It’s Wednesday, November 26th, 2014…and here’s The Gouge!
Leading off today’s edition, a few Ferguson-related offerings, followed by a brief commentary of our own. First up, the biting satire of Hope ‘n Change:
“The Grand Jury’s verdict is in – Officer Darren Wilson did nothing wrong using deadly force as a last resort to save his own life when attacked by a huge, drug-fueled thug who had just committed robbery and assault. But because Wilson is white and his assailant was black, “protestors” (we sure as hell don’t want to call them terrorists) are looting and burning all over Ferguson, Missouri and making considerable mischief across the country.
What this incendiary situation does not need is Barack Hussein Obama second-guessing the Grand Jury and telling the looters (in wink-wink nudge-nudge fashion) that they damn well should be angry at filthy awful white people. Unfortunately, that’s the subtext that came through loud and clear in his statement following the announcement of the Ferguson decision.
…So whether it’s Ferguson or the U.S. border, this president wants us to know that “lawbreakers of color” are good and cops and white people are bad…“
Next up, courtesy of The Blaze, blogger Matt Walsh reveals what’s really motivating the Ferguson Faithful:
“…This decision is not what you wanted, I realize, but that’s only because you never wanted justice at all. You wanted a certain outcome, and you have demanded that outcome from the very beginning, before listening to the other side, before looking at the evidence, before hearing from all of the witnesses, before giving the dust a chance to settle. You came to a conclusion based on rumor and conjecture, and you have not strayed from that conclusion or adjusted it or even acknowledged that any other conclusions are possible. This, my fellow citizens, is not the behavior of people who want justice and fairness. This is the behavior of a lynch mob. This is the behavior of tyrants who are perfectly willing to send an innocent man to jail if it means winning some kind of bizarre ideological victory. This is behavior that ought to be exposed and shamed, in no uncertain terms…”
Then there’s this from Rich Lowry writing in the pages of Politico:
“…This is a terrible tragedy. It isn’t a metaphor for police brutality or race repression or anything else, and never was. Aided and abetted by a compliant national media, the Ferguson protestors spun a dishonest or misinformed version of what happened—Michael Brown murdered in cold blood while trying to give up—into a chant (“hands up, don’t shoot”) and then a mini-movement.
When the facts didn’t back their narrative, they dismissed the facts and retreated into paranoid suspicion of the legal system. It apparently required more intellectual effort than almost any liberal could muster even to say, “You know, I believe policing in America is deeply unjust, but in this case the evidence is murky and not enough to indict, let alone convict anyone of a crime.”…”
You’ll note a consistent theme in the articles we’ve cited: all three approach the events in Ferguson from the viewpoint if the death of Michael Brown was a tragedy, it was one of his own making. And while the “Gentle Giant” certainly died at the hands of a Ferguson police officer, he himself, Michael Brown, was solely responsible for the fate which befell him.
What amazes us most about this entire sordid episode isn’t The Great Divider seeking to make ever-more discordant political capital from Brown’s death…
“…Communities of color aren’t just making these problems up.”
…(notwithstanding the fact they certainly made this particular problem up), but rather the fact any number of Conservative pundits and outlets, including the Washington Examiner‘s Tim Carney, view Progressive claims of police racism as a real issue for concern and further action:
“…For many of those who cursed the ruling, bigger questions were at hand: Did Michael Brown die an unjust and pointless death? Do cops constantly hassle black youths? Do police more readily shoot at black youths than at whites? Did the police overreact to the summer protests? Is the criminal justice system less fair to blacks than to whites?
These aren’t tough questions if you’re a black person in Ferguson — or almost anywhere else. Yes, the system is rigged. Black people bear the costs. And white people don’t.”
With all due respect to Carney, he needs to wake up and smell what he’s peddling ain’t coffee but Kool-Aid. And though the WSJ editors likewise saw fit to lend The Obamao’s latest racial grievance legitimacy on Tuesday, Jason Riley was willing to call a spade a spade when this morning he noted…
“We now know that Michael Brown was much more of a menace than a martyr, but that won’t stop liberals from pushing an anti-police narrative that harms the black poor in the name of helping them.
The black teen in Ferguson, Mo., robbed a store, attacked a white police officer and was shot dead while resisting arrest. That was the conclusion of a St. Louis County grand jury that brought no charges against the officer after considering all the physical evidence, along with eyewitness accounts from blacks in the vicinity of the confrontation.
Not that any amount of evidence would have stopped the hooligans in Ferguson Monday night who were determined use Brown’s death as a pretext for more bad behavior. Nor will evidence thwart liberals who are bent on making excuses for black criminality and pretending that police shootings are responsible for America’s high black body count.
