The Lighter Side of Ferguson

I hate to make light of a situation involving death, riots, and torched police cars, but one really has to laugh at the Left with regard to Ferguson. 

As Heather Mac Donald explained this week, bit by bit it became clearer that the conservative narrative – which wasn’t even a “narrative,” but simply an examination of the available facts — was more plausible. A thuggish convenience store robber assaulted a policeman; a “gentle giant” was not gunned down in cold blood by a racist cop.

But of course, an embarrassed apology was not forthcoming. The Left plunged ahead with its insistence that Michael Brown’s death proved something or other, and presented a great vehicle for that always-urgent “national conversation on race.”

After the decision, as Kevin Williamson notes, the Left’s claim became: “The prosecutor presented a case that was insufficiently biased.” Williamson is quite right with his analysis: “If your argument comes down to a complaint that grand jurors were given ‘all the evidence,’ that’s pretty weak tea.”

And that’s pretty funny.

So what is the Left’s prescription now? Why, fewer parking and traffic tickets, of course. That, and racial quotas for police departments, which violates civil-rights laws, and — per the definition of what must be done to enforce a quota — ensures that less-qualified cops are put on the streets. Just what we need.

Long-term, perhaps the Left’s most commonly proposed reform for neighborhoods like Ferguson is to make it easier to obtain and use illegal drugs there by decriminalizing them. Reasonable people can disagree about the War on Drugs, but smoking more dope will, to make a dry understatement, do nothing to address the actual social problems. First and foremost, they must address the appalling out-of-wedlock birthrates, dropout rates, poverty, and other crime.

My online dictionary defines “enabler” as “a person who encourages or enables negative or self-destructive behavior in another,” or “one who enables another to persist in self-destructive behavior … by providing excuses or by making it possible to avoid the consequences of such behavior.”

So the Left’s favored approach is precisely that of the enabler: don’t focus on criminal and self-destructive behavior; don’t even mention out-of-wedlock birthrates that feed crime; don’t address a dysfunctional inner-city culture that romanticizes thugs and disparages “acting white.”  Instead, talk about dubious statistical disparities and undefined “institutional racism.”

It’s hard not to enjoy a good laugh. The Left’s bankruptcy here is so obvious that one hopes that anything it proposes will not get taken very seriously. But of course, it’s quite possible that the joke may be on me.

And now, we have the Eric Garner decision. Did the officer have criminal or racial intent? The grand jury was half-white, the other half included blacks and Latinos. Here’s hoping the crowds and critics act more responsibly than they have in Ferguson, and that the call to draw some unsupportable global conclusion on race is rejected.