NEVER LET A GOOD CRISIS GO TO WASTE.

Will Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel take advantage of the most recent weekend carnage to rediscover bourgeois habits?  He's at least giving lip service.  "If you say enough is enough, you must come forward as a neighborhood where a moral center of gravity holds. . . . [There are] too many people with criminal records on the street, and there is a shortage of values about what is right and what is wrong, what is acceptable, what is condoned and what is condemned." At least he's talking about what happens when the village combines the redeeming features of a hippie commune and the projects.

To address the shortage, though, would be to go against decades of benign neglect, or is it outright enabling of the yobs?  John Kass writes, "Cook County’s one-party political class seems incapable of addressing [the carnage]; from the prosecutors who don’t prosecute, to judges, to the police brass trying to keep their jobs, to Chicago aldermen." He continues, "What’s needed is clear policy, which isn’t about emotion, but rather clear thinking.

We're unlikely to see that from The Combine.  We'd be unlikely to get policies that work in cities with Democrat politicians dependent on dependent voters.  Jack Dunphy gets it.

As Rahm Emanuel knows, to take a stand against hit-and-run fatherhood is to cast blame on a significant portion of the Chicago electorate. What’s more, to do so would also cast blame on the leftist policies that gave rise to the welfare state and to which he owes his political career. The vast government apparatus that over the years has come to make fathers unnecessary, at least in a financial sense, lies at the very heart of Democratic politics.

It's worth recalling that Blaming the Victim documented the abuses clients of New Haven's public assistance programs, early in the days of the so-called War on Poverty, endured.  Ignore personal agency and court the consequences.  Will those include a serious attempt by the Democrats' base in the hardscrabble parts of Chicago to take agency and turf out the mayor, and much of that political class?