The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Return of ‘law and order’ spells trouble for Dems

- Pat Buchanan He writes for Creators Syndicate.

According to Gallup, on the issue of crime, President Joe Biden is 18 points underwater. While 57% of Americans disapprove of how he is handling crime, only 39% approve.

Biden’s dismal rating was recorded before the verdict came in the Kyle Rittenhous­e trial — a verdict Biden declared had made him “angry.”

Biden’s low rating on crime came before “flash mobs” of thieves in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago and New York looted stores, cleaning them out in minutes.

It came before the guilty verdicts came in against the three white men accused of murdering Ahmaud Arbery, the Black jogger, in Georgia.

Media efforts to infuse a racial motive to Rittenhous­e’s action, however, failed. Rittenhous­e is white, as were the three rioters he shot.

But what these incidents, involving killings with racial connotatio­ns, portend is that crime, race, law and order will be blazing issues in 2022 and 2024. And as of now, Biden and his Democratic Party are not on the side of America’s majority.

The latest statistics on homicide and murders for 2021 seem to guarantee that this mega-issue remains front and center.

A day before Thanksgivi­ng, The Washington Post reported that Washington, D.C., had recorded its 200th homicide this year, surpassing last year’s total. Homicides in 2020 were up 30% from 2019.

In Philadelph­ia, America’s sixth-most populous city, there have been 503 victims of homicides thus far in 2021, a record.

Who is doing all this shooting, knifing and killing on the savage streets of our great cities, and who are the principal victims?

Heather Mac Donald, among the nation’s foremost statistici­ans of crime, relates, using the figures for New York:

“In 2020, blacks were over 72% of all shooting suspects; we know that from victim and witness descriptio­ns. Whites were 1.4% of all shooting suspects ... based on victim and witness descriptio­ns.”

Bottom line: Disproport­ionately, the perpetrato­rs, the shooters and the killers in America, are Black. As are their victims. If Black Lives Matter wants to preserve Black lives, they should look to their own communitie­s because that is whence almost all of the killers come.

2022 and 2024 could prove to be a political rerun of the mid-’60s. Then it was that “law and order,” a slogan liberals called code words for racism, helped propel conservati­ves to preeminenc­e in the GOP and thence to national power.

And between then and now, the similariti­es are many.

Then, there were the riots in Harlem and Watts in 1964 and 1965, Newark and Detroit in 1967, and D.C. and 100 other cities after the killing of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968. During those years, there was also a national explosion in violent street crime.

Today’s Democratic Party is associated with defunding the police, ending cash bail for arrested felons, emptying prisons and embracing the BLM and antifa “social justice protests” of 2020 that often involved looting, arson and assaults upon police.

As for Biden, the 2021 model bears little resemblanc­e to the tough-talking Delaware senator who pushed the tough, principal anti-crime bill of the 1990s.

Today, the progressiv­e wing of his party prevents Biden from taking that kind of stand. But that is what his country is calling for.

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