Cities

The Democrats' trained hamsters in the main stream media have tried hard to avoid the real story in the "Baltimore" controversy, focusing obsessively on Trump's "racism" and assiduously avoiding the underlying message of the controversy. Daniel Henninger describes it this way:

After [Rev. Martin Luther] King’s assassination in 1968, horrific inner-city riots broke out in New York, Washington, Detroit, Baltimore, Chicago, St. Louis, Pittsburgh, Kansas City and Trenton, N.J. For much of the U.S. population born since then, those events have about as much immediacy as a World War II documentary.

Still, political control of virtually all these cities has remained in the hands of the Democratic Party. Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia and St. Louis have had nothing but Democratic mayors since then ...

That suits the keepers of America’s sterile status quo in its most rundown neighborhoods just fine. Urban Democrats are now in a destructive co-dependent relationship with public-sector unions. Inner-city residents have become an afterthought.

Walking past a public-housing complex in lower Manhattan recently, I noticed the date on the cornerstone: 1963. That is about when these projects were erected all over the U.S. They, like so much urban infrastructure, are falling apart through neglect because city budgets are consumed by labor costs.

Public schools in every city mentioned in this column are failing to educate black American children adequately because the teachers unions won’t permit reform.

According to recent FBI data, the most violent cities in the U.S. include—still—St. Louis, Detroit, Baltimore, Milwaukee, Cleveland and Oakland, Calif.

A 16-year-old gangbanger in Chicago today was born in 2002 or 2003, after 9/11. Stories like his, passing from innocence to ruin before reaching adulthood, have repeated themselves every 20 years in all these Democratic-controlled cities. If that’s not racism caused by political failure, the word has no meaning. Yet the press, or part of it, has been consumed the past week with Trump vs. Cummings and such irrelevant stories as “Cummings has long frustrated the president.”

Odd, isn't it, that the CNN moderators in this week's Democratic Debates didn't focus on America's inner cities with a question like this:

Cities across the United States like Baltimore have had Democratic mayors for decades—in Baltimore's case, over 5 decades, have had a Democratic city councils, have gotten hundreds of millions of of federal dollars dedicated to improve the lot of it citizens, and yet continue to struggle mightily. Is this situation a failure of Democratic leadership at the city, state and federal level, and should the citizens of these cities look elsewhere for solutions.

Nah ... a question like that won't do. It conflicts with the narrative.