Which Republicans?

Kevin Williamson notes the absence of Republicans running the country's urban hellholes.

There has been a striking display of chutzpah among Democrats as they try to make a national campaign out of police-brutality allegations that wrong-foots Republicans. Regardless of what you think about the merit of the underlying allegations, the question of how police departments and other municipal agencies are run in Chicago, St. Louis, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, San Francisco, etc., has not a whole heck of a lot to do with any Republican: We are talking almost exclusively about Democrat-monopoly cities that have been that way for a long time. The extent of Republican involvement in the issue, if Moulitsas’s vapid prose and our eyes are to be believed, is Giuliani’s talking about the Super Bowl halftime show on Fox News.

Who runs Baltimore? Who runs Chicago? Who runs Los Angeles? How far from the site of Tamir Rice’s shooting would you have to drive to find a Republican with real municipal political power? What’s standing in the way of reforming the Cleveland police department? John Kasich? Please. You may as well blame Rick Santorum. If you are going to blame a Republican for the state of Baltimore, it would make just as much sense to choose Abe Lincoln as Rudy Giuliani.