Must-Read Of the Day: The WaPo's Richard Cohen Gets Mugged By Reality… Again

They say a conservative is a liberal who’s just been mugged, but for years Richard Cohen of the Washington Post has adamantly refused to accept the evidence of his own senses, and steadfastly hewed to the usual leftist blatherskite, even as he’s groped, however asymptotically, toward the truth.

Maybe he’s finally been mugged once too often. His latest column is called, “Did Liberals Get It Wrong On Crime?” —

This is a good news, bad news column. The good news is that crime is again down across the nation — in big cities, small cities, flourishing cities and cities that are not for the timid. Surprisingly, this has happened in the teeth of the Great Recession, meaning that those disposed to attribute criminality to poverty — my view at one time — have some strenuous rethinking to do. It could be, as conservatives have insisted all along, that crime is committed by criminals. For liberals, this is bad news indeed.

Bad news, huh? Why? Cohen never really explains, although the implication is clear: whenever your world-view is based on a fantasy of the way the world should work, instead of the reality of how it actually operates, the day of reckoning is never very pleasant.

Whatever the reasons, it now seems fairly clear that something akin to culture and not economics is the root cause of crime. By and large everyday people do not go into a life of crime because they have been laid off or their home is worth less than their mortgage. They do something else, but whatever it is, it does not generally entail packing heat. Once this becomes an accepted truth, criminals will lose what status they still retain as victims.

This is not as outlandish as it may seem. I recall that after the Watts riots of 1965 (34 dead), someone determined that the mobs looted only those stores owned by the miserly and the mean. In other words, the store owners had it coming, and the rioters, which is to say the criminals, were just getting some justice, often in the form of a TV set.

So two years later, in the immediate aftermath of the Newark riots (26 dead), I conducted a one-man, totally unscientific survey of looted stores. I detected no pattern. Generous owners were trashed. Good guys suffered. The mob was not administering justice. It was getting stuff for free.

The Watts survey tended to support liberal dogma that criminals were like everyone else, only more desperate. Probably the ultimate example of this was cited to me years ago by a woman who had her necklace yanked from her while walking in Manhattan. When I commiserated with her, she said of the crook — I am not making this up — “he probably needed it more than I did.” This is liberal guilt at its apogee… mocked by Stephen Sondheim in his lyrics for the “West Side Story” song “Gee, Officer Krupke” —

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Welcome to reality, Mr. Cohen.