A confession: When House Republicans announced plans for a New York hearing to showcase rampant crime, I didn’t need to curb my enthusiasm.
I assumed the worst, that the hearing would bring New Yorkers bad news they already know and that Democrats and their media shills would dismiss the event as theater designed to embarrass Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg.
I was right.
The hearing, partly because of its timing, smelled like payback for Bragg’s flimsy indictment of Donald Trump, giving Dems and the media the ammunition to repeatedly ridicule it as a partisan dog-and-pony show.
But I was also wrong in a major way: I underestimated how clueless and heartless Democrats could be about the sufferings of actual crime victims.
My big takeaway was that they really don’t give a damn.
Nadler’s unforced error
Manhattan Rep. Jerry Nadler, for example, made the brain-dead mistake of citing declining homicide rates and decreased shootings in New York as proof that Judiciary Committee Republicans were using crime as a “pretext” to “bully the district attorney.”
Telling grieving families that statistics say crime really isn’t so bad in New York and it’s worse elsewhere is tone-deaf.
That’s what 30 years in Washington will do to you.
The indifference of Nadler and his fellow travelers to the witnesses’ pain and demands for justice made the hearing instructive.
As a result, the Dems snatched defeat from the jaws of victory and the hearing was more than worthwhile.
The deniers were ice cold when warmth and compassion were called for, with Rep. Daniel Goldman offering another example of callousness.
His attempt to label the day a waste of time earned him a much-deserved scolding from the angry mother of a murder victim.
“Don’t insult my intelligence,” Madeline Brame snapped at Goldman, an heir to the Levi Strauss fortune and a prolific stock trader whose district includes lower Manhattan and parts of Brooklyn.
“You’re trying to insult me like I’m not aware of what’s going on here,” Brame said.
She testified that Bragg’s office downgraded and dismissed charges against two offenders who — along with two others — brutally beat and stabbed her son, Army vet Hason Correa, to death in Harlem.
“When Alvin Bragg came into office, he was handed a strong, trial-ready murder case,” Brame said.
“He dismissed — completely dismissed — gang-assault and murder indictments against two of the defendants clearly on video participating in the brutal, savage slaughter of my son. Hason was kicked, punched, stomped and stabbed nine times by four individuals whom he did not know, nor had he done them any harm.”
The only decent thing Goldman could have done was express his sorrow at her loss and promise to look into her complaint that Bragg was coddling killers.
Lecturing her about Washington gotcha games and cutting her off midsentence was not an option, yet that’s what he did.
