Actually, Senator
For the first time in decades, I caught some of the Sunday morning political shows last weekend. Who knew there still were Sunday shows? Since the advent of cable news, you can get the same programming anytime you want, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. So what’s the point?
Apparently, the point is to give viewers three additional options for receiving MSNBC content on Sunday mornings, on ABC, NBC or CBS.
I watched a total of about 10 minutes, so this is not a full review, but I do have a great idea for renaming the Sunday shows. They should be called: “Actually, Senator” or “We Should Note” or “I Apologize for the Interruption.”
These phrases are repeated throughout the programs as the hosts “correct” Republicans with Democratic talking points.
Here’s an example from ABC’s “This Week,” with Jonathan Karl interviewing Republican Sen. Tim Scott:
SCOTT: “Under Joe Biden, we’ve seen the movement to defund the police, leaving communities like the one I grew up in devastated and ravaged by a wave of violent crime that we have not seen literally in five decades.”
Over on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Rep. Byron Donalds, R-Fla., got the same “correction” on crime from host Peter Alexander. First, he fact-checked Donald Trump, who wasn’t even there, then he obsessively circled back to the same (false) talking point, long after Donalds had moved on.
ALEXANDER: “[Trump] called Milwaukee a ‘horrible’ city. The campaign later clarified, said he was talking about alleged voter fraud and the crime rate there. So let me take those one at a time. Murders in Milwaukee are down 39% since last year …”
DONALDS: “… [I] think it’s important for people to understand your murder rate may be down, but that doesn’t mean that violent crime, et cetera, are also lower …”
ALEXANDER: “Fine, but –”
DONALDS: “[Voters] are frustrated with what has happened to our country under Joe Biden. Immigration massively up and out of control. The labor markets are OK, not great. Wages are down when you adjust them for inflation. People are struggling to make ends meet …”
ALEXANDER: “Again I — I apologize for the interruption. A lot to get to. We should note it’s not just the murder rate. The overall violent crime has fallen during Biden’s presidency. It is now at a near 50-year low.”
Who knew Democrats were doing such wonderful things with crime?
Of course murders were down in 2022 compared to the year before! There was nowhere else to go. Following St. George Floyd’s ascension into heaven and the subsequent de-policing movement, murder rates went through the stratosphere — then dipped slightly.
Similarly amazing facts:
— Deaths from sneak attacks on the United States dipped after Pearl Harbor.
— Civil War deaths dropped dramatically after 1866.
— Deaths from Spanish flu collapsed in 1921.
The BLM mania was the brainchild of, and pushed relentlessly by, Democrats and the media. It was adamantly opposed by Republicans — to the point of Sen. Tom Cotton proposing to send in troops to quell the rioting, leading The New York Times to apologize for his op-ed and fire James Bennet, the editor who published it.
Nationwide, the murder rate increased by a mind-boggling 30% in 2020 — a bigger year-to-year increase than any time since we’ve been keeping records. The next closest spike was in 1968, when the murder rate rose by a comparatively paltry 12.7% — though for similar reasons.
Just when it seemed killings couldn’t go any higher, the murder rate rose again in 2021, as the left’s demonization of police continued, for a total increase of 37% during the Floyd extravaganza.
Following the two most murderous years in two decades, the murder rate did finally fall in 2022 — by a whopping 4% to 5%. This brought the U.S. murder rate back down to 2020 levels, aka the second-most murderous year in the past two decades.
It’s like Jerry Nadler boasting about how skinny he is because he lost 5 pounds.
Yes, but, Jerry, the year before you gained 30 pounds, the year before that you gained 29 pounds, the year before that …
Those are the murder stats Democrats are bragging about.
Did Democrats in Milwaukee do a better job? Hardly. Milwaukee had the same Floyd murder spike as the rest of the country — only worse.
Here are that city’s murders per year, according to The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel’s homicide tracker:
2019 — 98
2020 — 190
2021 — 197
2022 — 224
2023 — 183
As you can see, Milwaukee’s murder rate didn’t go up by a mere 30% in 2020 — it nearly doubled. Amazingly, the number of murders continued to rise over the next two years, finally falling by about 18% last year — not the 37% claimed by Alexander. That makes Milwaukee in 2023 82% more murderous than the year before Democrats unleashed BLM on the nation.
Solid work, Democrats.
As for violent crime, it has declined only in the sense of going up, increasing by a lot, having more violent crime than before. The Justice Department’s National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) is the gold standard of crime reports, recording all crimes, not just those reported to the police. And the NCVS shows a huge increase in violent crime from 2021 to 2022. (The latest crime figures are from 2022.)
Democrats’ claim to the contrary is based on a single unreliable source: the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports (UCR), which are missing so much data that even the FBI doesn’t trust them.
Due to a technical change in 2021, the UCR didn’t collect crime reports from about a third of police departments in the U.S. in 2021 and 2022, including some of the biggest, such as:
— New York City
— Los Angeles
— Phoenix
— Suffolk County, New York
— San Jose
— Chicago
The bureau’s position on its own reports is that “it’s possible crime went up, went down or stayed the same,” as The Marshall Project put it. Other liberal groups, like the Brennan Center, have also ridiculed the FBI’s recent reports, saying the missing data render “the FBI’s annual report on crime in 2021 threadbare and heavily dependent on estimates.”
But now some genius, Jeff Asher, has come along and treated these same FBI reports as if they’re the Talmud, and announced that crime under Biden is at a “50-year low”! You’ll see that claim everywhere — Poynter, Newsweek, ABC News, White House press releases and so on. But his entire analysis is based on faulty data.
This is the vital information requiring that Republicans be rudely interrupted whenever they mention crime: a 4% decline in the murder rate — following a 37% rise that was 100% the Democrats’ fault; and FBI crime reports that even the FBI doesn’t believe.
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