Oregon's city of Portland is looking more like Caracas, Venezuela by the day, not just in its Marxist ideology, but in its moral rot and physical shambles.

John Hinderaker at Power Line noted a few days ago that he had until recently taken comfort in knowing that his home city of Minneapolis wasn't the worst-run city in America, because of Portland.

But now the blue-city shambles is taking another turn - Portland's leaders are openly screaming for federal law enforcement coming in to protect federal property, such as courthouses, to leave the burning garbage dump that is their city. They'd rather the city be left to fester.

Fox News has a very good report:

What a dump.

According to the Washington Post:

During a video news conference Friday, Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler twice called the federal police in his city President Trump’s “personal army” and said that he is joining a chorus of Oregon’s elected officials in sending a clear message to Washington: “Take your troops out of Portland.”

“This is part of a coordinated strategy out of Trump’s White House to use federal troops to bolster his sagging polling data, and it is an absolute abuse of federal law enforcement officials,” Wheeler said. “As we were starting to see things de-escalate, their actions last Saturday and every night since have actually ratcheted up the tension on our streets.”

There was also this leftist fool:

“I am proud to be among the loud chorus of elected officials calling for the federal troops in Portland’s streets to go home,” Portland Commissioner Jo Ann Hardesty said in a statement shared with The Post on Sunday. “Their presence here has escalated tensions and put countless Portlanders exercising their First Amendment rights in greater danger.”

The governor of Oregon was just as bad:

Oregon Gov. Kate Brown said President Donald Trump, who deployed Department of Homeland Security officers to Portland, "is looking for a confrontation in Oregon in the hopes of winning political points in Ohio or Iowa."

"Now he is deploying federal officers to patrol the streets of Portland in a blatant abuse of power by the federal government," Brown, a Democrat, said in a statement late Thursday.

And here's more overwrought rhetoric from an under-brained Oregon senator:

“A peaceful protester in Portland was shot in the head by one of Donald Trump’s secret police,” Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) wrote in a Thursday tweet that also called out acting DHS secretary Chad Wolf. “Now Trump and Chad Wolf are weaponizing the DHS as their own occupying army to provoke violence on the streets of my hometown because they think it plays well with right-wing media.”

According to federal officials, leftist anarchists were preparing to attack federal property, such as courthouses, had attempted to break and enter, and were last seen chanting of their plans to burn it down. If that doesn't suggest a situation that requires federal intervention -- to defend the threatened third branch of government with its courts and rule of law -- what does?

A federal official tweeted this:

“I offered @DHSgov support to help locally address the situation that’s going on in Portland, and their only response was: please pack up and go home. That’s just not going to happen on my watch.” pic.twitter.com/BW8UdbNZ9c

— Acting Secretary Chad Wolf (@DHS_Wolf) July 17, 2020

Oregon's U.S. Attorney, a federal rather than state official, had this to say:

“The overarching goal of law enforcement is public protection and, during tense and dangerous situations, de-escalation. Federal law enforcement officers protecting the Mark O. Hatfield U.S. Courthouse and other federal buildings have been operating with those two critical goals. Night after night for the past 50 nights, they have protected the federal courthouse from incursion and fire. They have rebuffed efforts to enter the building by force and have been met with an onslaught of commercial fireworks, laser strikes, glass, mortars, paint, and anything else near at hand. They have endeavored to find the individuals within the crowd who are committing these violent acts and arrest them in a manner that is safe for both the officers and nearby non-violent protesters. In limited instances, their conduct has been questioned and the Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General appropriately opened an investigation into the use of less lethal ammunition directed at a [protester] last week."

What we are looking at here is an unprecedented opposition to any semblance of law and order. Worse still, we are seeing a city and state at odds with federal interests in the most basic of interests, protecting federal property.

We are seeing fantastical narratives from Oregon's mayor in particular, but pretty much all of them.

Start with the claim that the Portland violence had died down until the feds came along. The feds were causing the problems, not the rabid leftists. Baloney, Portland has been a leftist hellhole for months - just look at the evidence shown from the Fox News coverage. Widespread reports about people not being able to go out at nights and crime running rampant didn't suggest anything at all dying down, it suggested a festering problem growing and getting worse.

And, considering Wheeler's bizarre projecting, not a word about why there was violence and hellishness in the first place, a violence brought about by Wheeler's own weak leadership and more likely, kowtowing to the rabid mob. The mob had pretty much become his governing arm, either by choice or default. That ought to be grounds to demand he forfeit his office, given his hostility to all rule of law and failure to maintain the peace. We haven't really seen anything like this in the last 100 years. Perhaps the best analogy would be that some dispirited elements of the defeated Confederacy embraced the ways of the mob, unable to accept the results of the Civil War. They became Klansmen. Portland looks disturbingly similar in its defiance.

There was also the nonsense from several of them, claiming Trump was only cracking down on their hellhole city to please voters in Ohio and Iowa, to get his numbers up in the polls. Let's translate that: Instead of numbers up in the polls, how about 'doing things people like'? People like it when laws mean what they say and rule of law is a given in any American city. They like courthouses to be courthouses, and police to police, all things that are anathema to the freaks running Portland. Why would people support the president and reward him in the polls if his administration decided to protect federal, taxpayer-paid-for property? It's completely opaque to them that this would be popular - except of course among all those un-hip people in Iowa, as one of them said. By extension, they unwittingly signalled that they had been keeping their city a hellhole to keep President Trump's poll numbers down, which doesn't speak well for them.

Thirdly, there were the bizarre and Confederate-like howls to get out. They want the feds to abandon federal property to the Antifa mobs they succor. The howls should be treated with the contempt they deserve and the federal response should if anything be harsher. We all know what they really want out, not the feds, but President Trump, out from the White House. That's what explains the vehemence of their statements. They never really got over the 2016 election and now that they know they can't overturn it, they turn their own city into a dump and tell the President to get out that way.

It just serves as a new argument to re-elect Trump.

Image credit: Fox News YouTube screen shot