EVEN WHEN SOMEONE SHOOTS A DEMOCRAT, IT'S THE DEMOCRATS' FAULT

Mitch McConnell made some remarks on the Senate floor today, then posted them on his Senate website.

“For the first time in 12 years, an outright majority of Americans say crime has gotten worse in their area over the past year.

“Many Democrats have spent the last year and a half trying to defund police, smear law enforcement, and go soft on crime. As a result, innocent citizens have spent a year and a half watching murders, carjackings, and other violent crimes skyrocket.

“On Monday, my hometown of Louisville was stunned by what appears to have been an assassination attempt against a Jewish mayoral candidate by a prominent far-left activist who’d previously called for defunding our Police Department.

“This far-left Black Lives Matter activist and defund-the-police cheerleader walked into a Jewish Democrat’s campaign headquarters and opened fire.

“Obviously, every aspect of this is still under investigation, including the suspect’s mental condition.

“But guess what: He’s already been let out of jail.

“A left-wing bail fund partnered with BLM Louisville to bail him out.

“Less than 48 hours after this activist tried to literally murder a politician, the radical left bailed their comrade out of jail.

As New York magazine's Eric Levitz notes, "Through the American Rescue Plan, [President] Biden sent $350 billion in fiscal aid to states and cities. He then encouraged municipalities to invest those funds into expanding police departments. Nearly half of America’s 20 largest cities have followed Biden’s advice." So the leader of the Democratic Party called for the use of federal money to fund the police. And yet we're meant to infer that 100% of the rise in crime is Democrats' fault. It somehow has nothing to do with a massive rise in gun purchases cheered on by Republicans. It apparently isn't part of the same national pathology that's led to a sharp increase in attacks on store clerks and airline personnel, nearly all of which are the work of right-wingers.

And while McConnell doesn't refer to the shooting suspect as a Democrat, he says the man was bailed out by "the radical left" -- a phrase he last used a month ago when he suggested that President Biden might "outsource" the process of choosing a Supreme Court nominee to "the radical left."

McConnell's intended audience doesn't believe there's any daylight between "the radical left" and the Democrats -- or between "the radical left" and massive multinational corporations. He said today:

“Since 2020, a long list of prominent corporations have donated or pledged enormous amounts of money to the radical nationwide BLM parent organization.

“One wonders if any of their corporate money helped spring this would-be assassin from jail.

(One assumes that McConnell would raise no objection if a police union helped bail out if an officer who killed an unarmed Black civilian. But they're allowed to rally around their own. Black Lives Matter isn't.)

The suspect, Quintez Brown, was praised in the past by Democratic politicians, but he subsequently rejected both major parties. He wrote this last month:

The revolutionary consciousness of the masses must understand that the struggle against the negative forces of genocide and fascism will not end at the ballot box of the ruling class. Attempting to get within one of the two major parties has caused our leaders to become co-opted with their interests shunted to the background. They have become expendable.

He was not a Democrat at the time of the shooting. And his target was a Democrat. But McConnell wants his listeners to believe that Democrats are to blame for this -- not the fact that virtually anyone can obtain a gun in this country, not the fact that Brown had mental health issues, not the fact that he'd turned his back on change through the system and rejected the Democratic Party. Nope, it's all our fault.

McConnell said today:

“Now, I'm confident that if an activist claiming to be conservative tried to assassinate a politician, whatever his mental state, the media would open a 24-7 ‘national conversation’ about rhetoric on the right.

“Somehow I doubt attempted murder by a BLM activist will get that treatment.

“I doubt we’ll have a ‘national conversation’ about the constant chorus of powerful voices calling our society evil.

Did we have a national conversation when right-wing activists plotted to assassinate Governor Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan? If so, I missed it.

But there's the problem: Republicans over the years have developed a narrative linking any pathology by anyone not on the right to every Democrat. Republican voters understand this narrative and don't need to have it explained to them. Democrats, on the other hand, rarely link the worst right-wingers to the Republican Party -- occasional figures in the party (Donald Trump, Marjorie Taylor Greene) might be identified with violent radicalism, but never, say, Mitch McConnell. But somehow it's Joe Biden's fault when a Democrat gets shot.