On Friday’s broadcast of PBS’s “Washington Week,” host and Editor in Chief of The Atlantic Jeffrey Goldberg stated that “there’s a serious crime issue in the District of Columbia, especially in poorer areas.” But there are questions about and issues with the specific federal response.
Goldberg said, “I don’t want to downplay — there’s a serious crime issue in the District of Columbia, especially in poorer areas. But the question is, the militarization of that.”
Earlier, Goldberg stated, “[P]eople who know the long history of home rule in D.C. understand that this is a very, very fraught racial issue as well. This is about giving the people of D.C. the right to self-government. This seems to be kind of an old — coming from an old playbook.”
In another part of the segment, The Atlantic Staff Writer Vivian Salama said that “it is not lost on D.C. that the very crimes and accusations that the president is lobbing against people in D.C. were also what happened during January 6, with regard to the assaults against police officers and other things that were happening that day, and, yet, the president pardoned so many of those people, who were charged, by the Justice Department, of those crimes. And yet, here we are –.”
Goldberg then cut in to sarcastically ask, “Are you suggesting that there’s a bit of racially-tinged hypocrisy going on here?”
Washington Post columnist David Ignatius said that “I think the district government, in this dreadful moment, did a pretty good job.” Goldberg responded, “Right.”
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