Abandoned row houses in Baltimore, Maryland. By Jon Bilous @ Shutterstock.com
In Baltimore, things have been good for the rats and not so good for homo sapiens. If you have seen “The Wire” you know what Roger Kimball means when he describes the T.V. series as more documentary than fiction. Drugs. Violence. Poverty. Squalor.
When Senator Bernie Sanders (D-Vt.) described parts of Baltimore as, “You would think that you were in a Third World country,” did the socialist presidential aspirant mean it as a compliment?
Baltimore’s own disgraced Democrat mayor, Catherine Pugh, complained about the same infestation of rats and dead animals that President Trump mentioned in his tweet. No one in the media, apparently, rushed to rat out Mayor Pugh as a racist.
The political class – like Elijah Cummings – will deny Baltimore’s dysfunctional, “rat-infested” conditions, writes Christopher Roach in American Greatness. The people living there do not need reminders. “Perhaps they will now realize that they’ve been swindled by those supposedly looking out for them.”
More important, regardless of who is president or who represents them in Congress, they and their leaders need to seek a renewal of their moral and cultural life. They may not like Trump or his tone, but his reminder of the failure of black political leaders to usher in the significant improvement of black communities is undeniable.
Trump’s message in recent weeks is straightforward: those who purport to represent these poor and desperate people provide little in the way of good government or service to them.
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