It's been an eventful week for the media: A government shutdown; a glitch-infested roll out of the disastrous Obamacare; and, of course, a deranged white male Tea Party member, with a Ted Cruz pin, carrying an AR-15 attacked the White House while screaming racial and Islamophobic epithets.
Well, sort of.
That last one, not so much, and much to the chagrin of the liberal media and politicians. It turns out, of course, that all the shooting was by the
Keystone Capitol Hill cops. Those Guardians of the Peace, members of that Thin Blue Line standing between order and chaos, after terrorizing downtown DC, shutting Congress with a fusillade of rounds, engaging in a wild twenty-vehicle chase, crashing a couple of cars, injuring one of their own, managed to shoot and kill a disturbed unarmed African-American single mother apparently
AFTER her car had come to a halt and presented no danger. One wonders where the Trayvon Martin supporters are on this.
This blue mayhem also conjures up memories of last year's NYPD shooting orgy near the
Empire State Building. In that one, the cops pumped out 16 rounds to kill a suspect, who never fired a round, and wounded several innocent bystanders.
The police are out of control. This cop craziness has to stop, if for no other reason than to allow the media to focus on the real danger, you know, white male Tea Party members with AR-15s.
"The police are out of control."
ReplyDeleteI could not agree more. I used to be a "law and order" kind of guy. While I still believe in l&e, my impression of cops has rotated 180 degrees. They're no longer the "Thin Blue Line", they're paramilitary black shirts. I would not trust a police officer for anything.
I don't do conspiracies and never bought into the feds using the military to enforce whatever. Today, they don't need the military they've got the local police department and they're armed with APCs and all manner of military equipment courtesy of the Feds and forfeiture laws. I'm pretty sure that there are only a handful of cops in the US who would put their pension on the line and not confiscate my firearms. Or anything else.
I think there's a 3rd Amendment thing waiting to happen.
"They're no longer the "Thin Blue Line", they're paramilitary black shirts."
DeleteWhy not both?
Good one, Dip.
ReplyDeleteThings you left out:
Obama cancelled his Asia trip.
Kerry does not cancel his.
Kerry and Hagel appear at a press conference. Signs on their podia: dumb and dumber.
The pope kisses babies. Dingey Harry condemns them and asks "why would I [save them]?
Both Hillary biopics are canceled. No news yet on whether or not Hillary was canceled.
A tree falls in Yosemite. Since the park is closed, will we hear it? Quoting someone else: "how do you close a forest?" And how do you close the Grand Canyon. And does that mean the Colorado River is no longer flowing into CA and Mexico?
I'm wondering how long people are going to put up with their grandstanding bull****. At some point, the state needs to step up and point out that since this attraction is on their land, they're going to take it and administer it.
DeleteAZ tried to do this with the Grand Canyon. They were told in no uncertain terms the the Fed Gov't would not allow it... Hell, I wish AZ would go ahead and let's see what happens next...
DeleteThe Feds barry-caded Mount Vernon and it's not even on Fed land and is privately owned.
We need states and private citizens to perform acts of civil disobedience. Good on Gov Walker for telling them where to shove it. He sent his own men in to reopen the boat launch ramps and picnic areas.
I live 6 hours north of DC. If Mark Levin calls for a march on Washington I will go.
I live about 11 hours south. If I have to go north to D.C., I'm going armed.
DeleteIndeed US police are changed: black tactical clothing & gear, shaved heads, the accusatory staredown. They all need to re-read the constitution (most Americans should), lighten up a bit, grow out their hair, eat more donuts, trade their Glocks for S&W revolvers. I would actually feel alot safer. JT.
ReplyDeleteThey indeed have changed. Much of the fault lies with the reaction to 9/11 when both parties began dumping huge amounts of resources on local police forces to turn them into little armies. The police include a great deal of military-style training now, and have a real attitude problem when dealing with us ordinary mortals. They behave like little occupation armies.
DeleteYes. It's hard for conservatives to imagine the police as enemies, but there it is. For that matter, it was hard for the founders, who were geniuses, to see the judiciary as future enemies of the constitutional order.
DeleteAlas, ultimately even the judiciary, police, and (regular) military are government programs.
We should be grateful that the latter don't have labor unions. Yet.
I think it's partly the reaction to 9/11, but prior to that the police were already soaking up the tacticool for the War on Drugs™, with federal money made available for SWAT gear and military style training. Every rinky dink town in my state seems to have a SWAT team. Hell, the Department of Education has a SWAT team. WTF? SWAT teams are expensive to do right, so most of them are done wrong. And once you've paid for this expensive toy the temptation is to use it. Unfortunately...from the police bureaucrat point of view...true hostage standoffs and terrorist attacks hardly ever happen, so the SWAT team is used to serve warrants and make routine arrests that could be handled more safely by less confrontational means. Waco was an example of how this can blow up in your face.
