The Crazy Aunt in Our National Attic

COTTonLINE does a sporadic series on the (mostly self-inflicted) troubles of Oregon, where I misspent 3 years of my youth. As noted before, it is an odd place dominated by gnomish ultra-liberals who find their American citizenship very nearly intolerable.

A current City Journal article looks at the Portland city government effectively declaring - without evidence - their police force to be a greater problem than those breaking its laws. It’s gotten this bad:

Portland’s attitude toward law enforcement has become so negative, in fact, that neighboring Washington County will no longer offer coordination or support to the Portland Police Bureau. “The makeup of the Portland jury pool and the anti-police attitudes of many residents appears to have a large impact upon the DA’s ability to successfully bring charges against suspects that are injured in police use of force cases,” noted Senior Assistant Washington County Counsel Elmer Dickens.

Local officers will also no longer be able to take part in federal counterterrorism efforts, thanks to the city council, which has nixed Portland’s partnership efforts with the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force.

Read the first paragraph as “You got a riot? You deal with it. Our officers won’t be treated as the enemy.” The second says Portland sides with terrorists.

Oregon ... you could be forgiven for concluding it is our nation’s modern-day equivalent of a mental hospital. That view is nothing new, Lewis and Clark’s guys didn’t like OR when they wintered over in the early 1800s.