Nihilistic, Bloodthirsty Incantations

Weeks of sometimes violent protests have focused on the deaths of two African American men, Michael Brown and Eric Garner, at the hands of police officers. Fanned by rhetoric from race baiting agitators like Al Sharpton, and seized on by a broad array of Leftist organizations who treated the deaths of Garner and Brown as a cause celeb, the meme became clear—the police are wantonly killing black men—executing them solely because they are black. Forget the facts of the individual cases, forget the statistics at a national level, forget the fact that cops put their lives on the line every day—living the leftist fantasy is more important than addresses the root causes within the African American community.

The meme was embraced, albeit gingerly, by politicians of the left. Barack Obama and his attorney General, Eric Holder, expressed their "understanding" of the protests, but did attempt to distance themselves from violence. New York City Major Richard DeBlasio was slightly less circumspect, meeting with protestors and icing the police.

Yesterday, two New York City cops were murdered execution style, by an African American who, it appears, was acting to exact revenge for the killing of Brown and Garner.

Rick Moran comments:

Now, if I were to analyze this incident the same way that liberals analyze similar incidents where they think they can blame conservatives, I would blame the shootings of these two officers on liberal websites fanning the flames of rage against the police. I would blame the murders on Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, the Black Caucus, the parents of Michael Brown — all the race hustlers who have been exploiting the situation for their own benefit.

I’d blame Eric Holder and Barack Obama for pandering to black anger. I’d blame the climate of cop hatred that has been created by so-called activists and has sprung up and infected black communities across the country.

But I’m not a liberal so I am going to withhold judgment until we find out why the perpetrator committed this horrific act. Anyone who takes their own life is a disturbed individual, so it’s possible that all of the above had little or nothing to do with his act of murder.

Was the murderer disturbed? Unquestionably, but that's beside the point.

Bob McManus provides this angry comment on the murderer, his motivation, and New York City's leftist Mayor and his reaction to the protests:

Violence against cops has gone mainstream — that is, violent threats to society itself can manifest virtually without a soul among [New York City's] elected leaders saying so much as boo.

Pitiful ...

Nobody knows what was in the shooter’s mind, of course; happily, he relieved society of the ­responsibility of trying to find out with a well-placed bullet to his own head.

But anybody who thinks he wasn’t emboldened by City Hall’s placidity in the face of nihilistic, bloodthirsty incantations is delusional.

And anyone who believes that the city’s decision not to draw a high-profile line — even if only symbolically — after the ­“alleged” Brooklyn Bridge attacks was not empowering to the shooter is equally wrong.

Was the shooter crazy? Define crazy. The city is full of crazies. And none of them needs to be ­encouraged in their psychoses — certainly not by the suggestion that official New York thinks they somehow may have a point.

It’s wrong to blame the protests wholly for the actions of one person — up to a point.

That is, right up to the point when the protesters began to ­demand dead cops — and nobody put a stop to it.

Right up to the point where protesters began to drop full garbage cans 10 feet down on unsuspecting cops, and nobody took it for what it was: An escalation that culminated in yesterday’s Bed-Stuy executions.

And now for the funerals — for the heartbreaking skirl of the pipes and the agony of the families; for the grim-faced officers from across America, lined to the horizon in silent tribute to ambushed brothers; for the folded flags and the endless motorcades to the cemetery.

You wanted dead cops, protesters? You got ’em.

Now live with it. If you can.

What? You hadn't heard about the demands from protesters for "dead cops" in NYC? The MSM didn't report that rather salient piece of information after obsessively reporting the protests for weeks? But why should they? It doesn't fit their narrative, and therefore, it's simply irrelevant. Isn't it?

UPDATE: (12/22/14):
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Jonathan Tobin provides us with a worthwhile follow-on comentary when he writes:

Conservatives know very well that attempts to politicize violence on the part of the mentally ill is deeply unfair. They know that liberal claims that either the Tea Party or conservatives such as Sarah Palin were somehow responsible for the 2011 shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords was sheer slander. If some angry supporters of the police now try to say Obama, Holder, or de Blasio approved or countenanced the actions of Ismaaiyl Brinsley, they are just as wrong. Obama, Holder, and de Blasio have all rightly condemned the murder of the two officers.

But once we acknowledge that, we cannot ignore the fact that the discussion about race and the police in this country has gotten out of control in recent months and that these same political leaders who should have been seeking to restrain the public from drawing extreme and general conclusions about two very extraordinary cases instead kept the pot boiling for political advantage.

Even worse than that, they have empowered and legitimized racial demagogues like Al Sharpton who have sought to profit from exploiting these tragedies to promote their own agendas. In turn, Sharpton and those like him who are given prominent air time on networks like MSNBC and CNN have encouraged protesters who have not only engaged in violence but often openly called for the killing of police, a stance that has been openly endorsed by Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan and other radicals.

The act of a single possibly mad gunman does not mean that Americans must never question the actions of police or ponder broader issues about race. It is misleading to claim that those who have raised such questions have given a green light to the murder of police officers. Yet those who have sought to take two very different and quite unusual incidents in Ferguson and New York and weave them into a neat narrative of racism and anti-black violence by police have done very much the same thing. The difference between the two is that the media spent much of the last four months seeking to establish that wrongheaded narrative as a fact while they will, quite rightly, give no credence or air time to those who will blame Obama for cop killers.