Biden.
In other words, the crime problem is in rural America too and it’s in suburban America. And I do think — look, I think the left doesn’t want to hear and the right doesn’t want to hear that we need more cops and fewer guns. Better training, better screening, we will never tolerate police brutality, but those are the two things, some on the left don’t want to hear it either.”
The CNN contributor acknowledged that Democrats claim to care about poverty-stricken minorities who are disproportionately the victims of crime. “And by the way, if you look at all of the polling and the voting, it’s those folks who are voting for more security, more safety, more and better cops, and it’s the white liberals who want to defund the police. It’s not actually the heart of the Democratic Party,” he concluded.
Begala is spot on. But there’s a problem.
Democrats already know that their soft-on-crime policies harm black and brown Americans the most despite being so vociferous in their virtue signaling about how much they care about the plight of the folks living in the cities they run.
The fact is that Democrats do not care how their policies affect those living under their governance. They are not unaware, they are unconcerned. It is why far-leftists pushed for defunding the police, even though blacks overwhelmingly favor a police presence in their communities. Instead of employing policy to protect civilians, they prefer releasing criminals on bail – even those suspected of having committed violent crimes.
Even further, their policies lead to substandard education and poverty, which are tremendous contributors to the crime issue. They have done very little to improve the lives of racial minorities in America despite having led their cities for decades. At some point, it is difficult to assume it is not deliberate.
