The Derp Also Rises

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There is more unrest and turmoil in Ferguson today after the pathologically clueless Police Chief Thomas Jackson yesterday released a video that allegedly shows the deceased teenager, Michael Brown, stealing cigars from a convenience store, implying that this somehow justified or excused the teenager’s death. Several have pointed out that there was no way the officer who shot Michael Brown would have known he was a shoplifting suspect, assuming that he was.

This guy Jackson seriously needs to get completely out of the law enforcement business. Even if the video shows this — the snip of the video I saw didn’t — Police Chief Terminal Derp Jackson could have not released it to the public just yet while the situation in Ferguson is still fragile. Waiting a few days would have been nice. He could have shared it with investigators, and eventually to juries, fine. But releasing it to the public at this time was absolutely unnecessary and served no purpose other than to piss people off. And the Justice Department had asked Chief Derp to not release it.

My impression from some news stories is that there are gangs of looters who are a separate crew from the actual protesters, and some news stories have photos of young men identified as protesters who are guarding businesses to protect them from looters.

12 thoughts on “The Derp Also Rises”

  1. I am becoming more and more convinced that the majority of the population of the “first world” will soon be Hungry Ghosts. Or whatever Greed + Stupidity comes back as. I think I’m glad I’m old. The future does not look bright.

  2. One of the evil aspects of the Travon Martin case was the vilification of the victim – which was totally irrelevant. Shooting a unarmed black teen who is not in the act of committing a crime which threatens life or property does not become justifiable homicide if you can convince people that once upon a time that teen was dangerous or at some distant future he might have become a threat.

    This is character assassination of the deceased in preparation for deflecting an investigation that the Police Chief is not going to be able to whitewash. BTW, this is the shoe that hasn’t hit the floor. There will be an investigation and if the true facts resemble the reports so far, a cop will be charged. The wingnuts will line up in defense and moderate republicans will do a Fred Astaire trying not to offend the base while not defending the cop shooter.

  3. At this point, the Police Chief is auditioning for Wingnut Welfare because he knows that after this horror-show, his Chiefing career is over.

    I can hear him now, on Reich-Wing talk radio, after his first opening monologue:
    “Thanks, Bubba, you’re the very first caller on ‘Hail to the Chief.’
    What’s on your mind?”

    Probably not much in or on Bubba’s “mind” besides automatic reflexes…
    Or, apparently, the Chief’s.
    Oy.

  4. @Buddhacrone (love your name), a description of Hell by Hunter S Thompson:

    “…a viciously overcrowded version of Phoenix—a clean, well-lighted place full of sunshine and bromides and fast cars where almost everybody seems vaguely happy, except for the ones who know in their hearts what is missing”

    I think Thompson was feeling 1960s optimistic when he wrote that.

    Background, The Turmoil in Ferguson has been Threatening to Explode for Decades.

    Even deeper background, and a brilliant essay, Not a Tea Party, a Confederate Party:

    Who really won the Civil War? The first hint…came from the biography Jefferson Davis: American by William J. Cooper. In 1865, not only was Davis not agonizing over how to end the destruction, he wanted to keep it going longer. He disapproved of Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, and when U. S. troops finally captured him, he was on his way to Texas, where an intact army might continue the war.

    …Here’s what my teachers should have told me: “Reconstruction was the second phase of the Civil War. It lasted until 1877, when the Confederates won.”

    …The Civil War was easy to misunderstand at the time, because there had never been anything like it. It was a total mobilization of society, the kind Europe wouldn’t see until World War I. The Civil War was fought not just with cannons and bayonets, but with railroads and factories and an income tax.

    If the Napoleonic Wars were your model, then it was obvious that the Confederacy lost in 1865: Its capital fell, its commander surrendered, its president was jailed, and its territories were occupied by the opposing army. If that’s not defeat, what is?

    But now we have a better model than Napoleon: Iraq.

    After the U.S. forces won on the battlefield in 1865 and shattered the organized Confederate military, the veterans of that shattered army formed a terrorist insurgency that carried on a campaign of fire and assassination throughout the South until President Hayes agreed to withdraw the occupying U. S. troops in 1877. Before and after 1877, the insurgents used lynchings and occasional pitched battles to terrorize those portions of the electorate still loyal to the United States. In this way they took charge of the machinery of state government, and then rewrote the state constitutions to reverse the postwar changes and restore the supremacy of the class that led the Confederate states into war in the first place. [2]

    By the time it was all over, the planter aristocrats were back in control, and the three constitutional amendments that supposedly had codified the U.S.A’s victory over the C.S.A.– the 13th, 14th, and 15th — had been effectively nullified in every Confederate state. The Civil Rights Acts had been gutted by the Supreme Court, and were all but forgotten by the time similar proposals resurfaced in the 1960s. Blacks were once again forced into hard labor for subsistence wages, denied the right to vote, and denied the equal protection of the laws. Tens of thousands of them were still physically shackled and subject to being whipped, a story historian Douglas Blackmon told in his Pulitzer-winning Slavery By Another Name.

