HOW BULLSHIT WORKS, FERGUSON EDITION.
I'll have more on Ferguson, MO this weekend, but here's a good template for how it's going down with conservatives, from Terresa Monroe-Hamilton at Right Wing News: First, you lay out all sorts of they're-just-animals stuff --
As far as it is being told, Brown, who was a big boy, resisted arrest as he was being put in the cruiser. A tussle ensued where Brown tried to get a hold of the officer’s weapon. He then fled the scene and the cop pursued him...
The real festivities began after the shooting as riots began. Store owners stood outside their businesses with baseball bats and guns to protect their livelihoods. Which explains in part the quadrupled sales in guns across the St. Louis area – looks like the good residents there have a lot more God-given sense than previously thought...
Rob at Joshuapundit astutely put it: “There’s nothing that says ‘social justice’ like smashing up and looting a convenience store, a grocery or a Wal-Mart.” Indeed. It’s a free for all baby and the crowd is into letting it burn, while yelling “death to all cops"...
The guy pulled a gun on the officer and was shot for it. No tears here, but it will escalate things. Nearby, a woman was shot in the head in a drive-by. She’ll live, but if this keeps up, the bodies will start to pile up. Let the protests begin.
-- then, having mollified your ooga-booga constituents with this miserable display, you suddenly change gears and pitch it to the up-and-coming "libertarian" crowd (because it's their moment, y'know) --
As awful as the shootings and the senseless waste of life is, the underlying story lies with the police force itself in my eyes...
This is the evil gift of Obama’s governmental control fetish. He has facilitated police forces whose attire is fashioned after the US Marine Corps MARPAT camouflage pattern...
Not very professional conduct on the officer’s part and not how I choose to remember the men in blue who I have looked up to my whole life. I’m not sure when all of this morphed into the police turning into Obama’s new army.
This is not to excuse Obama, whose approach to the issue of cop-militarization expert Radley Balko calls "more of the same, and in some cases worse," but the police have been turning into mini-militaries for decades. Calling it "Obama's new army" is like calling it Obama's Iraq War -- which of course they've also been doing.
To see a middle-American cop gun down an unarmed black kid, and then see his colleagues go colonial on his black neighbors while arresting MSM reporters in a vain attempt to conceal it, and then say it's Obama's fault -- that is some bullshit. And it beautifully encapsulates a conservatarian strategy we've been seeing a lot of lately: Stroke the bigots who are mashing down black folks with one hand, while pathetically pressing the other against your brow and weeping crocodile tears for the civil liberties you claim Democrats stole from you.
