There was an amazing confluence of events in Oakland, California, when über-leftist Barbara "Call Me Senator" Boxer, the former senator from California whose departure paved the way for Kamala Harris, was mugged in a city that has led the way in defunding the police.  Had the elderly Boxer been injured, I'd like to think I'm a decent enough person that I would have been shocked by what happened and felt for her.  However, as she was not injured, I can only say that karma came a-knockin' on her door and that literally being mugged by reality is, perhaps, a useful experience for a leftist.

According to SFGATE, a San Francisco–based online news outlet, Boxer got shoved and lost her phone:

Boxer, 80, was assaulted by an assailant who "pushed her in the back, stole her cell phone and jumped in a waiting car," the tweet said.

The former senator was not seriously injured in the confrontation, according to the tweet.

In other words, she was a victim of the same smash-and-grab crime that's been sweeping America in the past year, whether the smashing is a window, a showcase, or a person.  She's lucky that she didn't suffer the fate of the man in Brooklyn, who was bludgeoned into unconsciousness and literally rolled across the sidewalk for his wallet.

To understand the schadenfreude I feel about what happened to Boxer, you first need to know her politics.  Boxer was a leftist — although, in her defense, she wasn't a bat-fecal-matter crazy leftist because she left Congress at the same time Trump entered, an event that drove the Democrat party completely insane.  Indeed, looking at what a pre-2017 über-leftist stood for, it's amazing to see how far left the party shifted just during Trump's presidency.  (It's shifted even farther left in the six months of Biden's White House occupancy.)

Boxer stood for the usual leftist stuff (abortion, environmentalism, anti-gun, hate crimes, anti-war, etc.), but she also had moments of sanity.  Although she despised Netanyahu, she generally supported Israel (something that's now anathema among Democrats).  She wanted election integrity laws but did show incipient signs of Trump Derangement Syndrome when she wanted to end the Electoral College after Trump's 2016 win.  And she took useful stands on issues such as autism and health insurance (saying Americans should be able to get the same quality insurance policies as members of Congress).

Those positions would get Boxer shamed out of the party nowadays.  However, we all know that, had she stayed in the Senate, she would have gone as hard left as the rest of the Democrats.  If you look at Boxer's voting record, she was always among the most progressive voters in Congress, earning 100% scores from every leftist group in America and single-digit scores from conservative groups. In other words, she always voted to the far left on whatever issue was before the Senate.  That almost certainly means that she would have been a cheerleader for Black Lives Matter madness, including the push to defund the police.

And defunding the police is exactly what Oakland, a crime-ridden American city did.  In 2020, the Oakland City Council cut $14 million from the police budget, even as homicides increased by 47%.  At the end of June 2021, the same council cut the budget by another $18 million, even though homicides were up 87% in 2021.  Many on the council would have cut the budget by 50%, but some sanity prevailed.  This self-destructive madness is the logical terminus of Boxer's politics.

Here's the beauty of Boxer's brush with reality: normally, these crazy leftist policies, everything from defunding the police to opening the borders, leave the rich White and Black leftists who espouse them untouched.  They live in quiet, safe, often gated communities, from which illegal aliens and other criminals are barred by good police forces, security systems, and private guards.  It's very rare — indeed, I'm hard-pressed to think of another example — to see one of the rich leftists who enacted these horrible policies come a cropper because of them.

And that's why I'm feeling nothing but schadenfreude over Boxer's truly minimal brush with the kind of crime her party is visiting on ordinary people across America's Democrat-run cities.  That's true even though, to the extent these cities are Democrat-run, the ordinary people now victimized by crime are the same ones who put maniacs on the city councils and into their mayors' offices.  Eventually, they're going to have to get mugged by reality, too, and start voting Democrats out of office, if anything is going to change.

Image: Barbara Boxer by Gage Skidmore.  CC BY-SA 2.0.

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