Wednesday, August 27, 2014

The Git and the Pendulum

The big local news story is the letter written by Ed Mullins, the head of the NYPD Sergeants' Benevolent Association, wrote urging the DNC to not hold their 2016 convention in New York City, specifically downtown Brooklyn's Barclays Center. Mullins' letter is a masterpiece of dog-whistling and innuendo, invoking the "bad old days of high crime", and the return of "squeegee men" to the highway exits of the city.

Mullins letter opens up with a doozy of a paragraph:


Mayor Bill de Blasio wants the Democratic National Committee to designate the beautiful Barclays Center in downtown Brooklyn as the site of the 2016 Democratic National Convention. But while the Barclays Center is still new and glistening, the great city in which it stands is lurching backwards to the bad old days of high crime, danger-infested public spaces, and families that walk our streets worried for their safety.


I doubt Mullins is referring to the families of Eric Garner and Ramarley Graham.

Mullins then engages in a little bit of, as Roy would put it, "Ooga Booga" by hinting at an éminence grise noire acting behind the scenes in the DeBlasio administration:


But it is not just that we have fewer officers patrolling the streets. The Mayor has provided a public platform to the loudest of the city’s anti-safety agitators, instead of giving voice to the millions of New Yorkers who want to live and work in safety. Why would he kowtow to demagogues who push a political agenda? Does he really believe people in the city care more about politics than quality of life?


Today, Mullins appeared on WNYC's Brian Lehrer show, with predictably disastrous results. The entire segment is a train wreck, with Mullins bringing up the 1987 Tawana Brawley scandal. He continually comments that the "pendulum" is swinging back toward the "bad old days" depicted in this documentary:





Mullins gives the whole game away, though, when asked if the DNC has responded to him:

"No and I don't think they will reply... What many people seem to not realize is that New York is a Democrat state and their real value is not in New York."

Democrat state? Mullins seems to forget he's not talking to Boss Limbaugh. As an added bonus, Mr Mullins characterizes the protestors arrested during the 2004 Republican convention as criminals, rather than the victims they were. Listen to the interview, Mullins is a git, and he can shove his "pendulum" where the sun doesn't shine.

5 comments:

  1. These sort of things are the reason I think it's all going to come apart. It's not the racial and sectarian divides with us - oh, they're there, but we've developed a society that lives with them. With Americans it's tribal - and the tribes have named themselves 'Liberal' and 'Conservative'. These are just labels that cover a whole set of increasingly narrow ideologies, but the underlying tone keeps getting more and more violent.

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  2. "The new sheriff's ^wife's a - Ni-CLANG!"

    I've noticed for a while now that the right is trying to make "politics" this weird scary thing that we should avoid at all costs because it isn't part of our normal lives.

    This is false, so I'm not sure where this comes from. I think part is the fact that they frequently don't like the results of the political process. I suppose they could be trying to get people to say democracy is a bad idea, let's make Reagan king and have done with it, but I doubt it.

    And there's always plain old stoopididty.

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  3. Damn. Sounds like Mullin is running Giuliani's campaign from 1993.

    Yeah, even the specter of the "squeegee men" has been raised. "Specter of the Squegee Men" would be a great Dr Who episode.

    These sort of things are the reason I think it's all going to come apart. It's not the racial and sectarian divides with us - oh, they're there, but we've developed a society that lives with them. With Americans it's tribal - and the tribes have named themselves 'Liberal' and 'Conservative'. These are just labels that cover a whole set of increasingly narrow ideologies, but the underlying tone keeps getting more and more violent.

    I think we are a bit too sensitive to this because we are political obsessives. I still have "Republican" friends to whom I make no bones about being a socialist- we don't typically talk politics because there are other subjects with which to occupy our time.

    This is false, so I'm not sure where this comes from. I think part is the fact that they frequently don't like the results of the political process. I suppose they could be trying to get people to say democracy is a bad idea, let's make Reagan king and have done with it, but I doubt it.

    Voter apathy is their biggest hope for success- the voters blew it big time by not coming out in record numbers in 2010, and it will be decades before the mess can be cleaned up. In the meantime, the right gins up outrage about fake issues, knowing that racial animus and hippy-hating can get the rubes to vote against their best interests.

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  4. Voter apathy is their biggest hope for success- the voters blew it big time by not coming out in record numbers in 2010, and it will be decades before the mess can be cleaned up.

    I think you are giving way too much blame to the downtrodden masses, and way to little to our cynical corporatist Dems.

    Who got rid of Howard Dean's 50-State strategy as soon as he was sworn into office?

    Was "look at how well the stock market is doing...now let's cut Social Security via the Catfood Commission" supposed to rouse the masses?

    And it continues.

    Even if the voters did turn out in huge numbers in 2014, there are many Congressional districts that will not be in play at all...because DCCC chair Steve Israel and DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz (Obama's pick) want to run conservadems, only.

    (And not against their favorite goopers.)
    ~

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