Which Republicans?

By Kevin D. Williamson

Wednesday, February 10, 2016

Markos Moulitsas, a lefty commentator who does not exactly overwhelm with his intelligence and originality, has a piece in The Hill headlined: “GOP: Listen to Beyoncé.” Moulitsas is enough of an numbskull to make that argument — that Republicans have a special duty to listen to the views of lightly informed pop singers on the matter of police misconduct and allegations of police misconduct — but he doesn’t actually make that argument. His piece doesn’t say anything about Republicans as such at all, although it does contain criticism of Rudy Giuliani, the former Republican mayor of New York City.

Some nameless editor at The Hill is making the argument “GOP: Listen to Beyoncé.”

About that . . .

There has been a striking display of chutzpah among Democrats as they try to make a national campaign out of police-brutality allegations that wrong-foots Republicans. Regardless of what you think about the merit of the underlying allegations, the question of how police departments and other municipal agencies are run in Chicago, St. Louis, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, San Francisco, etc., has not a whole heck of a lot to do with any Republican: We are talking almost exclusively about Democrat-monopoly cities that have been that way for a long time. The extent of Republican involvement in the issue, if Moulitsas’s vapid prose and our eyes are to be believed, is Giuliani’s talking about the Super Bowl halftime show on Fox News.

Who runs Baltimore? Who runs Chicago? Who runs Los Angeles? How far from the site of Tamir Rice’s shooting would you have to drive to find a Republican with real municipal political power? What’s standing in the way of reforming the Cleveland police department? John Kasich? Please. You may as well blame Rick Santorum. If you are going to blame a Republican for the state of Baltimore, it would make just as much sense to choose Abe Lincoln as Rudy Giuliani.

Shouldn’t that headline read “Democrats: Listen to Beyoncé”?

The state of American cities does not reflect a lack of progressive leadership; the state of American cities is the result of progressive leadership. Thus the laying of the blame for Flint at the feet of Governor Rick Snyder, the argument being that the Republican governor had a positive duty to anticipate the incompetence and stupidity of the Democrats who run Flint, from the Democratic mayor and city council to the Democratic emergency manager. That’s a fine argument: “Of course Democrats are going to screw up the cities — damn those Republicans, who hold almost no power in the cities in question, for not stopping them!”

Do carry on with that.