If you want to see the results of leftist policies, go to the cities that are run by the most elite, wealthy and “progressive” people, such as Los Angeles, San Francisco and Seattle, where homelessness, filth and disease are taking over. The scene is shocking and heartbreaking.

In an appearance on Monday’s Hannity, I pointed out that this is the kind of thing that used to be seen only in Third World countries. For decades, we could be confident that we had eradicated serious diseases such as plague and typhus. But today, the rat infestation is so serious that police officers (five at this writing) in the central LA area are coming down with typhus, and some medical experts suspect that bubonic plague is present. BUBONIC PLAGUE. You know, the “Black Death” from medieval times that wiped out about a third of Europe’s population and lingered for centuries. In the 1600s, during the Great Plague of London, one in five residents died.

The Plague

During those long centuries, no connection was made between rats and fleas and the disease they caused. In fact, some medieval doctors believed it was caused by pockets of bad air released during earthquakes or possibly by an unfavorable alignment of Saturn, Jupiter and Mars in the 40th degree of Aquarius on March 20, 1345.

Some of them believed that bad smells could drive out the plague, so they spread excrement around, actually furthering the spread of the disease. And bathing was discouraged, as it was believed that this opened the pores and made one more susceptible to infection. Just goes to show, there’s hardly anything more worthless than a medieval doctor, except perhaps economist Paul Krugman.

We finally do have antibiotics that can treat plague, and most people survive if they get the correct medicine in time. (Otherwise, it’s about 50-50.) But the main way to deal with it is still with good sanitation and pest control, as a plague epidemic needs filthy, crowded and rat-infested conditions to get going. Large cities have always had to deal with rats. There’s no New Yorker of any age who hasn’t heard jokes about the size of New York rats. But the kind of infestation we’re seeing now is something else again, thanks to mountains of garbage and human waste.

An article in National Geographic points out that plague still exists in various parts of the world. The most recent global epidemic started in China in the 1800s and didn’t end till 1959. (This outbreak actually spread to San Francisco through Chinese immigration.) In 2006, an outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo took the lives of at least 50 people. In recent years, there have been cases in China, India, Mongolia, Vietnam and…the United States.

Who Needs Terrorists When You’ve Got Hapless Bureaucrats?

We’re always concerned about the threat of terrorists possibly releasing bacteria such as plague in some aerosol form. But who needs terrorists when your own government bureaucrats are fully capable of letting it take hold and metastasize on their own streets?

I hesitated to link to this article about bubonic plague because I’m not trying to sensationalize this problem. (In fact, if you’re a hypochondriac, you might not want to read it at all, and just remember that unless you live or work around this filth, you’re generally safe.) But it’s important for people to see the seriousness of the threat of this and other diseases and not let political correctness get in the way of handling it.

We don’t want leftists to, in effect, give the bubonic plague bacterium or some other microbe full civil rights because it happens to take hold among the homeless population.

Please Support The Stream : Equipping Christians to Think Clearly About the Political, Economic and Moral Issues of Our Day.

Anyway, in these large, dirty, poorly run cities, there are victims beyond the hard-core homeless (although they are victims, too). I feel especially sorry for two groups of people: the ones who want to get out of there but who can’t afford to leave, and also for those police officers and public health officials who are risking their own lives and health and fighting a losing battle, with no assistance from the mayor and City Council. These politicians should be ashamed of themselves for even taking a paycheck if this is the best they can do.

In San Francisco, House Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi lives and works behind security gates, within a mile of some of the most filthy, horrific examples of this. Large numbers of homeless people are camping out alongside the buildings, using the sidewalks and stairwells for toilets, shooting up drugs and tossing their used syringes all over the ground.

Pelosi doesn’t want a wall for America, but in San Francisco, she has one for herself, just as all her cronies do. The hypocrisy and downright insanity of “progressivism” is too obvious to ignore.

This isn’t just a political discussion — this is a discussion of how America is going to survive as a civilization if we keep going on this track. But politics is keeping us from dealing with it.

From this linked-to article in the LA Times, one can see that some participants at Los Angeles city council meetings are making heroic efforts not to blame homeless people. They’re in huge denial and are spinning madly by trying to blame such things as the overwatering of plants (I am not kidding) for the rat population explosion. Clearly, it’s the homelessness — fostered mostly by drug and alcohol abuse and mental illness — in “progressive” cities affordable to only the very wealthy that has caused the huge infestation of rats and their disease-carrying fleas.

I wish I could be more optimistic, but it’s hard to imagine any improvement in these cities until leftists are voted out and some hands-on leaders can come in at the city and state levels and do what it takes to eradicate the problems. It all comes down to the voters wising up, but they seem to have the collective IQ of a diseased flea.

Originally published at MikeHuckabee.com. Reprinted with Permission