A Tale of Two Media Conservatives

12/4/2014

Not all conservative media members are rock-ribbed.  The phrase "rock-ribbed Republican" has an old and venerable history.  Like the accursed term RINO, it is over-used.  Ferguson is one of those topics that helps you winnow the RRRs from the squishier sorts.

Leading the RRRs - no surprise here - is the Crab's favorite multimedia conservative, Ann Coulter.  Her column of November 26 is a classic.  She is righteously outraged that there even was a grand jury.  Officer Darren Wilson, a good officer with a clean record, was forced to fire his weapon after a size XXL thug named Michael Brown slammed his cruiser car door shut on him and then tried to grab the officer's gun.  After a sequence of events available in numerous places on the Web, XXL Brown charged at Officer Wilson (with his hand under his waistline, where one might stash a gun), and Wilson fired the shots that killed him.  All of the forensic evidence supported Wilson's narrative of events.  The credible eyewitnesses of the encounter (meaning the ones who weren't provably lying) supported him as well.  Or, as Ann Coulter put it:

 There's nothing to protest! A cop shot a thug who was trying to kill him. The grand jury documents make perfectly clear that Big Mike was entirely responsible for his own death. Can't the peaceful protesters read? 

Ann is a role model for the Hermit Crab, since she speaks the clear truth without fear.  She defends Joseph McCarthy (as do I), derides the fraud called Darwinism (read her book Godless), reminds her readers that Richard Nixon had in fact won the war in Viet Nam (a victory throw away by the Democrats), and most usefully for this discussion, she authored the invaluable book Mugged: Racial Demagoguery from the Seventies to Obama.  Anyone who read Mugged was unsurprised by the events that followed Michael Brown's death by misadventure.

To call Jonah Goldberg of National Review Online the anti-Coulter is a bit harsh, but his column of November 27 was in my view harmful, in that he seemed to disavow the riots in Ferguson while nearly endorsing  them across the rest of the country.  By stating that the hostility and distrust of many members of minority communities have legitimate concerns, he nearly endorses all of the steps that followed the incident - steps including rioting, arson, assault, and even murder.

It is my contention that there are in fact few areas left in the United States in which white police bully and abuse blacks because of their skin color.  The days of Bull Connor and his like are over.  For a police chief or sheriff in any state of the union to allow racial bias in their departments would be political suicide, and the end would come quickly.  

In this year 2014, the most dangerous racists holding public office are President Barack Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder.