To be Wrong or to be Chicken

[n2doc]

By Charles P. Pierce

Aye, there's the rub.

Two potential Republican presidents tried to finesse the various existential issues arising from the events in Ferguson, Missouri. Paul Ryan, the zombie-eyed granny starver from the state of Wisconsin said this:

Ryan cautioned that people should allow the investigation into 18-year-old Michael Brown's death at the hands of a white police officer to run its course before drawing conclusions. The Justice Department is conducting its own inquiry in addition to a state investigation, but the Wisconsin Republican cautioned against allowing the federal government to take on a large oversight role in Ferguson. "There is no problem with the federal government having a role," he said. "But in all of these things, local control, local government, local authorities who have the jurisdiction, who have the expertise, who are actually there are the people who should be in the lead."

Jesus H. Christ on tour with Judas Priest, is there any situation in recent memory that cries out so loudly to be kept a quadrillion hectares away from "local control" than this one? (What would Ryan have done in 1964? Left the investigation into the deaths of three civil rights workers in Mississippi to the "expertise" of the Neshoba County sheriff's department?) Would he really prefer, at this point, to have Eric Holder concede the direction of the investigation to the "expertise" of Chief Thomas Jackson, who leaked the convenience store video despite the fact that the Department Of Justice did everything but hit him over the head with a hammer to stop him? Is that what President Ryan would do? Sorry, ZEGS, thank you for playing.

But Ryan is a rock compared to our old pal, Big Chicken from New Jersey.

"Listen I think it's very dangerous to make generalizations about anybody like that, Matt. We have millions of dedicated men and women who are police officers across this country, who work in grave danger every day, who try to make sure they protect innocent people across the country. So I'm not going to get into this game of generalizing and characterizing people in that way. Everybody should be judged on their merits. Whatever happened in Ferguson, we have a justice system in this country that will be able to make that judgement and if there are people who need to be held accountable I'm confident they will be. But I'm not going to get into this business of generalizing against law enforcement officers. It's not right."

I find Big Chicken's answer very revealing, and not just because he has something of a personal interest in sucking up to law enforcement these days. If events in Ferguson continue to deteriorate, and if other Fergusons pop up elsewhere in the country in the places where the same social and political tinder has been piling up for decades, waiting for a spark, there's going to be space out there for a law-and-order authoritarian bully of a candidate to embody the collective fears and hatreds of nervous white people. If nothing else, that is right in Christie's wheelhouse. In fact, it may be the easiest way he has to deal himself fully back in.

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