Oooooh. Classy.

According to the Baltimore Sun, the “white candidate” in Baltimore’s mayoral primary is talking tough:

Taking his most negative approach yet in this year’s mayoral election, City Councilman Keiffer J. Mitchell Jr. launched a new television advertisement yesterday that blamed the city’s high homicide count on Mayor Sheila Dixon’s budget priorities.

[…]

Mitchell’s latest ad, which is running on all four network affiliates, criticizes Dixon for not including additional money in the fiscal 2008 budget for police officers. In fact, the Police Department’s budget increased 4.5 percent to $347 million. No new budgeted police positions were created, but the city has about 140 vacant police positions in the current budget.

Though it is popular to pistol whip politicians over crime statistics I find it difficult to believe that anyone, much less Mr. Mitchell, really believes that their is either causality or correlation between the short period of time Ms. Dixon has been mayor and the Baltimore murder rate.

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Even while clearly acknowledging that Baltimore is a very, very, very safe city that I, from my “perch in the country”, have no right to criticize, this disclaimer to keep Andrew Kujan from having another aneurysm, Baltimore’s astronomical mordfest began under the reign of Martin O’Malley and there is little evidence to indicate that he did anything other than dodge the bullet, metaphorically, by being elected governor.

This type of thing is just a cheap and desperate now as it was when the Democrats tried to pin responsibility on President Bush for 9/11.