“The trouble with our liberal friends is not that they are ignorant,” Ronald Reagan said in 1964, “but that they know so much that isn’t so.”
Reagan’s words have never rung more true, as anyone who pays attention to the news surely knows.
We keep seeing reports that in San Francisco – a city so nutty that they let you do Number Two on the sidewalk, pitch your tent wherever you like, and where school board members think Abe Lincoln was a racist – you can walk into a Walgreens, a Target, a TJ Maxx, or any other store, grab up to $949.99 worth a merchandise, brazenly walk out the door without paying, and you won’t face a felony charge. Not long ago, they raised the threshold for felony charges from $450 to $950.
Brilliant.
And today, according to news reports, you can sell your stolen goods on-line, or even on the streets of San Francisco, with impunity. And folks wonder why Walgreens has closed 17 stores, and some stores are limiting hours. Few politicians there seem to care about businesses trying to survive.
Who in their right mind would open a business in San Francisco today?
Next thing you know the nuts will be complaining about “prescription deserts” in San Francisco, where shoplifters can’t get their prescriptions filled because 17 Walgreen stores closed their doors.
A video last week showed two guys brazenly hauling backpacks and bundles of stolen clothing out of a TJ Maxx store. They weren’t even running.
Years ago, when I was a beginning reporter, someone in Laramie, explained that the city council was subject to a kind of pendulum, in which business leaders would run for council, keep things reasonable for a while, then go off the council. Then the council would lose focus. It would finally get bad enough that business leaders had to run again, to restore common sense.
Letting people walk out of stores with $949.99 in shoplifted merchandise shows that there’s no functioning pendulum today in San Francisco.
Didn’t anyone think that raising the dollar amount for a felony charge would have this effect? Where were the skeptics? Where were the business leaders? Where were the residents who just want a city where businesses can operate without being raided by thieves?
Same deal in New York City, where geniuses are also in charge, virtually all Democrats. They decided the best way to cut jail overcrowding was to get rid of cash bail for all but the most serious offenses. And, according to one report, when they let you go on your own recognizance, you get a free Metro card, two $25 debit cards, and a “burner” cell phone.
Sweet deal.
Which led to the hilarious story from January of 2020, in which a homeless guy robbed four banks in the space of a week, was finally arrested, then was released without posting any bail at all, and robbed a fifth bank the following day.
“I can’t believe they let me out!” he told reporters. “What were they thinking?”
Good question.
And these are the same folks who look with disdain at those of us from more common sense regions of the country (which is just about everywhere between the coasts except Denver, Chicago, St. Louis and Minneapolis).
The homeless guy who robbed five banks has more common sense that the Democrats running New York City.
Likewise, the rocket scientists around the country who have decided that the way to address the problem of a few bad cops is to defund whole police departments. And get rid of border control officers. And some progressives are crazy enough to want to empty the prisons.
What could possibly go wrong with that?
And they don’t seem phased at all by statistics from numerous cities showing crime, murder, and mayhem are up by double digits, even triple digits in the case of murder in Portland.
Defunding police makes as much sense as defunding health care, because every now and then there’s a bad doctor.
Reagan was right. Our liberal friends know many things that simply aren’t so.
The best quote, however, comes from that great philosopher of our times, Forrest Gump:
“Stupid is as stupid does.”
