It's beginning to look as if the Democratic Party can't whip African-Americans into an anti-white frenzy to turn out on Election Day, and then say, "OK, thanks, guys! That's all we need."
How else do liberals explain the upsurge in racial unrest since Obama became president? Why would white racism -- their view -- latent for the previous 15 years, burst forth meteorically just as the country elected its first black president?
Did we elect this bumbling incompetent, then suddenly remember that we're racists?
I have an explanation! It's subtly alluded to in the title of my book, "Mugged: Racial Demagoguery From the Seventies to Obama." What's theirs?I've tried looking on Salon, which is like a liberal website from IFC's "Portlandia" (typical headline: "Smashing police cars is a legitimate political strategy"), but Salon shows no interest in exploring why white racism has suddenly exploded under Obama.
MSNBC, having been thoroughly embarrassed with the Michael-Brown-was-shot-in-the-back-while-walking-home-from-his-cancer–research-internship narrative, has gone totally abstract with the actual cause of the Baltimore unrest. The network covers the riots like a sporting event, with Chris Hayes constantly jumping in to talk about how smart and disciplined and clean the activists are.
Which reminds me, whatever happened to Lawrence O'Donnell's star witness to the Ferguson shooting, Tiffany Mitchell?
You're all surely familiar with Dorian Johnson, Brown's ex-con co-conspirator in the cigar robbery, who invented the whole "hands up, don't shoot" fantasy. MSNBC played Dorian's version of the shooting a million times a day last summer:
"The officer is out of the car now ... and as he got closer, he fired one more shot. That shot struck my friend in the back. (Big Mike) then stopped what he was doing and stopped to turn around, with his hands in (the) air, and started to tell the officer that he was unarmed and he was not -- and before he can get his last words out, the officer fired several more shots and my friend went down in the fetal position."
As assiduous MSNBC viewers will also recall, Tiffany Mitchell's statements about the shooting played on an endless loop on O'Donnell's show:
"The officer gets out of his vehicle and he pursues him. As he's following him, he's shooting at him. And Michael's body jerks as if he's hit. He turns around and he put his hands up and the officer continued to walk up on him and shoot him until he goes all the way down to the ground."
Under O'Donnell's tough cross-examination, Tiffany disputed the idea -- now proved true by gobs of forensic evidence -- that Brown had wrestled with Officer Wilson for his gun:
MITCHELL: What I saw was Michael trying to pull away from the cop through the window.
O'DONNELL: And could you see if the police officer was touching Michael when he was trying to pull away?
MITCHELL: Yes, he was. He was pulling him in.
O'DONNELL: And so, he was trying to -- what you saw was the police officer trying to pull Michael into the car?
MITCHELL: Yes.
As O'Donnell summarized the evidence: "Two very valuable witnesses there, Dorian Johnson and Tiffany Mitchell."
But to be extra sure he was getting the absolute, complete truth from Dorian and Tiffany, O'Donnell then interviewed a series of experts -- all of whom were blown away by the credibility of Dorian and Tiffany!
MSNBC's law enforcement analyst, Jim Cavanaugh, said that Tiffany "is very credible and truthful. ... And I thought Dorian was very credible as well, and watched his interviews. ... A 22-year-old guy cannot make that up. ... So I think they're both very credible."
Lisa Bloom, NBC legal analyst, said, "I can tell you, as a practicing trial lawyer, who assesses witnesses every day for a living, Tiffany Mitchell is excellent. I give her an A."
Qualification to become an MSNBC expert analyst: Be dropped on your head a lot as a child.
Everything Dorian and Tiffany said has, of course, now been proved, after months-long, astronomically expensive investigations by both the grand jury and Eric Holder's Justice Department, to be a pack of lies. Wilson has been completely vindicated in shooting Brown, who did wrestle with the cop for his gun, was not shot in the back and did not have his hands up.
Maybe that's why MSNBC is not even trying to report on what happened with Freddie Gray, the cause celebre of the Baltimore riots.
And whatever happened to the South Carolina case of an apparently unjustifiable shooting of fleeing suspect Walter Scott by North Charleston police officer Michael Slager? Left-wing racial agitators don't have to listen to me, but that seemed like a better case for them than Michael Brown. Why so silent? Black lives matter, people!
Obscure websites claim that Slager had been shot by his own Taser and had reason to believe Scott was running away, still holding the Taser gun. Photos seem to show the Taser wire being pulled taut from the officer's chest to the fleeing suspect, who'd gotten tangled up in it.
And why did Scott run? Did he suddenly remember he forgot to tape Judge Judy? Did the Mercedes belong to him? Who was his passenger? It may turn out that Officer Slager shot a citizen in the back without reason or justification, but can't we get the basic facts of what happened?
This is what I loathe about lawyers. They refuse to let their clients talk -- in order to save the perfect case for trial. But in big public cases like these, that strategy doesn't work. Their clients are left to twist in the wind for six months, and, by the time the trial comes around, the guy's life is ruined anyway.
Luckily for Officer Wilson, his girlfriend called into a radio station to give his version of events soon after the shooting. Eight months and millions of dollars later, it turns out her account was the only true one, despite all those very credible, highly believable, salt-of-the-earth eyewitnesses testifying on MSNBC.