Last Call For A Firing Offense

Just a reminder that racism is still a problem in America, racism among young people is a problem (in case you subscribed to the theory that old racists will just die off or something, it wasn't true 50 years ago, it's not true now) and that racism among cops is a problem.  This from Cleveland:

Aaron McNamara is a young auxiliary officer at the Fairview Park police department [Update: "was" an auxiliary officer with Fairview police; he resigned less than an hour after this story was posted], climbing up the law enforcement ladder as he finishes his college degree this semester with dreams of becoming a federal agent, he says. On social media, he says he's gone through training with the Ohio State Highway Patrol, and this June he tweeted he was "Officially sworn in with the Fairview Park Police Department. Wow, this feels good. #DreamChasing."

He also has many thoughts about African Americans.

Over the past two years, McNamara has been commenting on YouTube videos — mostly about black people and law enforcement — regularly dropping racial and gay slurs, unambiguously expressing hatred towards minorities and anyone who dare not comply with what police say. He calls black people in videos "jungle monkeys," "spooks," and worse. He commented on a video of a young black child swearing, saying "This is how cop killers are raised my friends." He's also a fan of when police officers shoot and rough up non-compliant civilians.

Among Aaron McNamara's pearls of wisdom?

"Abolishing slavery was the worst thing we could have done. These people should be exterminated.. Unbelievable."

Reminder, this guy is in college (so educated enough to finish high school and pursue a degree), he wasn't in the South (Cleveland), is a Millennial in his twenties (so not from the 1950's or anything) and of course training to become a cop.

A cop who believes people like me should be "exterminated".

Raise your hand if you believe he is alone in meeting this criteria in America as we head into 2015.

Sunday Long Read: As Good As It Gets For Liberals

American Interest curmudgeon Walter Russell Mead makes the case that liberals in the US have no idea how good they had it under Obama, because the near-permanent rightward shift of America is imminent.

Shell-shocked liberals are beginning to grasp some inconvenient truths. No gun massacre is horrible enough to change Americans’ ideas about gun control. No UN Climate Report will get a climate treaty through the U.S. Senate. No combination of anecdotal and statistical evidence will persuade Americans to end their longtime practice of giving police officers extremely wide discretion in the use of force. No “name and shame” report, however graphic, from the Senate Intelligence Committee staff will change the minds of the consistent majority of Americans who tell pollsters that they believe that torture is justifiable under at least some circumstances. No feminist campaign will convince enough voters that the presumption of innocence should not apply to those accused of rape.

These are not the only issues in which, from a left Democratic point of view, the country is overrun with zombies and vampires: policy ideas that Democrats thought had been killed but still restlessly roam the earth. The finale of the George W. Bush presidency was, for many Democrats, conclusive evidence that conservative ideas just don’t work. The post 9/11 Bush foreign policy led to two long and unhappy wars. America had lost the trust of its allies without defeating its enemies. At home, the Bush tax cuts led to an exploding deficit, and the orgy of deregulation (admittedly, much of it dating from the Clinton years) led to the greatest financial crash since World War II and the most serious economic downturn since the Great Depression.

“Could a set of political ideas be more discredited?” liberals ask. The foreign policy failures of the Bush years, they believe, should have killed conservative ideology about America’s role in the world, and the financial crisis, they are certain, should have driven a stake through the heart of conservative economic doctrine. Yet: Here we are, six years into the Age of Obama, and the Tea Party is alive and Occupy is dead. The Republicans swept the midterm elections both nationally and at the state level—and Hillary Clinton appears more interested in conciliating Wall Street than in fighting it, and more interested in building bridges to conservative foreign policy thinkers than in continuing the Obama foreign policy. (And with even Jimmy Carter lambasting Obama’s Middle East policy as too weak, and the President committing to new troop deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan, it’s not clear that even President Obama wants to stay the course.)

Mead goes on to say that it's over for the left for good, that the Right will dominate, and if you thought Obama wasn't good enough, Hillary will be worse.

So just jump off a cliff now, libtards, right?

Not so fast.  The problem with the right is that you can always count on them overplaying their position and destroying themselves (and the country) in the process.  So yes, I think we are going to make a major shift to the right, and it's going to wreck the country again.  People have bet on the "permanent Republican majority" before and lost.

Maybe when the smoke clears next time, we'll have learned something.

The Morning After Brooklyn

The aftermath of last night's shooting of two NYPD beat cops is a grisly affair, with Republicans blaming Mayor de Blasio, AG Eric Holder, and of course, President Obama by proxy.  Former GOP Gov George Pataki made an ass of himself.

Pataki cast disdain at the mayor and the attorney general in a post on Twitter.

"Sickened by these barbaric acts, which sadly are a predictable outcome of divisive anti-cop rhetoric of Eric Holder and Mayor de Blasio," he tweeted.

He was referring to de Blasio's and Holder's support for peaceful protesters decrying alleged police brutality after the killing of Eric Garner and Michael Brown, two unarmed black men who died in confrontations with officers this year.

Protesters have taken to streets nationwide to demand an end to killings of unarmed people by police officers.

Hours before Saturday's attack, Brinsley appeared to make statements on social media implying he planned to kill officers and expressing outrage over the deaths of Garner and Brown.

Pat Lynch, the head of New York's Patrolmen's Benevolent Association, has vehemently attacked the mayor before and did so again the day of the shooting.

"There's blood on many hands tonight," Lynch said before making reference to the mayor's office.

De Blasio did not respond to the denunciations against him, but he condemned the killing of the officers as an "assassination" while Holder described it as a "cowardly attack."

And of course, it's all the fault of those people.

Not to be outdone, social media users joined the fray. Others objected to the finger pointing.

Some turned to hashtags #BlackLivesMatter for Garner and Brown -- and #BlueLivesMatter for police officers -- to share their opinions.

"Everyone who turned Michael Brown into a saint, the assassination of those cops is on you," username @mattcale52 tweeted.

This is an awful tragedy, but let's be real here.  It's going to get a lot uglier.  You couldn't pay me to be in NYC right now.