Robert Stacy McCain reacts to the shooting of two Ferguson, Missouri police officers in the most predictable way imaginable: “Months of anti-police agitation produce the expected consequences.”
Scared Monkeys is a little less reserved: “ARE YOU HAPPY BARACK OBAMA, ERIC HOLDER, AL SHARPTON AND THE MSM? YOU FINALLY GAVE THE MOB WHAT THEY WANTED … BLOOD…THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS WHEN GOVERNMENT FANS THE FLAMES OF RACISM. ERIC HOLDER INCITED THIS BY HIS ACTIONS, RATHER THAN ACTING LIKE AN ATTORNEY GENERAL FOR ALL THE PEOPLE.”
As for the Justice Department report that supposedly motivated these attempted murders:
The open season on police officers in Ferguson, MO takes place following the over the top, scathing Justice Department report alleging bias in the police department and court and the resignation of Ferguson police chief Tom Jackson. However, this is what happens when you pander to the mob. This is what happens when Attorney General vows to dismantle the Ferguson police department and at the same time he and Barack Obama fail to mention that “Stand Up, Don’t Shoot” was based on a complete and total lie.
Another right-wing site says, “this is an entirely expected consequence after over half a year of anti-cop agitation.”
This reminds me of something I read in the BuzzFeed profile of Lindsey Graham’s neo-confederate advisor, Richard Quinn.
“King’s memory represents, more than anything else, the idea that institutional arrangement — laws, ordinances and tradition — should be subordinated to the individual’s conscience,” wrote Quinn. “The brand of civil disobedience he preached (and for which he is remembered) exhorts his followers to regard social reform as a process to be carried out in the streets.”
He concluded: “Ignoring the real heroes in our nation’s life, the blacks have chosen a man who represents not their emancipation, not their sacrifices and bravery in service to their country; rather, they have chosen a man whose role in history was to lead his people into a perpetual dependence on the welfare state, a terrible bondage of body and soul.”
The latter argument about welfare dependence is a familiar one, but the thing about subordinating respect for laws, ordinances and tradition to an individual’s conscience is refreshingly frank and revealing.
And if that tradition is Jim Crow and those ordinances are just fines issued to the black community to keep taxes low for white folks? That’s just the “institutional arrangement.”
The most important point may not even be strictly relevant here because we don’t know what motivated the shooting. But the idea, at least, is that since someone shot at the police they must have been reacting to anti-cop agitation. There’s no possibility that they were reacting to their dissatisfaction with the “institutional arrangement.” You can be blamed if you protest the police and then some policemen get shot, but you cannot be blamed if you treat your community inequitably and someone gets angry about it and shoots you.
This finger-pointing can be pretty high school, if you ask me. The right’s anti-government rhetoric puts politicians of all parties at heightened risk, but they think it’s worth the risk. I disagree, but I can tell the difference between expressing a political preference and inciting a riot. It’s not the hypocrisy that bothers me here so much as the idea that you fan the flames of racism if you fight for social reform in the streets, or if you tell people about racist policies they are mostly already well informed about.
I don’t know who shot these police officers or why they did it. They were in no way justified regardless of what motivated them. But if you feel like you have to place some blame, place it on the people who made the Ferguson police department the enforcement arm of a very bad “institutional arrangement.”