The recent crime wave in Oakland—multiple bank robberies, a smash-and-grab at a jewelry store, a double homicide in the Hills, a robbery at gunpoint by Lake Merritt, the ramrod burglary of two dispensaries, and seven shootings last weekend--prompted Barbara Lee’s dismal performance in front of the nightly news cameras, waving shiny objects and assuring everyone, “Nothing to see here, we’re making progress!”
Liar, liar, pants on fire, Madame Mayor. This is on your watch. Nobody believes you—you’re hanging on to the cliff by your perfectly-manicured fingernails as the city you purport to lead slides deeper into anarchy. The truth is, you’re just as clueless as your inept predecessors. You became mayor on April 25—just four months ago—but you’re already a laughingstock. Now, everyone in America knows that what they thought about Oakland—that it’s the second most dangerous city in the U.S.—is actually true. And all you can do with your useless, pointless power is to deny, obfuscate, throw red herrings, go to more ethnic restaurant openings—and, yes, keep on lying.
Maybe you’re not lying. Maybe you actually believe the fairy tales you spout. Who knows what goes on in your mind, dulled to senescence by decades of doing nothing but genuflecting before your union masters. One watches Mayor Lee on T.V. and sees the mouth moving, hears the clichés, but what she says is increasingly detached from reality. This is a woman who was measuring the drapes in City Hall long before the election. She didn’t really have to run for office, in the traditional sense of running. She didn’t have to campaign and actually get out there in front of the public and answer tough questions. No, she was coronated by the unions that created her, a coup amplified by a local media too lazy, incurious and incompetent to actually investigate what she stood for. The result is the kind of embarrassing monologue she delivered yesterday when, asked about the shocking multiple crimes committed in Oakland, she repeated her lie that Trump is “fearmongering” in Oakland. No, Madame Former-Black Panther, he’s not. Everyone, including you, is afraid to walk around Oakland. I dare you to do it without your security detail. There’s a gangster element running rampant, and guess what, Madame Mayor? You and your sinister woke politics helped birth it.
I want to conclude this post with something that went down yesterday, when Bed, Bath & Beyond’s Chairman announced that from now on, the chain “will not open or operate retail stores in California.” This immediately prompted San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan, a sensible mayor, to tweet: “This is serious--we are shooting ourselves in the foot and we need to acknowledge that.” As Bed, Bath & Beyond said, “California has created one of the most overregulated, expensive and risky environments for businesses in America [through] higher taxes, higher wages that many businesses simply cannot sustain, and endless regulations that strangle growth.” And Oakland is the poster child for this anti-business insanity. From the woke viewpoint, if the city desires more money for, say, an anti-violence program, it’s easy: increase business taxes. If the city wants local businesses to hire more people of color, simple: create new regulations that mandate it. If the city thinks that employees need more money, easy: raise the minimum wage.
This is the dark side of socialism, a command economy with dictatorial mandates imposed by race-crazy bureaucrats. Everyone in Oakland claims to be afraid that Trump is imposing an authoritarian autocracy on us. But they never seem to realize that we already exist under a dictatorship of the proletariat that works no better here than it ever did in the old Soviet Union which, let us remember, collapsed. As Oakland is doing right before our eyes, under the fiddling, blubbering, doddering watch of Barbara Lee.
Steve Heimoff