The Ol' Bad Day Defense

 Back in summertime 2014  - I'm pretty sure it was 2014 - I was listening to All Things Considered Saturday.

Michel Martin was doing a feature on the fairly new Black Lives Matter movement.

She had presented several pieces of the story and had queued up the next which was an interview with a retired detective from the Sacramento police department; I have no memory of what the ostensive subject of the interview was.

Almost immediately the retired detective burst out something about Black Lives Matter being a dangerous Marxist organization.

That got my attention.

After a noticeably subdued gasp and a longer than professional pause Michel forged ahead with the interview.

I have no memory of what was said.

But I have noticed that the dominant attitude of the police toward Black Lives Matter people is that the Black Lives Matter people are terrorists who wantonly indulge in destruction of property and in assaults on the very essence of our sacred American way of life.

I guess that's why, when there were Black Lives Matter demonstrations last summer, the cops always showed up in force and in full battle regalia and almost immediately started clubbing and tear gassing everyone in sight; you can't let terrorists have an inch; if you do, they'll take a mile (a stitch in time, etc.)

Early in the white insurrection at the Capitol on 6 January I remember thinking, "it's a good thing they're white; if they were black, they would be dead".

But on the other hand the white teenager who killed two people and wounded a third in Kenosha last summer is out on two million dollars bail that the American Nazis and their ilk raised to let this "poor scared kid who was just exercising his rights" (that's a synthetic quote but pretty close to what has been said about this youthful assassin) have his freedom back.

The court seems not to take his crime very seriously either: the trial keeps getting pushed back so the poor kid can savor his bail granted freedom.

He has been seen drinking and laughing with fascists in bars since his release; I guess being a mass murderer out on bail waives the 21 year old drinking age.

The last straw, though, was last night.

A police captain of the Atlanta Police Department summed up the mass murder of quite a number of Asian Americans by saying that the carnage was not a hate crime, the poor kid had just been "having a bad day".