No, We Don't All Need to Do Some 'Soul Searching' over Baltimore
Credit President Obama for saying this Tuesday: There's no excuse for the kind of violence that we saw yesterday. It is counterproductive. When individuals get crowbars and start prying open doors to loot, they're not protesting, they're not making a statement -- they're stealing. When they burn down a building, they're committing arson. And they're destroying and undermining businesses and opportunities in their own communities that rob jobs and opportunity from people in that area. So it is entirely appropriate that the mayor of Baltimore, who I spoke to yesterday, and the governor, who I spoke to yesterday, work to stop that kind of senseless violence and destruction. That is not a protest. That is not a statement. It's people -- a handful of people taking advantage of a situation for their own purposes, and they need to be treated as criminals. Of course, it didn't take long for Obama to turn into . . . well, the same Obama who makes us grind our teeth. For starters, he stepped out of the role of president and into the role of network news director, lamenting that "one burning building will be looped on television over and over and over again, and the thousands of demonstrators who did it the right way I think have been lost in the discussion." Actually, Mr. President, it was "144 vehicles and 15 buildings" burned by the angry mobs. Whatever the flaws of the national media, they didn't overhype what was going on in Baltimore Monday night and into Tuesday morning. Obama said, "The overwhelming majority of the community in Baltimore I think have handled this appropriately, expressing real concern and outrage over the possibility that our laws were not applied evenly in the case of Mr. Gray, and that accountability needs to exist." Yes, the percentage of Baltimore residents who participated in the riots and committed crimes is small. But in terms of sheer numbers, we're not talking about a few bad apples. There were 235 arrests; the video suggests dozens of looters at that CVS, maybe hundreds. The Daily Mail says "dozens" of businesses were looted, ransacked, and damaged, and this map of reported incidents appears to concur.
Then his closing point: I think there are police departments that have to do some soul searching. I think there are some communities that have to do some soul searching. But I think we, as a country, have to do some soul searching. No, we don't! This is not a time for the usual "Socialism of Blame" where responsibility for what happened gets spread far and wide and equally to everybody. Why do we have to do some soul searching? We didn't do anything to Freddie Gray, the man who died after being arrested. The police actions are being investigated. We didn't set fire to a senior center under construction. We didn't run into a CVS and grab everything we could. We didn't set police cruisers on fire, or jump atop smashed police cruisers.
You know who's responsible for the punctured fire hose? The SOB who reached down with a knife and stabbed the fire hose!
All over Twitter Monday evening, people linked to that video and asked, "Why would he do that?" as if the answer were unimaginable. He did it because he didn't want the firefighters to put the fire out. He wanted the businesses to burn. He wanted the buildings to burn. He wanted to destroy. This may reflect his inability to create anything of value in his life so far, or it may reflect an anarchic desire to see destruction, which motivates many arsonists. After a while, the "why" stops mattering that much. It pales in comparison to the need to stop a guy like this. "We, as a country, have to do some soul searching"? I'm sure there's a significant chunk of you who have never even been to Baltimore. We can shut down our entire chain of soul stores and do a complete inventory, counting what's on every shelf, and it's not going to change one fact on the ground in Baltimore. Boy, the Iranians Are Really on Their Best Behavior These Days, Huh? Thomas Friedman: The challenge for President Barack Obama is whether he can do a deal with an Iran that, as Litwak puts it, "doesn't change character but just changes behavior." Obama's bet -- and it is not crazy –-- is that if you can get the right verification procedures in place and deprive Iran from making a bomb for a decade (that alone is worth a deal, given the alternatives) then you increase the odds of Iran's own people changing Iran's character from within. But then so much rides on implementing a fail-proof verification regime and "snapback" sanctions if Iran cheats. Gonna change Iran's character from within, huh? Here's the latest "character update" from the Iranian regime: Iranian patrol boats intercepted a cargo ship in the Strait of Hormuz on Tuesday and forced it into Iranian territorial waters by firing shots across its bow, prompting the