DeleteI'm with mbecker908, I used to be a law and order type, but what we have now isn't law or order, just oppression.
Paul
This has been going on for three decades and as Paul notes, it started as the War on Drugs. Asset forfeiture triggered SWAT operations.
DeleteThe standing joke in Phoenix is that if you call the police and tell them shots have been fired a patrol car will roll by in about 45 minutes. Tell them that there's a 500 Benz and a 740 BMW in front of your house and it looks like a big drug deal, guys are exchanging suitcases. You'll have every cop from every jurisdiction in a 10 mile radius. The problem is, it's not a joke.
As evil Republicans cast a darkness across the land fear now stalks without mercy. Even though stalwarts Reid, Schumer, Derbra Wasserman sound the tocsin they know it's no ordinary danger they face, it is a foe of unspeakable evil, Tea Partiers! Guarding the sacred places the high skilled, brave to a fault, but seriously undermanned thin kakhi line of the NPS fear the worst. Ravening mobs of WWII veterans. "They usually come around ten o'clock. First you hear the wheels creaking in the distance, then strains of their battle cry (America the Beautiful) start to waft in, it'll freeze you're blood. But, we're here to do what must be done."
ReplyDeleteAcross the wilderness the Lost Tribe of News Media wanders in hope of a sign or a person signing up in Obama Care. Two in Wisconsin? Three in New York? There is confusion, so it passed they sent trusted members to the Oracle Sebelius with the question; Has anyone signed up? After consulting the writing of the mystic Yogi Berra, she gives her answer. "No one goes there it's too crowded. There is jubilation, "does not Obama work in mysterious ways?" To show their thankfulness they leave offerings of validation and burn the most expensive syntax.
To be continued......
Wow! Hope you don't start a rival blog! Don't want to lose my six readers . . .
DeleteFear not, I like this place and will not leave. Besides you write a pretty mean story yourself.
DeleteDip don't worry. You both write real well. If James appears wrapped in white robes, wearing sandals whose soles seldom touch the floor....then worry :)
DeleteThere can never be enough good writers. There is an even greater shortage of good writers who can tell good stories or tell good stories well. Compliments to both and to Babs. I'm Irish and love America and will join the increasingly necessary march on DC (if they let me into the country, which in these uncertain times is not a given). The sooner the better. Max.
DeleteTo paraphrase the great editor Harold Ross, no evil is unspeakable. There are merely those too inarticulate to speak it.
DeleteHey, I am seventh!
DeleteOff topic: Do you have any thought about Donald Rumsfeld? I just read this tidbit on him, and think he has an excellent take on the 0 administration:
ReplyDelete“I think his behavior reflects a lack of experience and a lack of a strategic concept, or some principles or values that he tests things against.”
http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/donald-rumsfeld-obama-i-begin-incompetence-problem_759183.html?nopager=1
“I think his behavior reflects a lack of experience and a lack of a strategic concept, or some principles or values that he tests things against.”
DeleteHe has been President for 5 years with a huge staff of Advisors - it cannot be lack of experience.
The other two?
His vision and values are of the extreme left so riddled with emotion - and unsullied by a grasp of economics or history. All disorted throughthe prism of Chicago politics.
But his behavior is built from his personality - a malignant narcissist. The worship of 'me', the total lack of empathy, the pettiness, and the inability to form relationships with others. All this perhaps compounded with the stresses of a closeted homosexual ('bathhouse Barry').
The stresses on such a relatively ungrounded person over promoted through affirmative action are more than enough to account for his incompetence.
Kirkbride
As a distant observer of, semi-frequent visitor to and enormous fan of, your country, I must confess that at times I am astonished at the behaviour of your police and law enforcement agencies. I acknowledge that the reports and videos of incidents that find their way into the international media will be among the worst excesses, however there is a disturbing similarity about many, involving breathtaking overreach by police and an appalling contempt for the rights and legitimate expectations of the other people. One that immediately comes to mind was a man said be speeding on a desert road who thought that he was being treated unfairly, said so, and was ultimately tasered for no greater sin than that he declined to sign the infringement notice, which was not a requirement in his home state. For all that is made of your constitutionally enshrined rights and freedoms, they don't seem to hinder what seems to be increasingly hostile behaviour of those charged with law enforcement.
ReplyDeleteAre you English?
DeleteAnd old saw (in its youth a joke) has it that in heaven the police are English, the cooks French, the mechanics German, the lovers Italian, and everything is organized by the Swiss; whereas in hell, the police are German, the cooks English, the mechanics French, the lovers Swiss, and everything is organized by the Italians.
