Liberal hero James Comey now the enemy for telling the truth about cops
When James Comey threatened to quit the Bush administration over a wiretapping dispute, he was an instant liberal hero. The incident certainly impressed President Obama, who cited Comey’s “fierce independence” when he made him FBI director in 2013.
But now that Comey is resisting Obama’s party-line claims about police brutality and mass incarceration, the White House is furious with him. Its chief propaganda arm, The New York Times editorial page, is harshly denouncing the man it praised for resisting Bush.
Same Comey, same streak of independence, but now he’s goring the wrong ox. Thou shalt not contradict Dear Leader!
Comey’s sin is that he dares to tell the obvious truth.
In two speeches, the FBI boss said he believes crime is rising in much of the nation in part because growing criticism of cops has emboldened criminals and caused law enforcement to retreat. He said cops complain their every move is often captured on cellphone videos by hostile crowds, and so have backed off from making arrests.
“I do have a strong sense that some part of the explanation is a chill wind that has blown through American law enforcement over the last year,” Comey said at the University of Chicago Law School.
That’s putting it mildly. Baltimore’s mayor admitted her cops were ordered to stand down and give “those who wished to destroy space to do that” during riots last April.
Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, another liberal Democrat, attributed soaring murder rates to cops going “fetal.”
“They have pulled back from the ability to interdict . . . They don’t want to be a news story themselves, they don’t want their career ended early, and it’s having an impact,” Emanuel told a recent audience.
Some call the trend the “Ferguson effect,” after the Missouri case where white Officer Darren Wilson shot and killed Michael Brown, an unarmed black teen. Riots followed there, too, when a grand jury declined to indict Wilson.
The oddity is that Brown was a thug who tried to grab Officer Wilson’s gun. Even Obama’s Justice Department, which aimed to file civil-rights charges against Wilson, was forced to admit no charges were warranted. Yet Wilson still lost his job, and Brown somehow became a civil-rights martyr whose case helped spark the Black Lives Matter movement.
Obama, as I wrote Sunday, supports that movement, an example of his growing radicalism on racial issues. His embrace of Al Sharpton, the most polarizing racialist in America, pits the president against police officers and others in law enforcement who risk their lives to protect the innocent.
From the White House point of view, it’s one thing for mayors and police chiefs to defend cops. It’s quite another when a top member of the president’s law-enforcement team break ranks, which is why the hatchet is out for Comey.
The idea that liberal criticism of cops is leading to more murder is so dangerous that it must be nipped in the bud. Recognizing a threat to its narrative that all cops are racist brutes until proven otherwise, the Times denounced Comey under a headline, “Political Lies About Police Brutality.”
It called his remarks “incendiary” and said they “imply that for the police to do their jobs, they need to have free rein to be abusive.”
He implied no such thing, of course, yet the Times insisted “there is no data” backing him.
Actually, there is a ton of data. It’s called the rising murder rate, and the Times itself noted the frightening trend in a compelling news article last August.
It reported that more than 30 cities had seen big spikes, with Milwaukee’s murder rate up 76 percent, St. Louis’ up 60 percent, Baltimore’s up 52 percent, Washington DC’s up 44 percent, New Orleans’ up 22 percent, Kansas City’s up 20 percent, and on and on. New York’s has been up about 10 percent much of the year.
Another result of the hostility to cops is increased attacks on officers. Four have been gunned down in the city in the last 10 months, the most in 26 years. A funeral for the fourth, Officer Randolph Holder, will be held today.
Comey also gored the White House by faulting Obama’s related claim about “mass incarceration” of nonwhites, saying the very concept is misleading.
“Each drug dealer, each mugger, each killer, and each felon with a gun had his own lawyer, his own case, his own time before judge and jury, his own sentencing, and, in many cases, an appeal or other postsentencing review,” he said in Chicago. “There were thousands and thousands of those individual cases, but to speak of ‘mass incarceration’ I believe is confusing, and it distorts an important reality.”
Comey’s right again, and that makes him dangerous. He must be silenced before the truth spreads.
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