U.S. Navy to send a destroyer and reconnaissance plane to monitor the situation. Iranian Revolutionary Guard boats confronted the MV Maersk Tigris, a Marshall Islands-flagged vessel, as it was traversing one of the world's most important oil shipping channels and forced it to divert toward Larak Island near Bandar Abbas, where it was boarded by Iranian forces, U.S. officials said . . . Alerted by a distress call from the Maersk Tigris, the U.S. Navy dispatched the destroyer USS Farragut toward the scene as well as a reconnaissance aircraft, the Pentagon said. Army Colonel Steve Warren said firing shots across the bow of a cargo vessel was "inappropriate" and seemed "provocative." The incident came just four days after Iranian patrol boats surrounded a U.S.-flagged vessel, the Maersk Kensington, and followed as it was in the same area, a U.S. official said. No warning shots were fired in that incident. U.S. officials said they were concerned and monitoring the situation, but an initial review indicated the United States did not have a legal obligation in a maritime environment to defend a Marshall Islands-flagged ship with no American crew. We're not obligated . . . so we won't. In other words, we're telling the Iranians that we're not going to defend these ships. Apparently no one remembers the Tanker War of the late 1980s. If Iran is being relentlessly provocative when the deal negotiations are at this point, how do you think they'll behave when the deal is signed? Hey, weren't we warned that these negotiations were so sensitive and delicate that 47 Republican senators risked blowing up the whole agreement by writing what amounted to an open letter to the Iranian regime declaring, "We don't trust you"? Why is our side required to stifle its open expression of doubts and questions, while their side gets to shoot at civilians? The Rick Perry You Don't Know Jim's "Write About the Candidates' Lives before They Were Famous" Series continues, with former Texas governor Rick Perry describing some of the more hair-raising experiences in the cockpit for the U.S. Air Force: The then-26-year-old Perry and his crew were flying from Bermuda back into the United States. Perry had been a captain for six months, and was less than a month away from leaving the Air Force. He remembers his crew for that flight as "inexperienced but well trained" — a second lieutenant co-pilot and a second lieutenant navigator on his first flight in the squadron. The C-130 was about 24,000 feet above Atlanta, Georgia, when a yellow light on the instrument panel lit up, indicating a potential problem with the No. 3 engine. "Yellow light flashed, yellow light means a possible overheat. When the yellow light stayed on, everybody puckered up. It's when the red light goes on and stays on, about 45 seconds later — that's an engine fire," Perry tells National Review. Perry says he instructed his co-pilot to begin the shutdown procedure for the engine by pulling the T-handle, which cuts the power and fuel to the No. 3 engine and dumps a substantial amount of fire retardant onto it. "I told the loadmaster in the back of the aircraft to look out on the right to see what he could see," Perry says. "It was a catastrophic turbine failure — a legitimate fire and legitimate disintegration of the turbine. Everything happened at once — all of that blew out the end of the engine. It looked pretty bad from that loadmaster's view. He reverted back to being a young man. He started speaking — well, he wasn't using proper flight protocol," Perry recalls with a chuckle. "There was a lot of profanity." Perry and his crew ensured the C-130's other three engines were working, turned into the wind, diverted to what was then Pope Air Force Base in North Carolina, and landed safely. Love Rick Perry or hate him, he's got a much more fascinating life story than we saw in his abbreviated appearance in the 2012 cycle. (You kind of wonder why his team didn't showcase more of this last time around.) Other offerings in my "Write About the Candidates' Lives before They Were Famous" Series: Ted Cruz's years as a Federal Trade Commission lawyer. Marco Rubio's years as speaker of the Florida House of Representatives. Marco Rubio's time running the Dole presidential campaign's Miami, Florida office. If you like this sort of campaign reporting – where hopefully you learn some things about the candidates you didn't know already -- share it, like it on Facebook, Tweet it, and so on. ADDENDA: Yesterday's appearance on Greta was bumped for riot coverage. I hope to see some of you at the National Review Insitute's Ideas Summit, where I'll be hosting a conversation with Senator Marco Rubio Friday Morning at 8:45 a.m. I also hope to see some of you later that day at the Right Online conference. Tomorrow: My big -- er, big-ish -- NFL Draft preview. | 
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