How the Brooklyn Shootings Are like the Oklahoma City Bombing



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Morning Jolt
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December 22, 2014

How the Brooklyn Shootings Are like the Oklahoma City Bombing

Christmas is Thursday. Anything you've gotta order, order it now!

Unfortunately, it's a grim edition of the Morning Jolt. We'll try to have a cheerier tone for tomorrow, the last Morning Jolt until December 29.

How the Brooklyn Shootings Are like the Oklahoma City Bombing

Friday, I wrote in relation to The Interview and folks like Touré who claim that making the film is akin to "shouting 'fire' in a crowded theater":

The thinking of the censor-minded is that somehow, Sony should have known that depicting Kim Jong Un in a humiliating way would have generated a furious, dangerous, threatening response. This is a bit of First Amendment jujitsu, where somehow you're responsible not just for what you say but for how someone else reacts to it. You're expected to have clairvoyant abilities of how someone is going to react, and then not speak aloud the argument you wanted to make, because preventing their potentially violent, dangerous, or threatening reaction is more important than your right to speak.

Saturday, some nut-job killed two cops in cold blood in Brooklyn, New York:

"I'm Putting Wings On Pigs Today. They Take 1 Of Ours…Let's Take 2 of Theirs," Brinsley, 28, wrote on Instagram alongside a photo of a silver handgun.

He also included the sick hashtags: #ShootThePolice #RIPErivGarner #RIPMike Brown.

"This May Be My Final Post…I'm Putting Pigs In A Blanket."

Quite a few folks on the right contended that the Left's furious rhetoric denouncing police forces as racist and malicious led to the killer's actions.

 

 
 
 

The boss lays out the argument that the protesters are morally culpable for the killings and a sudden uptick of violence targeting police officers:

If the anti-police protesters in New York who were braying for dead police officers meant what they said, they should be very pleased tonight. Here is video of their chant, "What do we want? Dead cops! When do we want it? Now!" . . .

We've heard a lot lately about tensions between the police and the communities they serve. But usually no one is willing to point out that a major source of that tension is an irrational animus toward the police, fueled by activists and commentators who lie about what they do.

Protesting police actions is not, ipso facto, a call for violence against the police. But that particular chant -- "What do we want? Dead cops! When do we want it? Now!" -- is precisely that. We can argue whether that chant rises to the explicit level of threat to the point where it would not be protected under the Constitution. We can argue whether or not the shooter would have gone on his anti-police rampage if the protesters had not chanted that slogan, or if it the protesters had any particular impact on his actions.

But I don't think there's going to be much dispute that chanting that you want to see cops dead is a terrible, terrible idea. If the protesters denouncing the New York City Police Department want to be regarded as something beyond violent anarchist scum, they'll have to -- no pun intended -- police their own. When somebody starts chanting that they want dead cops, if you're a protester with an ounce of sense, you have to stand up to that. This movement likes to claim that when it comes to police misbehavior, "silence equals consent." That would apply to the violence of this anti-police movement, as well.

If you oppose this recent anti-police protest movement, these incidents of violence against cops are probably the single most effective way to turn public sentiment against them. (The presence of Al Sharpton was probably the second-most effective way.)

Police shootings will do for the anti-police movement what the Oklahoma City bombing did to the militia movement.

The End of Bill de Blasio's Political Career

Jazz Shaw makes the argument that New York City mayor Bill de Blasio, who hasn't hesitated to stand with the protesters against the police, must resign in disgrace:

It is time for New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio to resign. Yesterday's assassination of two of New York City's finest was only the latest and most devastating brush stroke on a canvas which has been coming into focus for months. When you are the mayor of a city you have many responsibilities, but one of the most vital (in terms of maintaining a functional societal structure) is the mandate to enforce the laws and maintain social order. It is the same for mayors everywhere, as well as governors and presidents. But currently, the state of relations between City Hall and the New York Police Department has devolved to the point of complete dysfunction, and criminals are well aware of this state of affairs. The fault for the creation of this toxic atmosphere is essentially found solely at the feet of Mayor de Blasio.

Former commissioner Ray Kelly is saying that de Blasio's relationship with the police department has gotten so bad, he needs an intermediary.

One of Bill de Blasio's role models is former Mayor David Dinkins. Liberals have attempted to airbrush the Dinkins years as the beginning of the city's renaissance that most associate with Rudy Giuliani, a task of airbrushing so intense it requires a wind tunnel. Put another way, Dinkins was so bad, he convinced New Yorkers to vote for a Republican.

Dinkins reigned over an era of high crime rates, serious racial tensions, a Crown Heights riot targeting Jews so intense that Giuliani and other politicians called it "a pogrom," and a general sense of rising chaos in the city. But Dinkins never had this:

Believing City Hall has betrayed them, cops demonstrated their anger Saturday by turning their backs on Mayor de Blasio as he entered a Brooklyn hospital to pay his respects to two murdered officers.

A startling video shows a hallway at Woodhull Hospital filled with officers silently facing away from de Blasio as he walks a blue gantlet.

The demonstration, captured by WPIX11 News, included the presidents of the Patrolmen's Benevolent Association and the Sergeants Benevolent Association.

"Mayor de Blasio, the blood of these two officers is clearly on your hands," Ed Mullins, president of the sergeants association, said in a statement to his union members Saturday night.

"It is your failed policies and actions that enabled this tragedy to occur," he said. "I only hope and pray that more of these ambushes and executions do not happen again."

I don't think de Blasio's mayorality recovers from this. He may remain in office, but whatever mandate he once had is gone. A lot of the mayor's critics charged he would bring back the bad old days. Now we have thugs targeting cops, convinced they're acting in the name of righteous vengeance.

Meanwhile, Down in Washington Hawaii . . .

How quickly one day's presidential statement can be overtaken by the next day's events:

President Obama responded to black activists who deny that racial progress has been made in the United States by arguing that they are preempting the possibility of further progress.

"There's no reason for folks to be patient. I'm impatient. That's why in the wake of what happened in Ferguson and what happened in New York, we've initiated task forces that in 90 days, are going to be providing very specific recommendations," he told Candy Crowley during an interview that aired Friday on CNN's State of the Union. "On the other hand, I think an unwillingness to acknowledge that progress has been made cuts off the possibility of further progress. If -- if critics want to suggest that America is inherently and irreducibly racist, then why bother even working on it? I've seen change in my own life. So has this country. And those who would deny that, I think, actually foreclose the possibility of further progress rather than advancing it."

The president gave the interview on Friday. Late Saturday night, he called for "patient dialogue" in statement on the murder of two police officers in Brooklyn.

The names "Alfred Sharpton" and "Al Sharpton" appear 81 times in White House visitor logs.

ADDENDA: New York Jets center Nick Mangold, coming out of the tunnel yesterday:

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