    So Lincoln and Grant may have had their mission-accomplished moment, but ultimately the Confederates won. The real Civil War — the one that stretched from 1861 to 1877 — was the first war the United States lost.

    …The larger pattern….The essence of the Confederate worldview is that the democratic process cannot legitimately change the established social order, and so all forms of legal and illegal resistance are justified when it tries.

    That worldview is alive and well. During last fall’s government shutdown and threatened debt-ceiling crisis, historian Garry Wills wrote about our present-day Tea Partiers: “The presiding spirit of this neo-secessionism is a resistance to majority rule.”

    The Confederate sees a divinely ordained way things are supposed to be, and defends it at all costs. No process, no matter how orderly or democratic, can justify fundamental change.

    …Today, ObamaCare cannot be accepted. No matter that it was passed by Congress, signed by the President, found constitutional by the Supreme Court, and ratified by the people when they re-elected President Obama. It cannot be allowed to stand, and so the tactics for destroying it get ever more extreme. The point of violence has not yet been reached, but the resistance is still young.

    Violence is a key component of the present-day strategy against abortion rights, as Judge Myron Thompson’s recent ruling makes clear. Legal, political, social, economic, and violent methods of resistance mesh seamlessly. The Alabama legislature cannot ban abortion clinics directly, so it creates reasonable-sounding regulations the clinics cannot satisfy, like the requirement that abortionists have admitting privileges at local hospitals.

    …Barack Obama…won a huge landslide in 2008, getting more votes than any president in history. And yet, his legitimacy has been questioned ever since. The Birther movement was created out of whole cloth, there never having been any reason to doubt the circumstances of Obama’s birth. Outrageous conspiracy theories of voter fraud — millions and millions of votes worth — have been entertained on no basis whatsoever. Immediately after Obama took office, the Oath Keeper movement prepared itself to refuse his orders.

    A black president calling for change, who owes most of his margin to black voters — he himself is a violation of the established order. His legitimacy cannot be conceded.

    Confederates need guns. The South is a place, but the Confederacy is a worldview. To this day, that worldview is strongest in the South, but it can be found all over the country (as are other products of Southern culture, like NASCAR and country music). A state as far north as Maine has a Tea Party governor.

    Gun ownership…plays a irreplaceable role in the Confederate worldview. Tea Partiers will tell you that the Second Amendment is our protection against “tyranny”. But in practice tyranny simply means a change in the established social order, even if that change happens — maybe especially if it happens — through the democratic processes defined in the Constitution. If the established social order cannot be defended by votes and laws, then it will be defended by intimidation and violence. How are We the People going to shoot abortion doctors and civil rights activists if we don’t have guns?

  5. I was in the USN back in the 70s. A reliable friend told me of a racial ‘incident’ that he was a witness to – sometime in the 70s – onboard the USS Constellation. While at sea, there was a race riot that spanned several days. I don’t recall what set it off. This military riot didn’t involve the property damage like civilian riots – It involved racial assaults that paralyzed the ship. People didn’t report for duty. Sailors polarized and congregated by race – the main deck (not the flight deck) became a DMZ for hand-to-hand and improvised weapons skirmishes.

    The captain could have armed the ships police and simply shot offenders, but since the ships police was predominately (maybe exclusively) white, that would have resulted in a one-sided bloodbath. There’s a lesson to be learned in how he got the ship under control. He and the XO and the Air Boss and chaplains patrolled the main deck – unarmed – and talked down the agitators.

    The captains career was already over, but he showed courage and leadership that should have earned him a medal. The same principles apply here – show real leadership without bias and the situation will come under control. Convince the protesters that justice WILL BE DONE! Putting your butt on the line is a good way of convincing protesters you are serious.

  9. maha,
    Yeah, on my Dell Preferred Account.
    It’s got Windows 8 – SUCK CITY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

  10. Oh, and I’m now going to have to pay $25 more a month.
    Also, too – SUCK CITY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

  11. served no purpose other than to piss people off.

    It poisons the (potential) jury pool.

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