Moonbattery has consequences, as Portland learned after Multnomah County District Attorney Mike Schmidt announced that the rioters who have been tearing the city apart each night for over 2 months will mostly not be prosecuted:

Schmidt said his office will presumptively decline to prosecute those whose most serious accusation doesn’t involve deliberate property damage, theft or the use or threat of force against someone else. …

Those whose most serious accusation involves a city ordinance violation will also not be prosecuted.

You might wonder what point there is to having ordinances if everyone knows they aren’t enforced.

Even provably violent rioters could be handled or rather caressed with kid gloves:

Prosecutors will scrutinize the cases of protesters accused of resisting arrest or assaulting a public safety officer and consider “the chaos of a protesting environment, especially after tear gas or other less-lethal munitions have been deployed against community members en masse,” the district attorney’s office said in a news release.

This did not result in an end to the mayhem. It resulted in this:

Oregon State Police on Thursday pulled out the approximately 100 troopers helping both federal officers and Portland police in responding to nightly protests in the city that have often ended in confrontations with demonstrators and arrests.

Captain Timothy Fox explained why:

“We’re in a county that’s not going to prosecute this criminal behavior.”

Why put officers at risk to arrest criminals who aren’t going to be prosecuted?

The plan is to “move those resources back to counties where prosecution of criminal conduct is still a priority.” That is, out of Portland, where municipal authorities are sympathetic to the rioters.

Do not expect law and order to return to Portland soon.

Other consequences of moonbattery are more positive:

Voters in Georgia have ousted Fulton County District Attorney Paul Howard — who charged two officers with murder in the Rayshard Brooks shooting earlier this summer — by a whopping 45-point margin.

Howard, a 20-plus-year incumbent and the first black district attorney elected in Georgia, lost his post to Democratic challenger Fani Willis in a runoff election Tuesday, WAGA-TV reported. Willis garnered 73% of the vote in a commanding victory over her former boss.

It may be corruption allegations that brought Howard down, but his overzealous prosecution of Officer Garrett Rolfe doesn’t seem to have helped him. He hit Rolfe with 11 counts including felony murder for shooting Rayshard Brooks, who had stolen an officer’s taser and fired it at police.

When the public wakes up from the surreal nightmare that is 2020, voters may inflict a widespread reckoning on left-leaning pols who egged on the chaos. Even liberal Portland voters may resent what has been allowed to happen to their city.

On tips from Mr. Freemarket and ABC of the ANC. Hat tips: Conservative Daily Post, The Blaze.

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