By John F. Di Leo -
In the news this week – just two weeks out from a critically important midterm election – the news is full of stories about pipe bombs being mailed to prominent left-wingers.
It’s a fascinating story on several fronts. The targets included an ex-president and an ex-secretary of state, an aging actor, the office of a liberal media outlet, and an activist financier so ancient that most people thought he must be dead already. At this writing, none of these bombs went off, and most didn’t even reach their destinations because they were sent to people well known to be heavily guarded.
While it is too early – at this writing – to speculate, it certainly sounds possible, between the choices of targets and the utterly improbable type of pipe bomb, that these were never really intended to go off. Which makes one wonder: what was really the purpose of such a project, two weeks before an election?
While many are making light of it, we mustn’t lose sight of one issue, which applies whether it’s a genuine danger by a truly malicious bomber or outright nutcase, or a false flag by someone trying to frame the right for political purposes. The important thing about this is that it chews up precious law enforcement resources.
This is the sort of government expenditure that is never supposed to be questioned, of course. Law enforcement is one of the government’s primary responsibilities. From the constable on the beat to the detective at his computer, from the court system to the prisons, this is what we have government for – to keep the streets safe. So we would like to spend whatever it takes.
But our government is broke. It’s stretched thin, with overcrowded jails and prisons, overworked detectives, and far too many crimes to follow up on. In such an environment, especially in high crime areas like Washington DC and New York City, where some of these pipe bombs were sent, our police simply can’t spare the time for a high-profile, labor-intensive investigation like this one.
With so many teams working on it at once, they may eventually identify the person responsible, but there’s no guarantee. Such investigations are not as easy as they make it look on the television. The police of many different departments may be working overtime for quite a while on this, distracting them from their other critical daily work.
And so it is across the country, no matter which crime issue we discuss. Chicago, New York and Washington DC are among the crime capitals of the United States, with hundreds of successful killings in each one every year, and thousands of unsuccessful attempts in each as well. America’s big cities are violent places today, chock full of local gangs like the Latin Kings and El Rukns, not to mention the hordes of unaffiliated criminals that infest their streets. None of our big cities are able to truly crack down and get the violence under control. The police are underfunded, with virtually bankrupt pension plans and resource restrictions that make their dangerous job even harder than it already needs to be. And jails are often packed like sardines, with friendly judges and generous bail bondsmen happy to spring them.
Speaking of which… some states – such as California – have long had a problem with judges who spring convicts by the hundreds, even by the thousands, on the grounds that conditions are too tight in the jails, so they need to let them back out into the general population.
As hard as it is in our society to get a conviction – and then to get an actual sentence – and then to actually get the killer, mugger, rapist or robber into the cell – our judges often open the gates and let them out with “time served.” Just because their jail cells aren’t comfy enough? As a result, states with such problems see more crime than ever, because even when the state is in a position to remove known criminals from the population, there will always be a few soft touches who are happy to put them right back on the streets.
As long as we’re talking about the streets… we have a flood of illegal alien criminals – both the organized crime types like MS-13 and Al Qaeda, and the lone-wolf types like muggers and rapists. Millions of criminal aliens flood our inner cities too, because so many have declared themselves “Sanctuary Cities,” stubbornly refusing to enforce our nation’s laws, welcoming these criminals into their communities.
(Yes, there are decent, hardworking folks among the illegal population too, of course, but the dangerous ones endanger them as much as they endanger the rest of us. And don’t ever think that opposition to crime has anything to do with bigotry; the most frequent victims of crime are America’s minorities, so it’s crime-coddling that shows a disregard for minorities. Cracking down on crime shows support for our nation’s embattled law-abiding minority populations).
As if our Sanctuary City designations weren’t enough… every six months or so, another caravan of illegal aliens, numbering in the thousands, slowly parades northward through Mexico, gathering South and Central Americans, Africans, and Middle Easterners as well, including ever more distant criminals as they see their odds of successfully hiding in the crowd increase. An islamofascist Iranian might be conspicuous trying to blend in with a single family of Russians or Chinese, but hiding in plain sight in a crowd 10,000 strong? Piece of cake.
