MSNBC used to bill itself as "the place for politics." An updated version of the slogan would add -- "... provided we're not left embarrassed and defensive." Such has been the case on the cable outlet ever since the execution-style murders of two New York City police officers by a gunman who vowed on social media that he would avenge the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner in their confrontations with police.
On her show Monday night, the network's Rachel Maddow showed a clip of New York City mayor Bill de Blasio at a news conference asking "everyone" and "this is across the spectrum, to put aside protests, put aside demonstrations, until these funerals are passed." (And that includes those of you on the other end of the "spectrum" with your fiendish insistence that "police lives matter.")
An odd lead-in to a segment where Maddow and unfailingly predictable ex-New York Times columnist Bob Herbert tied themselves in knots to distance "dead cops" protesters from the dead cops in Bed-Stuy.
It began with Maddow's introduction of a way-too-upbeat Herbert, author of the timely new book "Losing Our Way: An Intimate Portrait of a Troubled America" --
MADDOW: Do you think it is possible for everybody to take a breather for a minute? Is there a way to pause and be more constructive than the initial response here? (Translation: we're getting hammered over this. How do we spin it?).
HERBERT: Sure, you could take a breather. The question is, how long is that breather going to be? What we've witnessed is an atrocity, a terrible tragedy. These officers were murdered in cold blood. There's no defense for it at all. I don't know anyone on either side of this issue, whether they're police officers or protesters or just ordinary members of the New York City community, who would condone this kind of atrocity. (Imagine that -- even supporters of police don't condone their murder). At that same time I think that it's important not to let this terrible tragedy obscure the very important issue of an epidemic of police violence against primarily African-Americans, often African-American children.That's an important issue and people who care about justice need to continue that issue. Now the mayor has asked that there not be any protests between now and when the funerals occur out of respect for the families and I think that's a reasonable request. If I had something to do with the protests, I would honor that request. But at some point the campaign against police violence, unnecessary police violence (rare concession from the left that some violence committed by police is necessary), sometimes fatal police violence, must continue and I think that it must grow, because justice has to be served at some point.
MADDOW: The initial reaction, particularly on the political right to these killings, was not what I expected, honestly. When Rudy Giuliani came out and said there's been four months of hate-the-police propaganda from this president, when former New York governor George Pataki came out and full-on blamed Eric Holder for this having happened (Still think we're a nation of cowards unwilling to discuss race, Mr. Holder? Congratulations -- now it's all we talk about.), when even the police commissioner said that these killings are essentially an offshoot of the protests, that they're directly related to the protests despite the facts of what seems to be this man's criminal and troubled and isolated life, that is the way the country, I think, is seeing this because those voices on the right have been so loud and so sure that this was political.
HERBERT: Yeah, you know, I'm not at all surprised, I've been covering this stuff for decades. I was in Harlem when Rudy Giuliani, because of protests, locked down Harlem, prevented elderly women from getting to their homes, buzzed the protesters with police helicopters and stuff like that. He has a Manichean view of the world and I just haven't been surprised by any of this. And this is why it's so difficult to overcome the problems connected with policing, why the police violence continues, why you can go back to the 1970s, the '80s and then right up to the present day, where you get these atrocities occurring at the hands of some police officers.
Got that? The "atrocity" that Herbert initially cited, Ismaaiyl Brinsley's unprovoked murder of two New York City police officers who never saw it coming, is indistinguishable to the "atrocities" committed by "some" police, an allusion to the deaths of Brown, Garner and others at the hands of overzealous police. In other words, the cops had it coming.
Those "elderly women" in Harlem kept from getting home by Giuliani's heavy-handed policing -- does Herbert worry when anti-police demonstrators block roads and bridges, thereby keeping elderly women from getting home, ambulances from getting to hospitals, social workers to families in crisis ...
Most curious of all, Herbert says he agrees with de Blasio's call for suspension of anti-police protests until after the funerals of officers Liu and Ramos. Why -- if the protests are in no way, shape or form connected to their deaths?
Can you imagine how liberals would have reacted had the tea party postponed rallies across the country after the Tucson massacre in January 2011? That didn't happen -- because the tea party had nothing to do with Jared Loughner's rampage, despite strenuous attempts by the left to claim the clearly deranged Loughner was motivated by bullseye crosshairs placed on a Palin website to indicate targeted congressional districts.
Lacking evidence that Loughner even knew who Palin was, liberals fell back on their threadbare "climate of hate" trope, a moldy-oldy they've trotted out ever since a devout left-winger killed JFK in Dallas. An actual example of such a climate has been the increasingly angry public protests after a Staten Island grand jury decided against indicting an NYPD officer in Garner's death. Hard though it is for liberals to believe, the "criminal and troubled and isolated" among us may interpret vein-bulging demands for "dead cops" as call to action and not solely as political sloganeering.
