Even liberal Maureen Dowd of The Times admits DC – Latest News
Proving the outdated noticed that a conservative is a liberal who’s been mugged, one of The New York Time’s marquee columnists has agreed — grudgingly, stubbornly, kicking and screaming — that President Donald Trump is correct: There’s an excessive amount of crime within the nation’s capital.
And, simply presumably, Washington, DC, presently beneath Democratic control, might benefit from Trump calling within the National Guard and different feds to help restore law and order.
“It’s ridiculous to drag F.B.I. agents from their desks to be cops on the beat. And the tableau of National Guard troops — even unarmed — raises the specter of martial law being normalized and weaponized,” Pulitzer Prize-winning DC-based scribe Maureen Dowd wrote over the weekend.
Then, maintain your horses, La Dowd all of a sudden hit the brakes, skidded, and did a full 180.
“It is also true that many D.C. residents are secretly glad to see more uniforms. No matter what statistics say, they don’t feel safe.”
This about-face was introduced on by her sister’s close encounter with slovenly car thieves. As Dowd tells it, she was having dinner together with her sibling Peggy within the upscale Georgetown neighborhood lately when the metaphorical mugging zapped the liberal proper out of her: Peg’s beloved Buick vanished from its parking spot by Maureen’s home.
“Two polite officers who responded to our call said they could do little, amid a rash of brazen car thefts by teenagers,” Dowd wrote.
“One officer said that, even if they saw the perp driving in her car, they could not chase him, because of laws passed by the D.C. Council.”
Dowd initially appeared to dismiss Trump’s hard-core stance on juvenile crime as over-the-top payback in opposition to two 15-year-olds charged with assaulting and trying to carjack a former Department of Government Efficiency worker. That is, till Peggy’s Buick confirmed up in a park in close by Maryland the morning after it was snatched — nonetheless working, practically out of fuel, with a $215 tow charge she was required to pay, Dowd griped.
There was a half-eaten pizza, grape soda cans, fast-food wrappers, a used condom and a pair of debit playing cards inside, Dowd reported. But cops stated they may do nothing to nail the fiends.
Insult to harm, Peggy quickly obtained more than $1,800-worth of speed-camera tickets for driving 70 miles an hour in a 25 mph zone, and needed to show the car was stolen to be able to get the summonses tossed.
Dowd’s co-workers haven’t gotten the message. Last week, shortly after the president declared struggle on DC crime, The Times labored double-time to reduce the menace.
One article refuted Trump’s assertion that the 2023 homicide price was the very best “probably ever.” False! crowed the paper. The murder price of about 40.4 deaths per 100,000 people was the very best in 26 years, not ever. And in 2024, that quantity dipped to some 26.6 corpses per 100,000 Washingtonians
But Dowd shouldn’t be favorably impressed.
“While the district’s homicide rate has fallen,” she writes, “it’s almost as high as New York’s at its most dangerous, in 1990.”
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Dowd, whose father was a cop, confesses she packs pepper spray today to guard her from troublemakers when strolling round city, a behavior she adopted years in the past when her mom drove her to her faculty dorm with a butcher knife on the seat between them. Her mother additionally gave her a Chinese letter opener with written instructions on how to search out the jugular of an assailant.
Over the weekend, Times reporters visited DC neighborhoods populated primarily with people of shade to search out out how residents felt about makes an attempt to wipe out crime. Perhaps surprisingly to the Times, not everybody in these communities opposes being safer. Though each attempt was made to search out people who stated they didn’t trust the president, others admitted liking to proceed respiration.
Dowd summed issues up, writing, “But progressives shouldn’t fall into Trump’s entice and play down crime, as soon as more getting on the flawed facet of an inflammatory concern. As with inflation, they need to do not forget that personal experiences can rely more than sanguine statistics.
“Even if Trump is being diabolical, Democrats should not pretend everything is fine here. Because it’s not.”
Finally — all of the information that’s match to print.