Or are we no longer allowed jokes like that?
I'm a Washingtonian of sorts (actually, a Marylander). I saw footage of the fracas on the evening news, and it seems that at one point, the police were in a good position to blow out the tires of the car.
ReplyDeleteBTW, I have long been a law-and-order type myself. But I've come to realize that I was reared in aa culture that still was haunted by the ghosts of the idea that law should (and at its best, does) embody fundamental principles which God worked into our species at creation. In this day and age, when "law" is only what a state, which may well be steeped in hubris, declares it to be, "law" can become quite lawless.
Hear! Hear!
DeleteYou will only be a Washingtonian "of sorts" while you continue to think this is a bad thing.
DeleteNational Parks are being closed out of spite. Privately owned businesses near or in the parks are also being forced to close.
ReplyDeleteIf I remember correctly, there is a coral reef that is now a National Park - can't remember the name or where it is located.
Should we not inform the Obama administration that there are divers enjoying a National Park? Maybe he will send a Carrier Battle Group supported by a Fast Attack to keep the sharks out.
My thoughts are precisely the same as yours.
ReplyDeleteThe facts were that this was a mentally deranged, unarmed woman with a infant in the car. It appeared the police were acting on rumor that a shooter was on the loose. The number of police in the area was overwhelming and all wanted to get in on the act. When it came out that the driver was not armed some of the TV commentators were shocked. They couldn't believe it.
This was a case of mass hysteria by the law authorities. It is a wonder they didn't shoot each other.
Initial liberal reports were that the woman was crazy because of the shut down. I say that the police were crazy because of the shut down... Just waiting for some "tea-bagger" to blow his top. Shoot first, wonder about it later.
Delete"It is a wonder they didn't shoot each other. "
DeleteCircular firing squad?
As this happened within The District, I can't help but wonder what portion of those po-po's were Affirmative Action hires.
Delete-Rurik
Nothing funny about these jokers.
ReplyDeleteEven with overwhelming manpower and equipment, they had to resort to killing an unarmed young woman with a child in the car. Despicable killers.
I look forward to the grievance industry taking up the case of this poor black woman attempting to enter a walled housing complex, only to be killed by armed security. Come on Jessie and Al lets have a protest, shooting a young black mother must have consequences. Perhaps if she had been a drug-dealing singer frequent access to the african-king could have been arranged.
I still think she was lost and in fear for her life. She was right to fear.
DeletePerhaps Al and Jessie are waiting for a signal from the african king......something along the lines of, "If I had a daughter, she would look like Miriam Carey."
DeleteMeanwhile Washington's top cop is quoted.....Cathy Lanier, the chief of the Metropolitan Police Department, said more shots were fired after the vehicle stopped, and the woman was hit several times. She was later pronounced dead, Lanier said.
According to multiple sources, there was no reason so far to believe that the woman fired any shots or even had a weapon.
snip, snip, then
“They did exactly what they were supposed to do,” she said.
U.S. Capitol Police Chief Kim Dine said there appeared to be no evidence of terrorism
Got that, "they did EXACTLY what they are supposed to do", that would be, kill American citizens if they approach the african king.
"Even with overwhelming manpower and equipment, they had to resort to killing an unarmed young woman with a child in the car."
DeleteFox Butterfield, is that you?
Who was that guy, you know, the one what said, 'the police behaved stupidly'? Where's he on this murder of an unarmed woman who had a kid in the car? No...don't tell me...I'll remember his name...it'll come...
ReplyDeleteThe police knew she was unarmed. They knew she had a child in the car. Yet they did what they did. Why? Are these IQ-70 types who're trained to see & attack rather than observe, evaluate and act?
What's particularly evil is this pat answer provided by the Giddy ones in politics and the marxstream media, 'well, she had mental problems...'
Really? What sort of mental problems? Depression? Schizophrenia? If she had problems, doesn't that likely imply she had become aware of being 'not right, had sought professional help, and was being treated so as to minize those problems?
It's the ones in denial, the med-noncompliant ones who love their illness that cause the troubles, not those who've identified problems and taken steps to address them, isn't it? So what's with this hitlerian propaganda inference that because this young mother had mental problems - if indeed she did, after all, it's a most convenient CYA story, isn't it? - therefore it's OK, just peachy keen that she was killed?
Where's this going? Crazy Tea Partiers need to be shot by heavily armed morons because they're 'crazy', as are all gun-owners and pro-lifers?
Time will tell. It always begins with the small things, to which people say, 'oh well, you know, cops hadda do whut they hadda do....'
Chilling and irksome, the entire business of this police state mentality.
Frankly, it's been family policy here never to tread in gun-free/Second Amendment-hostile northern gulags run by leftist aparats such as DC, NY, MA, NJ, IL, and similar prison states.
