May 29, 2019: Liberals Care about Crime and the President Is an Idiot to Say We Don't

 

5/29/19: If you follow President Donald J. Trump’s noxious Twitter feed, you already know it’s a smorgasbord of juvenile insults, false claims of unparalleled success, whining about how unfair his critics are and lies. 

Lots and lots of lies.

 

Today, our focus is on just one of those lies: that Democrats and liberals don’t care about crime.

 

 

“I pardon myself! Also, I pardon Don Jr. and Paul Manafort.”

 

This is not true. But that does not mean the president and his lapdog fans grasp it. We do care. If nothing else, we don’t believe Trump has the power to pardon himself. That’s kind of a basic “rule of law” concept. Were that true, he could shoot the First Lady, announce he was running off with a porn star, but first intone: “I pardon myself! Also, I pardon Don Jr. and Paul Manafort, just to be safe!”

Trump points to the only president in history ever to claim he could pardon himself.

 

True, Democrats and liberals have a different view of how to address and suppress crime. A good liberal might say, “I am not terrified by families seeking asylum at our southern border. I would, however, be happy to see employers who hire illegals just so they can pay them less, and kill American jobs, yes, I would be in favor of seeing such employers led away in handcuffs. That would be fun.

 

Our side cares about crime just as much as their side, just not in the same way. We cared when BP Oil cut safety corners. We cared when the Deepwater Horizon platform blew up and 11 workers were killed, and 3.19 million barrels of oil spilled into the Gulf of Mexico. 

 

We cared when Takata covered up the fact it was selling air bags that exploded, spraying deadly shrapnel in drivers’ and passengers’ faces.

 

We are happy to see rapists, pedophiles and house breakers arrested. We are happy to see a Catholic priest who dabbled in child pornography sentenced to prison. It was good to see Harvey Weinstein get indicted; and it looks like Patriots owner Robert Kraft might be in a legal trouble, another plus. We on our side are against human trafficking just as much as anyone on the Trump side. 

 

We do believe that American justice remains stacked against poor defendants, and that people of color are locked up more often, and for longer stretches, than rich white defendants. We also care when we learn that more than 2,400 convicted “criminals,” dozens on death rows in multiple states, have been exonerated on the basis of fresh evidence, particularly DNA.

  

We care about crime. We cared when a Trump fan sucker-punched a protester as the protester was led away during a campaign rally in 2016. We cared when Trump said he’d pay the attacker’s legal expenses. We cared that a man who wanted to become President of the United States would revel in a violent assault. We cared when a Republican candidate for Congress body-slammed a BBC reporter, lied about it to police, and we didn’t like it when Trump talked about how he loved the candidate. His kind of guy. We cared when one Trump fan sent bombs to CNN and another right-wing nut shot up a Pittsburgh synagogue.

 

This should not be difficult for anyone to grasp, even if Trump and his base don’t. Almost no one on our side (we do have our share of nuts) approves when Trump supporters are attacked. When an 81-year-old man wearing a red MAGA hat in a New Jersey store was attacked a few days ago, we knew that was wrong. What part of “attacking an 81-year-old man” sounds positive to anyone you know?

 

In nearly identical fashion, we cared when another hoodlum attacked a 91-year-old man and hit him in the face with a brick. In that case, the woman wielding the brick was shouting at the victim, Rodolfo Rodriguez, “Go back to your country.” I think we are safe in saying that attack came from an individual on the right.

 

We liberals may have been hasty in believing Jussie Smollett when he said he was attacked by two men in red MAGA hats, simply because he was gay. Fair enough. That doesn’t mean we weren’t glad to see him arrested once his story turned out to be false. And before conservatives start getting all high and mighty, they might want to remember that on Fox News, apologists for the president like to insist that any crimes committed by Trump aides, Flynn, Gates, et. al., are “process crimes.”

 

What? That means they don’t count?

 

 

Different people care about different crimes in different ways.

