St. Louis Congressman Cori Bush brought the totality of her awesome intellectual might to bear in answering criticisms last week that while she supports defunding the nation’s police departments, she spent some $70,000 of her campaign funds this year on private security.
Her explanation was as simple as it was powerful: Unlike all those people in St. Louis and in the nation’s other urban areas being beaten, shot and killed every day by criminals who no longer fear police intervention in their pursuit of crime, Bush told NBC News she needs private security because Trumpist white supremacists driving the wave of racial hate in this country and other bad guys might kill her as they have often threatened. That would stop her from doing all the great things she’s doing for The People, she humbly informed the NBC anchors.
Then, in a move of sincere political gratitude, a Thank You Card was immediately sent to her office from the Republican National Committee and every Republican candidate hoping to unseat a congressional Democrat and help reclaim the Congress for Republicans in the 2022 elections.
Most hypocrites are at least smart enough to try to cover their tracks when they’re caught dead-to-rights exalting in “rules for thee, not for me.”
But right thinking Americans are truly indebted to Bush for her Forrest Gump-meets-Al Sharpton style of honesty. She’s been less specific however in detailing exactly which police officers have threatened her life – another claim she made on camera to NBC – so those officers could be charged and pursued in court.
Meanwhile, on the mean streets of St. Louis, the efforts of Congresswoman Bush and other Leftists is giving St. Louisians the best opportunity to be murdered that they’ve had in decades. It was only the major crime wave in 2020 – one which lifted all urban ships, in fact – that unseated St. Louis’ annual contention for the highest murder rate in the nation.
It turns out that not getting murdered is apparently a big motivator for relocation for some people, even in a place like St. Louis, where dying in street violence is more or less expected in some quarters. Between 2015 and 2020, some 10,000 people moved out of urban St. Louis proper, dropping its population to just over 308,000, while the more melba toast metro areas outside the city actually gained about 7,500 residents.
That reduction in city population meant a statistical increase in the murder rate, with 87 murders per 100,000 people at the end of 2020, the highest percentage of urban carnage for the city since 1970.
That dynamic’s been in play all over the nation’s urban centers over the course of 2020 in the wake of Black Lives Matter terrorism. While thugs make the city streets their own, the solution offered by Cori Bush and other Leftists reeks of obvious logic: Defund the police; because racist cops, not undeterred criminals, are the problem.
In Cori Bush’s world, this all works. Folks in St. Louis – at least the ones still stuck there who haven’t been able to rent a truck and pack their plastic Cardinal batting helmets and get the hell out – are now at far less risk of being murdered by racist police – and far more at risk of being murdered by other St Louisians.
Her used-to-be neighbors drop like flies to cascades of flying 9mm semi automatic bullets – mostly fired that cool sideways way so you can see the brass fly out the top. But Bush stays safe and secure with $70,000 in private protection against Trump voters – folks so busy working jobs, raising families and paying taxes they even forgot to bring guns to their own insurrection.
That kind of logic, no doubt pervasive in her district, got Bush elected in the first place. They’ll probably elect her again.
But the clarity she’s provided for the rest of the country which still seeks to salvage the American Way of Life about the logic and direction embraced by the current majority party – is absolutely invaluable.
– Dane Hicks is publisher of The Anderson County Review in Garnett, Kan.