The Baltimore Riots: Now Playing on Home Barack Office

“Riot-Plagued Baltimore Is a Catastrophe Entirely of the Democratic Party’s Own Making,” Kevin D. Williamson writes at NRO. Kevin is spot-on as usual:

Would any sentient adult American be shocked to learn that Baltimore has a corrupt and feckless police department enabled by a corrupt and feckless city government? I myself would not, and the local authorities’ dishonesty and stonewalling in the death of Freddie Gray is reminiscent of what we have seen in other cities. There’s a heap of evidence that the Baltimore police department is pretty bad.

This did not come out of nowhere. While the progressives have been running the show in Baltimore, police commissioner Ed Norris was sent to prison on corruption charges (2004), two detectives were sentenced to 454 years in prison for dealing drugs (2005), an officer was dismissed after being videotaped verbally abusing a 14-year-old and then failing to file a report on his use of force against the same teenager (2011), an officer was been fired for sexually abusing a minor (2014), and the city paid a quarter-million-dollar settlement to a man police illegally arrested for the non-crime of recording them at work with his mobile phone. There’s a good deal more. Does that sound like a disciplined police organization to you?

Yes, Baltimore seems to have some police problems. But let us be clear about whose fecklessness and dishonesty we are talking about here: No Republican, and certainly no conservative, has left so much as a thumbprint on the public institutions of Baltimore in a generation. Baltimore’s police department is, like Detroit’s economy and Atlanta’s schools, the product of the progressive wing of the Democratic party enabled in no small part by black identity politics. This is entirely a left-wing project, and a Democratic-party project.

When will the Left be held to account for the brutality in Baltimore — brutality for which it bears a measure of responsibility on both sides? There aren’t any Republicans out there cheering on the looters, and there aren’t any Republicans exercising real political power over the police or other municipal institutions in Baltimore. Community-organizer — a wretched term — Adam Jackson declared that in Baltimore “the Democrats and the Republicans have both failed.” Really? Which Republicans? Ulysses S. Grant? Unless I’m reading the charts wrong, the Baltimore city council is 100 percent Democratic.

Because there’s no way for the left to process that, let alone admit it publicly, news anchor Brooke Baldwin of Time-Warner-CNN-HBO is blaming military vets for the Baltimore riots, as John Nolte writes today at Big Journalism:

In a pathetic suck-up interview with Democrat Congressman Elijah Cummins, Baldwin never once had the moral courage to ask the failed Baltimore City congressman if the left-wing policies ushered in by a half-century of a Democrat monopoly in Baltimore might have something to do with the city’s ills. Instead, she said of young military veterans who become police officers, “I love our nation’s veterans, but some of them are coming back from war, they don’t know the communities, and they are ready to do battle.”

The context was a discussion about increased training and retraining for the Baltimore police.

There’s no question Baldwin is hoping to launch a narrative with that smear.

This is pure CNN; throwing out anti-science smears towards the best people this country has to offer while it is in reality the rioters who are “doing battle.” It is savages who are looting and burning and causing anarchy, not the police. But it is the Baltimore police who have 15 wounded among their ranks. It is the Baltimore police who calmly did not do much battle during Monday night’s riots.

Meanwhile, David Simon, the creator of the Time-Warner-CNN-HBO series The Wire blames “reactionary governance” — again, despite Baltimore’s last GOP mayor having departed nearly 50 years ago:

David Simon: “A riot will fix everything, I’m sure.” http://t.co/x8HUm2blYh pic.twitter.com/LSGSZn85cc

— Harry Siegel (@harrysiegel) April 28, 2015

Here’s what Simon really means, from Brett Martin’s best-selling 2013 book, Difficult Men: Behind the Scenes of a Creative Revolution: From The Sopranos and The Wire to Mad Men and Breaking Bad:

As much as Simon was devoted to the romance and art of journalism and, more important, to nonfiction, even he had to concede that fiction film and TV were the primary communication media of his era. “To get a best-selling novel on the New York Times Best Sellers list, you need to sell a hundred thousand copies. A poorly watched HBO show is going to draw three or four million a week. That’s ten times as many people acquiring your narrative.” And that mattered because, to Simon and his partner, Ed Burns, The Wire was explicitly a piece of social activism. Among its targets, large and small, were the War on Drugs, the educational policy No Child Left Behind, and the outsize influence of money in America’s political system, of statistics in its police departments, and of Pulitzer Prizes at its newspapers. The big fish, though, was nothing less than a capitalist system that Burns and Simon had begun to see as fundamentally doomed. (If Simon was a dyed-in-the-wool lefty, Burns practically qualified as Zapatista; by ex-cop standards, he might as well have been Trotsky himself.)

Because yeah, that’s what’s driving the riots in Baltimore, too much wide-open laissez-faire capitalism.

At the risk of comitting the cardinal sin of “riot shaming,” here’s an Allahpundit-esque exit question, which will never be explored on any Time-Warner-CNN-HBO channel:

Isn’t a looter a poor-man’s progressive, doing in a rough and small-scale way what progressives like Obama do smoothly and systematically?

— Dinesh D’Souza (@DineshDSouza) April 28, 2015