Liberalism cannot bring itself to confront the reality of predators and evil

Watching Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler’s agonizingly painful and humiliating press conference Sunday night, I was reminded that liberals simply have no capacity for dealing with reality when it comes to violence at home or abroad.

Here is a mayor who has presided over 90-plus consecutive nights of violence in the city which has the most active Antifa faction in the country. Stores have been invaded, buildings have been burned, police have been injured, while the Portland city government and the Oregon state government have been relentlessly incompetent and ineffective.

On Saturday, a supporter of President Donald Trump was killed by the left-wing activists. Apparent Antifa members there practically celebrated his murder.

Faced with this grim reality and the very real threat that the violence could escalate and a lot more people could get hurt or killed, the mayor went on a tirade attacking President Trump.

The mayor was reduced by his ideological straightjacket of avoiding effective force into pathetically appealing – in a 45-minute press conference – for people to quit being violent.

This might have been understandable more than 90 days ago when the first violence occurred. But having the mayor begging people to be nice after more than 13 weeks of nightly violence is a sign of serious, deep derangement.

Mayor Wheeler’s commitment to opposing the violence with appeasement and groveling is made even more bizarre by the reality that in Minneapolis, Kenosha, and elsewhere, the National Guard has suppressed violence rather than placated it.