OPINION:
Reports this week are horrific and yet, not surprising. Chicago has had its most violent month since 1997, with the Chicago Tribune reporting 11 people murdered the last weekend of August. According to USA Today, the murder rate in Chicago has soared 72 percent in 2016.
But here’s the number which should give every American true perspective: In Afghanistan, from the start of the war in 2001 to August 2016, there have been 2,384 American casualties. In Chicago, since 2009 to August 2016, there have been 3,686 homicides. In other words, under President Obama’s watch, there have been 1,302 more people murdered in an American city in half the time compared to the longest war in U.S. history.
When asked by a perplexed media if Mr. Obama had any plan to address the carnage in his hometown, White House spokesman Josh Earnest said the president was “concerned” but according to the Free Beacon noted, “Well, I’m not aware of any specific prescription that the president’s prepared to put forward to address the situation just in Chicago.”
This is a rather strange passivity for a man who gives speeches and issues executive orders about which bathroom school children should use, yet he’s just not into engaging on an issue that kills those same children as they walk to school.
There’s a reason for this, of course: Mr. Obama and the liberals who run cities like Chicago care more about politics and their agenda then they do the lives of the individual American citizen.
Sound harsh? Consider the facts of the matter. When pressed, Mr. Earnest blamed Republicans and the need for more gun control. He then lectured on the importance of the police gaining the community’s trust.
Yet the problem is, according to Police magazine, a law enforcement magazine, “Mexican Drug Trafficking Organizations and Los Angeles-based gangs have set up inside Chicago and in the suburbs. MS-13, Crips, Bloods, and Surenos have a foothold in the area, and Chicago is a major distribution point for Mexican cartels.”
At the core of the violence in Chicago are gangs, including Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) a monstrous operation from El Salvador, now active in multiple American cities.
In the last several years MS-13’s activity has increased, with one Washington, D.C., county supervisor noting, “We warned two to three years ago that this influx over the border of illegal aliens was going to cause an increase in MS-13 and other gang-related crime,” Corey Stewart, chairman of the Prince William Board of County Supervisors, told Fox 5 in June.
“It’s happening. We are seeing it happen. It is not just in the border towns. It is happening all across America and we are seeing it especially here in Northern Virginia and the D.C. region,” the Daily Caller reported.
As violent crime rates began to soar in Sanctuary Cities, this column noted via National Review, “that fully half of America’s 41 million immigrants have settled in just five metropolitan areas: New York City–Newark, Los Angeles, Chicago, Miami, and San Francisco–Oakland. According to data from the Center for Immigration Studies, every one of these cities and their surrounding counties has sanctuary policies of some kind. …”
Mr. Obama and his sycophants know exactly how to stop the river of blood that Chicago and other American cities are morphing into, but they refuse to address it because the solution is admitting the abject and deadly failure of liberal policy. It means they would have to reverse course; it means they would have to admit that their liberalism not only fails, it kills people.
Mr. Earnest’s lecture to the press about more gun control and community-police relations makes one wonder: Does the White House actually believe one of the most murderous gangs of the 20th century, MS-13, which the El Salvadoran government has designated a terrorist group, will be quelled if they’re asked to hand in their guns? Perhaps they’re just really frustrated and want a better relationship with the police?
Of course not. No one is that idiotic, but the bureaucracy in Washington, D.C., sure thinks you are. Mr. Obama and his “progressive” foot soldiers are simply willing to throw this nation into a volcano lest they admit failure of their beloved liberal pipe dream.
Passing Obamacare was a “Thing To Do.” We now know they never really thought about how to implement it or even whether it would work. Killing Libya’s Moammar Gadhafi was a Hillary Clinton “Thing To Do.” Too bad figuring out what to do in the aftermath was never considered. Perhaps she was too busy emailing people about yoga.
Simply put: The slaughter in Chicago and so many other American cities is tied to our open border, a refusal of cities to follow federal immigration law, a federal government that has encouraged that criminality by not punishing it, and an economy that has abandoned and abused young people of color especially.
This is not a new normal. Liberals worked long and hard to cause these problems. Mr. Obama is not clueless about the bloodshed in Chicago, he simply prefers to distract the hoi-polloi by hectoring everyone about gun control and pointing a finger at the decent and law-abiding. How many speeches has Mr. Obama given here and abroad complaining about or apologizing for America? Too many to count.
And the number of speeches targeting illegal alien terrorist gangs and Mexican drug cartels slaughtering Americans every day? Not so much. None, actually.
Now why would that be?
Tammy Bruce, author and Fox News contributor, is a radio talk show host.
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