Drudge is trumpeting the high murder/rape rate in the USA

[Roon]

so things in Iraq don't look so bad. What an asshole.
www.drudgereport.com

[mtnester]

1. Wait until he really goes over and blames illegal immigrants

or them gay people...

Oh wait..and Clinton

[jaxx]

2. Nothing pisses me off more than seeing troops in Iraq being compared

to being on US streets. It totally tries to take away the danger that little king put them in to.

[ThoughtCriminal]

3. So murder and rape skyrocket under Bush

We should be grateful he found a way to export that?

Crime rates peaked when Bush I was in office, declined during the Clinton years and then started to rise again under Bush II. Another great GOP success.

The number of murders in the US is still much less than the number killed in Iraq since the invasion even thought the population is about 1/10 the USA population.

There was a popular bit of right-wing spam circulated last year and even quoted by a few pundits and I think even Trent Lott. It claimed that the fatal casualty rate for US troops was less than the murder rate in DC. However, what it really showed is how bad conservatives are at math. It compared one year of fatalities in DC to one month of fatalities in Iraq. Further, it reached back to the record setting murder rate in DC of 1990 (by 2000 the rate had dropped to about 1/2 that). The actual odds of a U.S. soldier getting killed in Iraq is about 14-18 times greater than being murdered in DC (One of the most dangerous in the country). And this doesn't even include the citizens of Iraq.

I would also point out that in the middle of a civil war, countless murders and rapes go unreported.

[Historic NY]

4. I proves Clinton was right in putting 100000 cops on the street........

Democrats were more serious about taking back America's streets....Bush is more concerned with taking everything he can and giving it to corporate America. Bush has allowed key provisions of Clinton's crime fighting initiatives to expire or to be eliminated.
It funny since Bush's own Justice Dept pretty much acknowledges that there is no present policy toward crime prevention or control. Republicans used to stand on "law & order planks" I guess now its "law & disorder". It goes to show Bush is a failure. Just one more example of Republican policy of doing things on the cheap. I haven't read the entire FBI report but having experience in crime & policing, I would venture an educated guess the the largest reason for the expanse of crime in the "heartland" is from both "organized gangs" and "meth". The northwest and west went through similar problems back in the late 80's & 90's, with both.There is a big disconnect in Congress over both of these and the connection to crime. The same thing happened in the 80's when crack became the rage. Small town & rural crime has risen mostly due to the inability to develop specific strategies to deal with it. The administration has sucked the well dry to fund Homeland Security, that it did away with funding successful crime programs that have been in place for decades. Case in point the anthrax attacks, still not solved were actually less of a threat than the "meth' problem is. What has worked for the better part of a decade is now gone and crime has begun to rise again....I say thats a successful Republican administration....not.

http://www.breitbart.com/news/2006/06/12/D8I6QFP00.html

<snip>

Criminal justice experts said the statistics reflect the nation's complacency in fighting crime, a product of dramatic declines in the and the abandonment of effective programs that emphasized prevention, putting more police officers on the street and controlling the spread of guns.

"We see that budgets for policing are being slashed and the federal government has gotten out of that business," said James Alan Fox, a criminal justice professor at Northeastern University in Boston. "Funding for prevention at the federal level and many localities are down and the (National Rifle Association) has renewed strength."

<snip>

Crime last year increased in all regions, although the 5.7 percent rise in the Midwest was at least three times any other region's. These states make up the Midwest: Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, South Dakota and Wisconsin.