Opportunity Knocks

The bodies were barely cold before right-wing pundits joined New York's police union head in blaming Mayor de Blasio for the murders of two policemen.

The killer was unbalanced, obsessed with media, and readily violent—he had in fact shot his girlfriend before driving to New York to make a name for himself. It goes without saying that the murderer would be turned into a left-winger spurred on by demonstrations against police violence. Also goes without saying: this is regardless of how non-violent demonstrators have been.

How likely is it that a deranged person in Baltimore would so much as even heard of Bill de Blasio? Silly question: logic is no obstacle to destroying a politician who's dared suggest he's had to have "The Talk" with his own son. Certainly, New York's mayor is Enemy #1 to a segment of the city's police force; for national punditry, blame for the murders also falls on Obama, Eric Holder, and any other useful name.

No one but a handful of New Yorkers might remember that previous mayors have been political targets of police unions. From the New York Observer—

This is a recurring theme," said Kenneth Sherrill, a longtime professor of political science at Hunter College. "Police respond with anger when mayors try to exercise authority over how they relate to the civilian population."

Police in 1992 police actually rioted against David Dinkins, abetted by Rudolph Giuliani's incitement. The Observer again—

On September 16, 1992, thousands of police officers stormed City Hall and stopped traffic on the Brooklyn Bridge to protest Mr. Dinkins' eventually successful attempt to create an all-civilian Civilian Complaint Review Board, as well as express their general frustration toward his administration. Just as police union leaders and their backers view Mr. de Blasio's desire to address the grievances of minorities who feel unfairly targeted by police as a thinly-disguised pretext to undermine law enforcement, they blamed Mr. Dinkins for undercutting police in an environment plagued with far more crime and unrest.

On the other hand, police reaction is downright soothing when it's demented white avowed right-wingers who kill cops. Digby brings up the murder in June of this year of two off-duty Las Vegas policemen. The killers were a couple drawn to the area to join the Bundy Ranch militia. The authorities verdict then: "Police believe the shootings were an isolated act, not part of a broader conspiracy to target law enforcement..." As in similar events, media reaction was mainly a yawn.

Roy Edroso remembers Team Con's reaction to the shooting of Gabby Giffords As he wrote then—

...once a connection had been suggested between the sainted Palin and an actual, horrific act of violence -- worse, a connection that such Americans as can remember back a few news cycles might actually grasp -- the necessity of severing that connection became stronger for rightbloggers than any faint impulses they might have had toward decorum, logic, or common sense.

Now, it's the usual drill—

...some of these same conservatives who defended themselves after the Giffords shooting are scapegoating like crazy after the murder of two cops in Brooklyn last weekend, claiming that protesters and officials who disputed the handling of the Eric Garner case are to blame for it.

Charles Pierce, on our recurring national theme: out-of-control authority demanding immunity from so much as criticism—

... If the CIA is insubordinate to the president, whom the country elected, then it is insubordinate to all of us. If the NYPD runs a slow-motion coup against the freely elected mayor of New York, then it is running a slow-motion coup against all the people of New York. There is no exemption from this fundamental truth about the way this country and its system is supposed to work. The military -- and its civilian analogues in Langley and in the precinct houses -- always is subordinate to the civil power which, no matter how much it may chafe them, means that they always are subordinate to politicians. If we render our torturers superior to the political institutions of the government, and if we render the police superior to the civil power of elected officials, then we essentially have empowered independent standing armies to conduct our wars and enforce our laws, and self-government descends into bloody farce.

But, alas,in the past few weeks, we have shown ourselves to be relatively at peace with that very thing -- as long as the torture is done in the prisons overseas and the judicial killing is done in the streets of the ghetto, and as long as our fear of some omnipotent Other is what drives our politics. In turn, and in its mind, the country has now turned peaceful mass protest into some sort of violent revolution, and it has converted the murderous rage of a criminal lunatic into the ultimate expression of the cries for justice that have been heard in the last month in Ferguson, and Cleveland, and on Staten Island. It is a deeply noxious perversion of reality, and it has been working like a charm. Very soon, the names of Michael Brown and Tamir Rice and Eric Garner will be as unknown to our national dialogue again as are the names of those faceless, bartered souls who languished in shackles in Poland and in Thailand. The last thing to go to the waterboard is the tattered remnant of what we thought ourselves to be.