Crime has gotten absolutely, completely out of control in that city.

I blame Robert E. Lee for this…

Three masked men barged into the Monkey Hill bar and robbed the register and five patrons at gunpoint Monday night, witnesses said.

The bartender and five customers were inside the bar at 6100 Magazine (at the corner of Webster Street) around 10:30 p.m. Monday, Sept. 28, when a masked man man walked in and held up the bartender, and two other men walked in quickly afterward, said one of the people who was inside when it happened.

The gunmen checked to make sure no one was in the back, took the customers’ belonging, robbed the cash register and then left, the man said. No one was hurt, he said.

“The whole thing was done in under three minutes,” the man said.

Other witnesses said the incident bore a strong similarity to recent robberies at Patois restaurant and Cafe Atchafalaya.

Magazine and Webster was about as safe a streetcorner as you could get in New Orleans, at least until Mitch Landrieu came along. Now you can’t even go into a bar for a cocktail on that corner without getting pillaged by stick-up men.

But the heroic struggle to bulldoze tourist attractions continues apace. After all, who needs tourist attractions after the criminal class the mayor seems to want to pander to has harvested or otherwise run off all the tourists?

Look for this to emerge as an issue in the governor’s race, particularly if the anticipated Vitter-Edwards runoff materializes. Vitter has already begun building the “murders, not monuments” narrative he will break out into full flower in the runoff, and Edwards really doesn’t have a defense should Vitter make him a proxy for Mitch Landrieu. Vitter will talk about sending in the state police on a full-time basis to break up the crime wave in New Orleans and save the city from the criminals, while at the same time saving Lee Circle from the politicians and the race hustlers, and Edwards will be in a box it’s going to be very difficult to get out of.

Edwards can disagree with Vitter on the state police and he can say that the Lee Circle controversy is a sideshow. Except in doing that he opens himself up to being tarred as Landrieu with a country accent, and if Lee Circle is a sideshow it’s a sideshow New Orleans Democrats opened – with only 19 percent of statewide voters agreeing that those monuments should come down (against 64 percent saying they should stay in our poll and 68 percent saying the same in Triumph Campaigns’ poll). Or Edwards can agree about the state police and the monuments in an effort to take the New Orleans issue off the table, but if he does that he sells out Landrieu and de-energizes a machine in the Big Easy he needs if he has any chance to win.

What we see in New Orleans now is classic Urban Democrat governance. They ruin everything. And they’re finishing off what Katrina couldn’t do.

Make sure you bring a piece under your jacket if you’re going bar-hopping Uptown from now on.