Conservatives know very well that attempts to politicize violence on the part of the mentally ill is deeply unfair. They know that liberal claims that either the Tea Party or conservatives such as Sarah Palin were somehow responsible for the 2011 shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords was sheer slander. If some angry supporters of the police now try to say Obama, Holder, or de Blasio approved or countenanced the actions of Ismaaiyl Brinsley, they are just as wrong. Obama, Holder, and de Blasio have all rightly condemned the murder of the two officers.That's quite fair. But keep reading.
But once we acknowledge that, we cannot ignore the fact that the discussion about race and the police in this country has gotten out of control in recent months and that these same political leaders who should have been seeking to restrain the public from drawing extreme and general conclusions about two very extraordinary cases instead kept the pot boiling for political advantage.
Even worse than that, they have empowered and legitimized racial demagogues like Al Sharpton who have sought to profit from exploiting these tragedies to promote their own agendas. In turn, Sharpton and those like him who are given prominent air time on networks like MSNBC and CNN have encouraged protesters who have not only engaged in violence but often openly called for the killing of police, a stance that has been openly endorsed by Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan and other radicals.
The act of a single possibly mad gunman does not mean that Americans must never question the actions of police or ponder broader issues about race. It is misleading to claim that those who have raised such questions have given a green light to the murder of police officers. Yet those who have sought to take two very different and quite unusual incidents in Ferguson and New York and weave them into a neat narrative of racism and anti-black violence by police have done very much the same thing. The difference between the two is that the media spent much of the last four months seeking to establish that wrongheaded narrative as a fact while they will, quite rightly, give no credence or air time to those who will blame Obama for cop killers....
If there is any reproach today that should be laid at the feet of Obama, Holder, and de Blasio, it is that by helping to foster one false set of assumptions, they have now left themselves vulnerable to questions about their own willingness to accept and exploit calumnies against the police and the justice system.
I'd correct Tobin, though, in mentioning that the MSM is indeed giving airtime to those who would blame President Obama for the murders. Further, it's simply not possible to discount the Al Sharpton-inspired protesters who marched through New York's streets inciting violence and exhorting activists to bring about more "dead cops."
That's the burden that the left must bear and it's the complicity that it must accept, and ultimately, overcome. That will require that mainstream leaders repudiate that most strident voices of the far-left apparatus --- which of course will be prohibitively difficult since these same people are those who wield enormous power in government, academe, and the media. Indeed, American politics is going to continue something of an ideological realignment over the next couple of years. The left will most likely continue to revive its default 1960s mode of radicalism and revolutionary dogma. Street activists and college ideological rabble will continue to denounce "this fucking country" with the blessings of those highest in power, such as Eric Holder at the Justice Department, as well as his successor, Loretta Lynch. But in electoral politics, we're already seeing and we'll continue to see ostensibly mainstream candidates aggressively distance themselves from the Obama-inspired radicalism that has infected contemporary "progressivism" with the cancer of ideological evil.