All of these very different threats – the high-profile bombers, the big city crime, the foreign-born gang members, the Middle Eastern terrorists – have something in common besides the danger they bring us and the incredible cost they inflict upon our economy, our culture, and our communities:
In one way or another, they are championed by the modern Democratic Party.
Now, this isn’t exactly to say that the Democratic Party blatantly endorses bombers, robbers, killers, drug dealers and rapists. To do so blatantly would inflict political pain on their own side. So they have to be clever.
The Democratic Party therefore holds rallies against violence… issues press releases calling for an end to crime… calls for national nights out in which people have candlelight vigils instead of ransacking apartments or shooting up city parks. It develops their bonafides – among their voting blocks at least – as compassionate politicians who want the violence to end.
And it provides cover under which to hide their other positions.
What ELSE do Democrat politicians do? It’s these Leftist politicians – and judges – and of course their allies in the mainstream media – who establish the conditions for such crime to continue.
The modern Democratic Party platform – whether formally stated party-wide, or just trumpeted by individual candidates – is a laundry list of issues that enable criminals, and endanger the law abiding citizenry. They call for:
- Gun control on law abiding citizens, so that potential victims are less able to defend themselves.
- An end to mandatory minimum sentencing.
- Amazingly, mandatory prison releases when jails happen to be “too full.”
- Banning local law enforcement from cooperation with federal efforts to catch and eject criminal illegal aliens.
- Publicly blaming the fact of police presence for the criminals’ desire to commit crime, as if drug dealers and killers would gladly stop destroying communities if only the police would offer to play basketball with them.
- And of course, to lock it all in, voting rights for felons, nationwide. Just to be absolutely sure whose side they’re on. No point in letting them out of jail to terrorize their communities again if you don’t get some votes out of it, after all.
As the midterm election approaches, these issues are on people’s minds again, more than they’ve been in a long time.
Many of us live in small towns or rural communities, largely insulated from the nightmarish crime waves that infect our inner cities. We may tend to forget that crime is so rampant in important pockets of our country.
But no matter how far we live from the high crime zones, it affects us anyway. Everyone’s taxes go to funding a criminal justice system made infinitely more expensive by catch-and-release sentencing. Everyone shares in an economy drained by these expenses, and everyone pays the bill for the loss of business from our cities, because business is driven away by these crime zones. And that means unemployment where our population is densest, and underperforming markets, and plummeting property values. All paid for by the general coffers.
No matter how far away we may live from Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles and New York, as long as they are crime-ridden, it costs us all.
Today’s caravan of illegals – with some percentage of gang members and terrorists mixed in amongst the huddled masses – serves as a very visual reminder of this problem, as Republicans denounce such lawlessness, while the Democrats cheer it on.
Today’s alleged mail bombs – necessarily creating a costly dragnet for cities too broke to properly police their endangered neighborhoods as it is – also serves as a reminder, as the voters can’t help but remember that every famous bomber, from the Weather Underground to the Unabomber, has been a Left-wing extremist. The Right rarely produces such people; the Left always has. Voters remember this too, and think about it, as Election Day nears.
Most of all, the economy is on Americans’ minds in the run-up to Election Day. People are reminded daily – maybe even hourly – of the cost and danger posed by hundreds of thousands of criminals on the streets because we won’t keep them locked up… the thirty million illegal aliens… the already-stretched-thin police departments forced to divert precious resources for some crazy bomb scare with all the markings of a deranged PR stunt.
And they see the Democrats cheering on the caravan, pleading with noncitizens to vote, exhorting their rank and file to disrupt rallies, impede traffic at rush hour with unpermitted demonstrations, and even harass Republicans dining out with their families…. And they certainly can't miss the Democrats proudly and blatantly holding voter registration drives in prisons.
The American voters know how desperately America needs to crack down on crime.
And they know, too, exactly how each political party comes down on the issue.
Copyright 2018 John F. Di Leo
John F. Di Leo is a Chicagoland-based trade compliance trainer, writer and actor. A former county chairman of the Milwaukee County Republican Party, he has now been a recovering politician for 21 years (but like any addiction, you’re never fully cured). His columns have been found regularly in Illinois Review for almost ten years now.
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