Don’t Give Special Rights To Anybody! Oh, Except Cops. That’s Cool. Ken White, Popehat, August 14, 2014
Cops and other public servants get special treatment because the whole system connives to let them. Take prosecutorial misconduct. If you are accused of breaking the law, your name will be released. If, on appeal, the court finds that you were wrongfully convicted, your name will still be brandished. But if the prosecutor pursuing you breaks the law and violates your rights, will he or she be named? No, usually not. Even if a United States Supreme Court justice is excoriating you for using race-baiting in your closing, she usually won’t name you. Even if the Ninth Circuit — the most liberal federal court in the country — overturns your conviction because the prosecutor withheld exculpatory evidence, they usually won’t name the prosecutor.
And leaks? Please. Cops and prosecutors leak information to screw defendants all the time. It helps keep access-hungry journalists reliably complaint. But leak something about an internal investigation about a shooting or allegation of police misconduct? Oh, you’d better believe the police union will sue your ass.
Cops, and prosecutors, and other public employees in the criminal justice system have power. It is the nature of power to make people believe that they are better than the rest of us, and entitled to privileges the rest of us do not enjoy.
Wingnuts’ sad dream to be cool: Why they worship Reagan and the military, Heather Digby Parsons, Salon, August 18, 2014
There are many stretches of the imagination in Wingnuttia, but this one requires a mental elasticity that only full-blown, brainwashed cultists could possibly wrap their minds around. Or a person who so desperately wants to be cool that he’ll delude himself into believing that the movement that fetishizes the military to the point of embarrassment is anti-authoritarian, that a movement that constantly repeats a mantra about American exceptionalism (calling the U.S. a “city on a hill”) is not Utopian, a movement that has been dedicated from day one to the destruction of unions, preserving the prerogatives of the 1 percent and demonizing racial and ethnic minorities doesn’t “look down” on others. (And any poor sad sap who has persuaded himself that the religious right is really a “live and let live” movement of tolerant partyers may be too far gone to be deprogrammed.)
They are really more to be pitied than censured. It must have been so difficult to grow up being them. But really, trying to make Ronald Reagan and other conservative movement luminaries into fun-loving counterculture radicals is just desperate and depressing. They are reactionaries, upset at all modern challenges to their prerogatives, fighting tooth and nail against any change that threatens their precarious hold on social dominance. They are very good at what they do. And they have been very successful on a political level even if the culture has mostly passed them by. But whatever their other achievements, they will never, ever be cool. Ever. They are Omega House, every last one of them.
