Crime rates are declining...unless you're listening to Republicans (MIGRANTS!!!)

When your dominant narrative runs on fear and loathing, you're going to hammer it as if your future depends on it...because it does

We live in a world in which a former President, Donald Trump, can call the President a “dumb son of a bitch,” and Sen. Tommy Tuberville calls President Biden “a garbage human being” with no hint of repercussion.

I probably don’t need to point out the double standard at work here, in that if the roles were reversed, Democrats tossing those insults at Donald Trump would result in Republicans erupting in paroxysms of righteous indignation. The incensed demands for an immediate apology would be able to be heard from San Diego to Presque Isle and from Bremerton to Islamorada.

(“Git a rope….”)

But when Republicans do it? Meh, it’s just a normal business day on Capitol Hill. Nothing to see here, people; move along….

When I talk about the Republican Party, though, what am I really talking about? What does the party of Abraham Lincoln and Ronald Reagan stand for these days? DOES it stand for anything anymore? Or is it just a collection of Right-wing crazies determined to bring down democracy by whatever means necessary and install their Godfather, Donald Trump, as Dictator-for-Life?

The problem is that the few intellectually honest Republicans who remain understand that the Grand Old Party is no more. The GOP is no longer the party of Lincoln and Reagan, the home of Conservatives who believed in small, limited government and in delegating as much power as possible to the states.

Today’s GOP has become little more than a cult of personality dedicated to the glorification and self-aggrandizement of Donald Trump. Why so many previously intelligent, moral, and dedicated Republicans have ceded their morality so completely to the service of Trump is difficult to know.

It’s a “chicken or the egg” question: Did the American people who supported the GOP become Trump supporters first and then Republicans, or did Republican politicians drag the American people along with them? Whatever the answer to that question may be, Trump came along providing simple, pat answers to complex questions. He hated the same people good, God-fearing, White Conservative Christian Cisgender Heterosexuals did, and they loved him for it.

The party that once, at least nominally, stood for freedom, liberty, free markets, and small business has become a cult of personality. Their emperor has no clothes, most of the country knows it…and no one in positions of power within the GOP will say or do anything to save the party. They’d rather go down with the ship than take the risks involved with trying to set the GOP right.

And this is the man who claims that Joe Biden isn’t fit to be President because he’s losing it….

Trump has made claiming that Biden is a rambling wreck who shouldn’t be in the White House a cottage industry. Yet, his rambling, often incoherent, and lie-filled rallies go unchallenged by the Right-wing and mainstream media.

Donald Trump is 77, only four years younger than President Biden, and appears to be declining at an appreciably faster rate than the President. Why is his slurring of words and cognitive decline not made an issue in the same way the press plays up every mistake made by the President as “evidence” of dementia?

That’s a difficult question to answer, but it does put that lie to the idea of the “Liberal Media,” yeah?

Republicans have no governing philosophy…unless you call running on fear a “governing philosophy.” Perhaps out of a lack of options or, more likely, laziness, the GOP is using fear as a campaign tactic this year. As

Michelangelo Signorile

writes,

The reality of crime in America has never been so out of sync with public opinion, and that’s particularly true among Republicans and MAGA.

Crime ticked up during the pandemic as courts were closed, police were sick, schools were shut down, and life was in general disarray. But crime isn’t just dropping now to pre-pandemic levels. It’s dropping to rates lower than before COVID. NBC reported on the latest FBI data:

The new fourth-quarter numbers showed a 13% decline in murder in 2023 from 2022, a 6% decline in reported violent crime, and a 4% decline in reported property crime. That’s based on data from around 13,000 law enforcement agencies, policing about 82% of the U.S. population, that provided the FBI with data through December.

“It suggests that when we get the final data in October, we will have seen likely the largest one-year decline in murder that has ever been recorded,” said Jeff Asher, a former CIA analyst who now studies crime trends.

The largest one-year decline in murder ever recorded.

Yet, if you listen to man-on-the-street interviews, what you’ll invariably hear is that crime is terrible and on the increase. Why? Because that’s what Republicans are telling them. That’s what they want to hear, because it justifies and feeds their fear of Black and Brown people.

Sadly, the people on the street lack the brain power and inclination to do their own research. And, as we all know, a lie can circumnavigate the globe and be deep into its second lap before the truth drags its sorry ass out of bed.

Though the truth is what it is and the data supports it, lies can always be dressed up to serve a new master when needed…and few traffic in lies more readily and with greater facility than Donald Trump.

You have only to look at a Trump rally or the political attacks by Republicans to see why MAGA believes it.

Trump rails against cities like New York, which he paints as nightmarish places that he claims are filled with violence and robberies, even though New York crime rates are lower than those of cities in Florida, where Trump lives and Republican Ron DeSantis is governor. Crime rates right now are lower in New York than in most of red America; Alabama has double the homicides of New York, and there is currently a red state murder crisis. Yep, crime is a bigger problem in the Welfare States, while the Donor States that fund anti-crime initiatives have seen the largest drop.

So, if you’re a Republican who believes there are two Americas, there’s your problem. But that has more to do with red-state policies than anything the Biden Administration has or hasn’t done.

The GOP has been viciously attacking migrants as they focus on the border, highlighting the few violent crimes that happen to be committed by immigrants—the latest twisted event was the disastrous response to the State of the Union by Sen. Katie Britt, who lied about a woman who was gang-raped inside Mexico decades ago, implying it happened by migrants in the U.S. at the border recently—even though immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than U.S.-born citizens.

And though they focus on the death of someone killed by an immigrant—plastering the victim’s name around Congress—we never see them saying the names of mass-shooting victims or talking about how we need to stop the ability of would-be murderers to get guns so easily. (And this proves they don’t really care about murder victims.)

The GOP as a whole genuinely doesn’t care about murder victims, except insofar as they can be trotted out and used to score political points. Republicans like Rep. Marjorie Trailer Greene (R-GA) will happily focus their righteous outage on the killing of a young woman in Georgia by an illegal immigrant from Venezuela. Yet they’re silent when mass shootings spill the blood of innocents across America.

I don’t know what some might call that, but I’ll call it what it is- hypocritical and cynical. Republicans don’t want solutions; they want chaos because it provides them with more they can blame on Joe Biden. They don’t want to fix things because it might give the President more accomplishments he might claim credit for.

The GOP long ago ceased to be the party of solutions. Since Newt Gingrich became Speaker of the House in 1994, Republicans' highest and best goal has been “owning the Libs.” This is the biggest reason this Congress has accomplished virtually nothing; they were too busy trying to stymie Democratic ambitions.

Even some Republicans in the House are becoming frustrated with their own party’s intransigence and gross immaturity. Republicans have begun resigning from the House, vexed by the GOP’s failure to accomplish anything of value. The latest defection is Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-WI), and who can blame him? If you come to Congress wanting to do good things for your constituents and for the country and instead run into a bunch of wackjobs with their hair on fire, how long do you think you’d last?

So, you can deal with the truth as it is…or you can live in Cloudcuckooland like the House Republican Caucus (and the GOP in general) and believe that your job is to burn shit down. That’s not a very constructive approach to governing, but it beats getting steamrolled by Democrats, no?

Time to “own the Libs”….

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