Carville bluntly told Imus: "You know, look - this is a humanitarian - you know, you're smart enough to see this . . . People, you know, if it continues, we're going to start to see civil unrest in this country. I hate to say that, but I think it's imminently possible."
Of course its imminently possible. We have created an entitlement society.
Then, as if that wasn't bad enough (it was), we added to it by enabling people to pretend to have via debt. So we gave the people the illusion of prosperity without actually having to work for prosperity. We offshored the production that could have provided people with living wages (albeit in exchange for hard work) and replaced that with capital flows and debt - that is, the ability of the government to finance programs on a temporary basis.
The problem of course is that such flows are temporary, as the interest and principal compounds. Eventually it compounds to the point that you cannot continue to make the debt service, at which point it implodes. Then that which was allegedly good turns into very bad.
But these outcomes are foreseeable. Those government entities that allowed this to occur are thus not to be excused; they are instead to be held to account. Chief among them is James Carville himself, who now tries to deflect his own piece of responsibility for what has occurred.
Emanuel said he spoke with McCarthy over the weekend and again this morning about the situation. The mayor said the city's reputation as a safe place to work and shop downtown is being endangered by the thuggery. Many of the attacks are happening near the biggest tourist and shopping attractions in the city.
But, CBS 2's Jim Williams reports, the problem of mob attacks downtown is much bigger than the weekend beatings, according to beat cops who wanted to remain anonymous.
This isn't a new problem.
I lived in Chicago for 13 years. The City is extraordinarily hostile to the premise that citizens have a right to self-defense (an unalienable right, incidentally.) For years the police and city mavens have deigned to have two standards - there were celebrities, including professional sports figures, who were caught with pistols in their cars that were given a shrug and a nod while ordinary citizens would be imprisoned for the same thing. There is no such thing as a concealed carry permit in Chicago and until being forced by the US Supreme Court it was illegal to own and possess a pistol in your own home.
Of course thugs think nothing of such laws and possess and use all the firearms they'd like. After all, once you've decided to be a criminal and felon, what's another crime?
There has long been a problem in certain parts of the city, with the borders changing somewhat over the years. Chicago could end this crap in an afternoon - drop the BS games on personal protection and recognize the Second Amendment. The next thug that tried something like this and got ventilated would be the last.
But that would bring true empowerment to the people instead of dependence. It would demonstrate that not only are the cops not required to help you (a legal fact, whether you like it or not) but it might promote the idea of law enforcement and law-abiding citizens standing together. And while there are many who claim that the citizens would be "terrible shots" and would injure or kill many innocents this way, they could hardly do worse than in Miami, where law enforcement managed to shoot four innocent bystanders and then not only committed an obvious felonious assault on a camera owner (pointing a gun in someone's face who has committed no crime is felonious assault, and using a firearm to do it is a 10 year felony in Florida) they also attempted to seize a news camera as well in a futile and puerile attempt to keep the public from seeing their incompetence at arms.
What Carville and the rest of the clowns in the political sphere had better pay attention to is that there are far more "bad guys" than cops and in the general sense a whole lot of those cops are crappy marksmen. Our "drug war" has provided the thugs with a budget that rivals that of the police and in some cases exceeds it, which means they're quite capable of going "nut-to-nut" with law enforcement should they so choose. As the noose tightens around the neck of the common man, a noose that our government has created the rope for, tied and strung, resentment will rise as opportunity disappears and the level of violence inevitably increases.
There is in fact only one reasonable, prudent and workable answer to this problem: Align the interests of law-abiding citizens and law enforcement, and reverse the cycle of dependence.
There are many more "good guys" (ordinary law abiding citizens) than thugs. Neutering their ability to defend themselves and then adding insult on top of it, strutting around like a military organization and harassing the citizenry, will not - because it numerically cannot - succeed.
The cycle of dependence must be broken. Opportunity must return, and to do so we must stop pretending that the "Free **** Army" can have what it wants - that we can effectively "buy off" violence for "today" with more and more handouts, and suppress those who go "wild" with lots of cops.
That paradigm must change, and if you live in a place like Chicago, and can't manage to convince the government of your town to do so then you better get the hell out of there before things get really bad - because if we continue on this path, they will.