Mere avoidance is often sufficient to prevent contracting the spirochetes.
It's happening in Canada as well. http://goo.gl/MCeihC. This shooting was wanton, unnecessary and frightening in its implications. The video is damning.
ReplyDeleteI stumbled across this blog recently and I have since become a regular reader. It is so completely refreshing to read insightful and thoughtful commentary. I read a piece in American Thinker today, and although this may not be the appropriate forum for it, I wonder what you all, whose business is/was government service, make of it.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.americanthinker.com/2013/10/dangerous_times_the_crisis-monger.html
Coming to a town near you:
ReplyDeletehttp://autos.yahoo.com/blogs/motoramic/why-hottest-police-car-bomb-proof-military-suv-184502872.html
Also, I recently bought a book (yet to finish but, it is alarming). Good review here:
http://blogs.fas.org/secrecy/2013/09/american-coup/
Arkie
Hey Dip! You called it!
ReplyDeletehttp://www.jpost.com/Iranian-Threat/News/Iran-gets-senior-seat-on-UN-nuclear-disarmament-committee-327722
I had always been a huge supporter of the police, but I've recently come to the conclusion that they're just armed civil servants, out for themselves and led by politically correct ass-kissers.
ReplyDeleteI know there are still many exceptions.
Don't count on any exceptions. Just watch the National Park Service Rangers as they're clearing out those pesky vets at the war memorials. They physically rousted a bunch of Vietnam Vets today at The Wall. This is going to come to a head quickly and it will not be pretty.
DeleteI'm at the point now where I'm hoping Congress DOESN'T belatedly backpay the NPS for all this 'volunteer' storm trooper time.
DeleteThere are reports now of Special Operators involved in Somalian and Libyan missions. It's reported, though unconfirmed, the missions were planned 11/2 weeks ago. They tried a "Hail Mary" to get the story changed. More evidence they are losing and know it.
ReplyDelete(Not necessarily disagreeing with you James - but October 4-5 was the 20th Anniversary of the events we've come to know as Blackhawk Down.)
DeleteArk
Yeah, I know Ark, but these are pretty predictable. Bin Laden dead, GM alive etc. "Blackhawk Down" is the first time some regretted retiring napalm.
DeleteSo looking through today's media and apparently there never was an actual shooting or something in Washington DC earlier this week. It was just an evil Republican rumor.
ReplyDeleteJack Dunphy (Not his real name) an LA policeman who writes at PJ Media wrote: "Use of Force: Do Critics of Miriam Carey Police Shooting Have a Case? "
ReplyDeleteThe article is worth reading in its entirety, but I include the following small extract:
"...Any use of force by a police officer must be judged based on facts reasonably known to the officer at the time. Or, as the Supreme Court put it in Graham v. Connor, “The ‘reasonableness’ of a particular use of force must be judged from the perspective of a reasonable officer on the scene, rather than with the 20/20 vision of hindsight.” (And note that Graham v. Connor arose from an incident in which police officers erroneously — but reasonably, according to the court — believed they had stopped a robbery suspect.)
Suppose for a moment a set of facts different from those that unfolded on Thursday, though one so similar as to present identical options to the involved officers:
A female driver with a young child as passenger rams a sports car into a barricade near the White House, then leads officers on a chase to the Capitol, where she drives onto the sidewalk and right up to a barricade, the only obstacle between her and the Capitol steps. Unable to proceed forward, she then backs into a police car and swerves along the sidewalk, in so doing nearly striking some of the many police officers present, some of whom fire at her. She then drives along the outskirts of the Capitol grounds. But police commanders, fearing a public relations backlash, order restraint and forbid the officers from using any more deadly force to stop her. She then crashes through the barricades lining the sidewalk at Constitution and Delaware, coming to rest at the steps of the Russell Senate Office Building. She then detonates the 500 lbs. of explosives she carries in the car, killing dozens, including some senators..."
http://pjmedia.com/blog/use-of-force-do-critics-of-miriam-carey-police-shooting-have-a-case/
I couldn't tell (just looking at TV available video) whether the child was in a car seat.
DeleteIF the kid was in an approved car seat - I'd think it "reasonable" explosives were not present.
This stuff (cops shooting then making excuses) is happening waaaay to often. Couple of months ago in Pine Bluff Arkansas, SWAT engaged a 107 year old man AFTER they'd managed to "get eyes on him" - robotic camera - true, the old fart did shoot through a closed door.
BUT, I'd think, why bother with even approaching the door if the cops could already keep an eye on him - why not just wait until the old guy took his afternoon nap?
Ark
http://www.foxnews.com/us/2013/09/08/107-year-old-man-killed-by-swat-team-in-arkansas/
DeleteArk