Prime Time Crime

In times of crisis a nation looks to its leader for inspiration, reassurance, and guidance.  Here’s a sample of what Americans have been getting since 2008.  Mere hours after the slaying of four Americans in Benghazi the President helped heal the country’s grief by flying to a Democratic Party fundraiser in Las Vegas.  Only after spinning an outright lie about the attacks being the result of a video that insulted Islam of course.  In the wake of the  terrorist massacre of 12 journalists and 2 cops in Paris, presidents, prime ministers, kings, and queens from countries around the world dropped what they were doing and flew there.  Who did the White House send to show solidarity and courage to the people of France?  Well, nobody.  They claim they sent the ambassador but he was there already.  Another senior official who was there already (attending a conference on terrorism no less) but couldn’t be bothered to walk literally across the street was Attorney-General Eric Holder.

Ah yes, Eric Holder, the first black Attorney-General in the history of the United States, an accomplishment he never tires of telling us about.  His other singular feat is being the only Attorney-General in the history of the United States to be held in Contempt of Congress (for withholding documents in the Fast & Furious scandal).  He’s a little more muted about that one.  No one likes a braggart.  

The same Eric Holder who passed on the opportunity to join other world leaders in condemning an evil act of barbarism couldn’t get to Ferguson, MO fast enough when Officer Darren Wilson shot Michael Brown.  Brown got 50 FBI agents working his case while the citizens of Paris got James Taylor.  In Brown’s case, if the old saying that it takes a village to raise a child has any truth to it then ‘the village’ failed miserably but, unlike the cops, ‘the village’ never seems to get held to answer. 

As if things weren’t bad enough for the people of Ferguson, Holder jumped right in and started fanning the flames.  You’d think the nation’s chief law enforcement officer would try to bring calm to the situation & urge people not to rush to judgement.  Instead he ginned them up with a trip down memory lane recalling his youth in New Jersey and all the times he was stopped for ‘driving while black’.  His rhetoric pretty much guaranteed the riots that followed.  Not wanting to come second in the race to judgement, the President took his never-ending Apology Tour to the United Nations where he brought up Ferguson as just another example of pervasive injustice here in the Great Satan. 

Now the results of the Department of Justice investigation have been released and the report on the shooting itself completely clears Officer Wilson.  Perhaps the A-G will step in and get Officer Wilson his job back.  No?  But the DOJ wasn’t done with Ferguson.  Almost as a sop to ‘the village’ to make up for presenting the truth about the shooting, the DOJ report found that the people of Ferguson suffered systemic racism and civil rights violations at the hands of the Ferguson Police Department.  They cobbled this together with a handful of old e-mails, unsubstantiated anecdotes, and a bunch of stats showing that blacks were overrepresented in terms of car stops, arrests, and traffic tickets (one Ferguson resident was quoted as saying that the line-up at Municipal Traffic Court looked like the queue for tickets to a Beyoncé concert). 

That’s it.  No lynchings, no segregated lunch counters, just meaningless numbers.  As most of us in law enforcement know, there’s a lot more to it as the following pieces illustrate very clearly:  Why Eric Holder won't let go of Ferguson, Ferguson fake-out: Justice Department’s bogus report.    

But when you’re weak on the facts there’s no better device to make your point than a powerful visual backdrop so they all went down to Selma and walked across the Edmund Pettus Bridge.  The comparison they sought was as obvious as the return address on Hilary Clinton’s e-mails (“I just heard about it on the news”) but unlike the ubiquitous MLK, the only city rushing out to re-name a street Barack Obama Boulevard will likely be Tehran.   

Back in Ferguson there was more violence and disorder this week culminating in the shooting of two policemen.  The President’s response?  A Tweet.

After all, he didn’t have time for a speech because he had to fly to Los Angeles to appear on the Jimmy Kimmel show where he said there was no excuse for attacking policemen BUT (the great verbal eraser)  blamed law enforcement for creating an “oppressive and objectionable” situation (“Shall I toss some more gasoline on that, Mr. President?  Nah, it’s going pretty good right now”) proving once and for all that he is either tone deaf to social conventions like propriety or time and place, or (and more likely), he is demonstrating his total contempt for them.

I got this the other day from a retired FBI agent and it pretty much says it all.