Comment

White House Meeting Scheduled for Beer O'Clock

359
drcordell7/30/2009 11:27:23 am PDT

re: #354 buzzsawmonkey

The exercise of rights under the Constitution also depends upon public order, which means that the police need to be able to do their job.

Gates’ treatment, even if it is an example of police overzealousness—not a sure thing by any means—does not rise to the level of a denial of constitutional rights.

Suggesting that it does—that the Constitution is tottering because of this incident—is howling lunacy. It is the same overheated rhetoric that one would see in placard form at an ANSWER demonstration. Trying to throw in aspersions about someone’s “conservatism” because they do not conform to your radical-left views of what rights, and conservatives, “should” be is incredibly silly.

That statement was not necessarily directly regarding the Gates case. It was in response to the statement that one only deserves their “rights” if they are acting responsibly.

Nobody is suggesting that the Gates case specifically is threatening the Constitution. It is simply an extremely high visibility example of the growing power that Police exercise daily in America with little or no repercussion. Other examples include 85-year-old grandmothers being tasered on the side of the road. Or a mentally-handicapped being pepper sprayed and then tasered while in the restroom of a Dollar General store. Such is the state of law enforcement in America, that even the smallest perceived slight or lack of deference to an officer justifies beating, tasering or pepper spraying.

The e-mail of the Boston Police Officer who was just fired for his racist comments illustrates this attitude the best. “His first priority of concern should be to get off the phone and comply with police, for if I was the officer he verbally assaulted like a banana-eating jungle monkey, I would have sprayed him in the face with OC deserving of his belligerent non-compliance.”