 

Again, liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans, care about different crimes in different ways. Our side believes addressing the issue of military-style rifles in the wrong hands would be a good place to begin to attack crime. Their side thinks building a giant wall might be cool and might do some good. A liberal might say, “Let’s stop putting people in jail for non-violent drug offenses.” Attorney General Jeff Sessions did battle with states that legalized Mary Jane.

 

If you want to battle the drug scourge, our side can think of several places to begin. We’re liberals and don’t normally take pleasure in the pain of our fellow man. Still, it was a pleasure to watch Martin Shekreli get seven years in prison after inflating prices on life-saving drugs by 5,000%. We were happy to see VW get fined for rigging air pollution controls in its diesel engine models. (We also care about clean air.) We think the government is doing fine work when the Department of Justice catches an international bank laundering money for drug cartels and imposes a $1.9 billion fine. It would be great if the white collar bankers went to jail and stayed there as long as some woman who stole $100 worth of quarters from a residential laundry room. You know, just like it might be nice to do something to help the tens of thousands of poor people who get locked up for minor crimes simply because they can’t afford bail.

 

On the right, the focus might be armed robbers, welfare cheats and illegal immigrants who vote. All these crimes are bad, although the last is extremely rare, as even the Heritage Foundation has shown. 

On the left, we might argue for increased focus on the biggest robbers of all, people like Bernie Madoff, and Jordan Goodman, the latter busted recently for running a $1.2 billion Ponzi scheme. 

If you can catch sexual predators, like Weinstein, Cosby, R. Kelly and Steve Wynn that’s always a positive. 

Who wouldn't want to see Harvey Weinstein go to jail?

(Not counting Harvey.)

 

We know the president likes to simplify every issue and vilify foes. So he focuses on killings by illegal immigrants and claims our side doesn’t mind when MS-13 gang members run amok. Our side knows the shooting of Kate Steinle by an illegal immigrant in July 2015 was a terrible tragedy. We know the pain her family must feel, as any decent parent of any political persuasion can grasp. On the other hand, liberals wonder how it was that Trump took no action after the Las Vegas slaughter, shrugged off the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, and brushed off the many killings ordered by Vladimir Putin. “There are a lot of killers,” he told Bill O’Reilly, just days after he took office, when asked about Putin’s bloody record. “What? You think our country’s so innocent?”

 

And then there was the president’s recent defense of Kim Jong-un, one of the most prolific murderers in the world. According to Mr. Trump, Kim knew nothing about the brutal abuse of Otto Warmbier, which ultimately led to the young man’s death. It was as if our clueless president had no idea that Kim heads up one of the most murderous regimes in the world.

 

 

90% of Americans would condemn the same crimes.

 

If you strip away the president’s childish rhetoric, it’s likely that 90% of Americans, of all colors and all political persuasions, would condemn most of the same crimes. Conservatives might focus more on the killing of police officers. Liberals might focus more on the killing of unarmed African Americans. Both kinds of killings are tragedies. If a right-wing nut walks into a church in South Carolina and kills nine, and another runs a protester down and kills her with his car, and a third shouts at immigrants in a Kansas bar, that they should “go back to their own country,” and kills two, yes, liberals care about crime. If a Muslim terrorist runs over eight pedestrians in New York City with a truck, yes, a sickening hate crime has been committed.

 

And we haven’t even touched on all the mass murderers, from Adam Lanza to Nikolas Cruz, who have been shooting up schools.

 

Here’s an easy rule of thumb. If a murder is committed by just about anyone you could name, against anyone at all, sympathy goes to the victim and family. It’s automatic. It doesn’t require great thought. When a black man murders five Dallas police, out of a misguided desire for “payback,” you empathize with the families of the slain. When a white officer shoots Walter Scott, an unarmed black man, in the back, you should empathize with Scott’s family too.

 

Last, but not least, it is never a bad day if you can catch politicians, of either party, or no party at all, in their crimes.

 

So, Mr. President, I can assure you, our side cares about crime as much as your side, if not more.

 

And we are convinced you, yourself, are a crook.