The Chronicle has been attacking Chesa Boudin and the concept of serious criminal justice reform since he first announced he was running for DA. The paper’s editorial page editor, John Diaz, launched a nasty red-baiting attack the day Boudin won.
Then when Boudin made fairly routine changes in his staff, the attacks continued.
And now, for reasons that I seriously cannot comprehend, the Chron just ran an oped with a vicious assault on the new DA from …. Donald Trump’s campaign.
Yeah: There’s a piece by Kimberly Guilfoyle,who is working with the Trump campaign, that brands Boudin (once again) as a commie who is going to let criminals run rampant across the city.
Check this out:
Boudin is advancing a radical ideology that’s focused on completely redesigning the city’s — and the nation’s — criminal justice system.
This dangerous reality is also being peddled by a new brand of Bernie Sanders-endorsed Democrats across the country. And, worse yet, the ideology is seemingly inspired by American communist revolutionaries who gained notoriety during the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Yet again, the Chron is trying to call Boudin a communist. It gets worse:
For Boudin, the ties that bind him to the violent leftist movement of the last century couldn’t be closer.
His adoptive parents are none other than Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, the notorious leaders of the communist-driven domestic terrorist group Weather Underground. Ayers was involved in the bombings of a New York police station, the U.S. Capitol, and the Pentagon in the early ’70s.
As a young adult pursuing a career in law, Boudin didn’t abandon the radical ideology of his upbringing; he embraced it by moving to Venezuela. Boudin served as a translator for Hugo Chavez, the communist dictator who dismantled the nation’s democracy and set the country on the path to its current state of socialism-induced economic collapse.
So first, Boudin is responsible for the politics of his parents. Then he’s working “as a translator for Hugo Chavez,” who was not a communist dictator but the elected president of Venezuela. And Boudin didn’t work for Chavez – he was far, far too junior to be anywhere near the top of the government. He worked as a translator in a much more insignificant role.
And I have to wonder: Does the author really think that linking Boudin to Bernie Sanders – in San Francisco – is going to hurt the new DA? Sanders is overwhelmingly popular in this city; that argument just makes Boudin look better.
So what’s this about?
I don’t know where this piece came from; it’s hard to believe that Guilfoyle, who has plenty to do in her day job, bothered to decide to write and submit an oped attacking Bernie Sanders, Chesa Boudin, and communists on her own and submitted it to the Chron.
In fact, the piece reads like a Fox-News-style attack that was drafted by someone who wanted to put forward right-wing talking points.
I asked Diaz to explain why he ran this, but he won’t answer my emails. And he hasn’t run a response from the Boudin campaign.
The Chron’s editorial page hasn’t had a lot of credibility in this town for quite a while. This pretty much makes it a joke.