According to the FBI, homicide is the leading cause of death among young black men, who are 10 times more likely than their white counterparts to be murdered. And while you’d never know it watching MSNBC, the police are not to blame. Blacks are just 13% of the population but responsible for a majority of all murders in the U.S., and more than 90% of black murder victims are killed by other blacks. Liberals like to point out that most whites are killed by other whites, too. That’s true but beside the point given that the white crime rate is so much lower than the black rate.
Blacks commit violent crimes at 7 to 10 times the rate that whites do. The fact that their victims tend to be of the same race suggests that young black men in the ghetto live in danger of being shot by each other, not cops. Nor is this a function of “over-policing” certain neighborhoods to juice black arrest rates. Research has long shown that the rate at which blacks are arrested is nearly identical to the rate at which crime victims identify blacks as their assailants. The police are in these communities because that’s where the emergency calls originate, and they spend much of their time trying to stop residents of the same race from harming one another…”
As for the rioting and arson which followed the grand jury decision, they simply confirm the wisdom of George Santayana. For had the powers that bothered to remember history, they would have benefited from Edward Banfield’s observations on the riots which erupted in America’s urban ghettos in the ’60’s:
“The rioters knew they had little or nothing to fear from the police and the courts. Under the pressure of the civil rights movement and of court decisions and as the result of the growing ‘professionalism’ of police administrators . . . the patrolman’s discretion in the use of force declined rapidly after the war. At the same time courts were lenient with juvenile offenders. ‘Tough kids’ had always attacked policemen when they got the chance, but by the 1960’s the amount of toughness required was not very great, for in most cities it became more and more apparent that a policeman who shot a boy would be in serious trouble. Not being able to use force, the police could not effectively use the threat of it. It was not uncommon for a gang of boys to disarm and beat a policeman who, following orders, would not use his gun against them. During a riot, the police were especially ineffective—because their offenses were not very serious, most rioters could not be successfully threatened; the only thing that could be done with them was to take them into custody, and this was something the police were seldom numerous enough to do. Sometimes the police had to stand by and allow looting to go on before their eyes. This, of course, increased the tempo of the rioting.“
Though in this case, those who refused to learn from the past condemned others to suffer the actual experience of repeating it.
Since pictures are worth a thousand words, we’ll wrap up our Ferguson coverage with two photos that speak volumes. The first captures the hypocrisy inherent in justifying looting and arson as a legitimate response to anything…
…the second the difference between reporting and social commentary:
Turning now to International News of Note, the WSJ‘s Bret Stephens reports on Team Tick-Tock’s latest act of appeasement masquerading as foreign policy:
“Does it matter what sort of deal—or further extension, or non-deal—ultimately emerges from the endless parleys over Iran’s nuclear program? Probably not. Iran came to the table cheating on its nuclear commitments. It continued to cheat on them throughout the interim agreement it agreed to last year. And it will cheat on any undertakings it signs.
We knew this, know it and will come to know it all over again. But what’s at stake in these negotiations isn’t their outcome, assuming there ever is an outcome. It’s the extent to which the outcome facilitates, or obstructs, our willingness to continue to fool ourselves about the consequences of an Iran with a nuclear weapon…”
For anyone a little slow on the uptake, (Progressives, pay attention!) here’s a hint:
Meanwhile, as Cathy York notes at Right Voice Media, despite Republican Mike Rogers’ attempted cover-up…
“…Mike Rogers’s wife, Kristi Clemens Rogers, is CEO and President of Aegis Defense Services LLC, and was instrumental in winning “a five-year, $10 billion Department of State protective services contract” that (guess what?) included the Benghazi consulate.
Furthermore, FOX News Chief Intelligence correspondent Catherine Herridge is reporting that people at the “highest levels” of the U.S. government were aware that Benghazi’s CIA annex was “collecting intelligence about foreign entities that were themselves collecting weapons in Libya and facilitating their passage to Syria.”
The more layers of this onion that come off, the more it stinks.
I still want to know who gave that stand down order that Mike Rogers said never happened…”
Along with The Dear Misleader’s whereabouts for seven, long unaccounted-for hours during the attack, what Stevens was doing in Benghazi in the first place, why security in the consulate wasn’t increased given the intel reports, and a host of other questions Rogers’ “investigation” inexplicably left unanswered.
In a related item, some good news for those like us who feel it’s not in the country’s best interest for the Benghazi story to die, as…
Stay tuned.
Finally, on the Lighter Side:
Magoo
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