Last Friday Attorney General Jeff Sessions issued a press release reminding sanctuary cities of their obligation to enforce federal immigration laws or risk losing their federal funding. Within the release, Sessions noted that Chicago's murder rate has risen "more than 50 percent from the 2015 levels" and that New York City continues to experience gang murders due to the city's "soft on crime" stance. Here's what he said:
"Additionally, many of these jurisdictions are also crumbling under the weight of illegal immigration and violent crime. The number of murders in Chicago has skyrocketed, rising more than 50 percent from the 2015 levels. New York City continues to see gang murder after gang murder, the predictable consequence of the city's “soft on crime” stance. And just several weeks ago in California’s Bay Area, after a raid captured 11 MS-13 members on charges including murder, extortion and drug trafficking, city officials seemed more concerned with reassuring illegal immigrants that the raid was unrelated to immigration than with warning other MS-13 members that they were next."
We suspect that Sessions' "soft on crime" comment was in reference to an ongoing feud between the NYPD and Mayor Bill De Blasio that erupted back in 2014 after De Blasio effectively legitimized the assassination of two cops in broad daylight by referring to minorities as "oppressed" and "threatened" by local police. The situation garnered national media attention when the NYPD turned their backs on De Blasio after he showed up at the funeral ceremony of the murdered cops.
Of course, the main stream media had a slightly different interpretation of Sessions' "soft on crime" comment and has worked itself into a tizzy insisting that the Department of Justice is 'attacking' the NYPD.
As evidence, here is a comical exchange from MSNBC this morning in which Joe Scarborough insists that Sessions is "attacking the NYPD" while Mika accuses the DOJ of propagating "fake news":
Scarborough: "The Attorney General sends out a letter basically attacking the NYPD saying that they are 'soft on crime.' Has he never been to New York?"
Schumer: "We are the lowest of the 25 biggest cities in crime."
Mika: "But they say crime is out of control."
Schumer: "My daughters ride the subway at 4am and I'm perfectly happy about it. We are a safe city. And, by the way, New York has grown from 7 million people in 1990 to 8.5 million today, the largest of any city because crime went down."
Mika: "There's this talk about 'fake news' but that quote we just put up there is 'fake news' coming from the Attorney General."
Schumer: "We're no longer fact-based. The founding fathers created a country based on fact. We don't have a fact base. If Breitbart News and the New York Times are regarded with equal credibility, you worry about this democracy."
We won't even bother to highlight all of the instances in which the New York Times decided to push 'fake news' regarding the Trump administration's alleged ties to Russian hackers (but feel free to read this for an example: "NYTimes Reports Trump Aides' "Repeated Contact" With Russian Intel Officials, Admits No Collusion Discovered").
That said, we can at least agree with Chuck that many politicians no longer live in a "fact-based" world....in fact, here is just one of our favorite examples...
...and this one is also very good.