This piece was coauthored by Jim McCoy.
America as we have known it, is in a state of union that many of us no longer recognize. To bastardize the Thin Lizzy song, “The Dems are back in town, them wild-eyed boys that’d been away, haven’t changed, had much to say…I still think them cats are crazy.” Let me recount some of the Democrat debauchery.
Rampant Violence
Burning, looting and assorted inner city mayhem has been all but ignored, or justified on the basis of racial reparations. Blue metropolises like Chicago, New York and Los Angeles are experiencing sky-high murder rates (see Heather Mac Donald’s recent article). She says, “But the lies directed against cops from the highest reaches of government have led the police to back off. The Los Angeles Police Department experienced a 43 percent reduction in arrests in 2020 and a 27 percent reduction in street stops…arrests are down another 28 percent…this year homicides in Los Angeles through August are up 44 percent.” The Council on Criminal Justice released national homicide statistics so far in 2021 showing homicides in 29 major American cities have risen by 16 percent from January through June compared to the first half of 2020 and by 42 percent compared to the same period in 2019.
Chicago saw a significant increase in homicides in August compared to the same period last year with at least 336 homicides for the first six months of the year, and in the first week of September 89 people were shot and wounded, 103 shot at and 15 murdered. Much of this was situated around the upscale Magnificent Mile. In New York City, NYPD statistics show that while murders were down from 2020, this is because cops made significantly more gun arrests, but there was a 32.3 percent increase in grand larceny, a 31.2 percent increase in grand larceny auto and a 16 percent increase in robbery. Apparently you’re less likely to be shot or murdered in New York City but more likely to be robbed or have your car stolen.
Our Economic Tailspin
Biden and company would probably have us believe in economist-hack Matthew Desmond’s now decimated “New History of American Capitalism” where slavery allegedly played a primary role in America’s economic system. Despite Covid-19 having a decreasing impact on America, our economy while improving since the height of the CCP pandemic, has been less than resounding since the Biden Administration’s cloddish touch. Inflation as measured by the Personal Consumption Expenditures Price Index (PCEPI) was 3.5 percent year over year (2020-2021)--the Federal Reserve core inflation rate. The current rate is significantly higher than the Fed's target inflation rate of 2 percent. While personal income increased in July, this primarily reflected increases in government social benefits and compensation of hourly employees to get them back in the workforce. Restaurants continue to be unable to hire enough employees and many remain closed, hardly a sign of a stable or growing economy.
We are Capricious Allies Internationally
On the foreign policy front, our allies can no longer trust us, and our enemies are suspicious of our support. Recall that the Taliban were once backers of Osama bin Laden and murderers of Americans for twenty years; on August 31st they became a courted friend. Financial Times writer, Gideon Rachman, hardly an apologist for the Trump years, argues that President Biden’s credibility has been shredded through his botched withdrawal in Afghanistan. America’s enemies, especially Iran, Russia and China have also taken notice. Does anyone believe let alone think China hasn’t been emboldened by the Biden Administration’s limp-wristed behavior, especially that of Secretary of State Anthony Blinken?
Americana May be Lost
As the coffins of the 13 servicepeople were being unloaded at Dover Air Force Base last Sunday, all murdered by an ISIS-K suicide bomber strapped with 25 pounds of high explosives at Kabul airport, President-In-Name-Only Biden was photographed looking at his watch as if he had better things to do with his time than honor these fallen Americans.
Steve Malanga analyzes the Americana character that has been lost since 9-11 and possibly since the Trump era: “The narrative of America as weak, divided, and paralyzed by self-doubt seems ever stronger now, especially with the recent disaster in Afghanistan… Sports, too, are now far more likely to divide us, as athletes pick political sides and take a knee before games. Forget ‘God Bless America’; the national anthem itself has become so controversial that some sportswriters argue we should stop playing it before games. And few other endeavors beyond sports escape censure. A few months after 9/11, a New York Times music critic praised an orchestra’s playing of Brahms’s magisterial German Requiem to honor the dead. Today, critics are more likely to chastise orchestras for being insufficiently diverse and for programming white composers like Brahms.”
The Woke Dumbing Down of Our School System
The educational triumvirate, the national teacher’s unions (AFT and NEA), K-12 school systems. and the professoriate were all in for Biden’s presidential election after receiving short shrift from Trump. In 2018 Brianna Heidt penned in these pages, “As Teachers’ unions in America have long been notorious for their liberal political policies and positions. Now, it appears the unions may somehow be skewing even farther to the left.” Bill McGurn writes in the WSJ, “In the past, progressives tried to lift black achievement. Today, they have given up. Embarrassed by the way our big city public school systems are failing black children, progressives answer not by making it easier for these kids to get into schools where black children are achieving, whether this be charter or parochial schools. Instead, they focus on getting rid of the embarrassment by getting rid of achievement tests that expose it and trying to hamstring the schools that show black children can and do learn in the right [non-union] environment.”
Bowing to the unions, an August 13th letter to Florida Governor Ron DeSantis from U.S. Education Secretary Miguel A. Cardona reprimands him for not making all students and teachers wear masks in the classroom – “Florida’s recent actions to block school districts from voluntarily adopting science-based [Fauci-mangled] strategies for preventing the spread of COVID-19 that are aligned with the guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) puts students and staff at risk. I am writing on behalf of the U.S. Department of Education to emphasize the importance of allowing school district leaders to make decisions that ensure safety for their students. In particular, I am deeply concerned about Florida’s July 30 Executive Order prohibiting school districts from adopting universal masking policies consistent with CDC guidance.”
So, our fickle Democrat citizens have done America in, less than nine months into the Biden presidency. As Joni Mitchell once sang in Big Yellow Taxi, “don’t it always seem to go that you don’t know what you’ve got ‘till it’s gone, they paved paradise and put up a parking lot.” We Americans are paying dearly to park here.
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