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The left has never been interested in consistency, but even by their standards the Black Lives Matter "movement" is ostentatiously contradictory and hypocritical.
The stated goal of BLM is to stop "racist" police from shooting black men. It is a fact that young black men are gunned down by police out of proportion to their numbers.
However, there's one word that's conspicuous by its absence: BLM never chants that innocent black men shouldn't be shot.
There certainly have been innocent young blacks killed by police. We can all agree that twelve year old boys should not be shot even when playing with toy guns, particularly not without much of a warning.
But the late Tamir Rice hasn't received a tenth of the BLM publicity and protests of Ferguson, MO resident Michael Brown. Yet unlike young Tamir, Mr. Brown was a violent criminal who tried to shoot a cop with his own gun on his way home from slugging a storekeeper and robbing him.
Yes, Officer Darren Wilson was white and the store clerk was apparently Asian. Does anyone believe Mr. Brown restricted his assaults to people of other races tham his own? And if he did, wouldn't that make him an even worse person: a hate criminal?
By disposing of Mr. Brown, Officer Wilson almost certainly saved the lives of at least a few black people who would otherwise have eventually been murdered by him in the commission of future crimes, to say nothing of everyone else.
That sounds like the sci-fi Department of Precrime, and we don't endorse punsishing people because we think they might commit crimes in the future. That didn't happen to Mr. Brown: he had committed and was in the act of committing crimes such as assaulting a police officer when he was shot.
Contrast this to the city of Chicago, where so many people are murdered every day that the local newspaper has a special page dedicated to the topic. From the photos memorialized there, it certainly looks as if the vast majority of murder victims are black. Don't their lives matter?
It's not these victims that BLM is protesting. Instead, they're raising a stink about the police, who kill far fewer blacks than murderers do. It might make sense to complain that the police are killing the wrong people, but we've never heard anyone point this out.
Of course, it doesn't take a gun to kill someone. Notorious blowhard and propagandist Michael Moore is accusing Michigan's Gov. Snyder of murdering an indeterminate number of Flint, MI residents by feeding them poisoned water:
Your staff and others knew that the water in the Flint River was poison -- but you decided that taking over the city and "cutting costs" to "balance the budget" was more important than the people's health (not to mention their democratic rights to elect their own leaders). So you cut off the clean, fresh glacial lake water of Lake Huron that the citizens of Flint (including myself) had been drinking for decades and, instead, made them drink water from the industrial cesspool we call the Flint River -- a body of "water" where toxins from a dozen General Motors and DuPont factories have been dumped for over a hundred years. And then you decided to put a chemical in this water to "clean" it -- which only ended up stripping the lead off of Flint's aging water pipes, placing that lead in the water and sending it straight into people's taps.
Flint, MI is mostly populated by blacks, and it's long since been proven that lead overdoses lead to mental retardation, illness, and death. This certainly sounds like a damning indictment of white Republican Snyder.
Except - Flint has been serving up poisoned water since 2013, most of a year before Gov. Snyder had anything to do with the city administration. Obama's EPA has known about the problem for most of a year and did nothing. And, unsurprisingly considering its residents, the state-appointed financial overseer and the Flint city fathers are Democrats to a person.
In sum: The Democratic government of a Democratic city destroys that city’s finances so thoroughly that it must go into state receivership; a Democratic emergency manager signs off on a consensus plan to use a temporary water source; the municipal authorities in that Democratic city responsible for treating and monitoring drinking water fail to do their job; a state agency whose employees work under the tender attention of SEIU Local 517 fails to do its job overseeing the local authorities; Barack Obama’s EPA, having been informed about the issue, keeps mum.
Gov. Snyder is the only Republican even tangentially involved in the catastrophe and he was one of the last officials to be involved. Yet he gets 100% of the publicity and the blame? The story festers in the Democrat-controlled EPA and hits the news only after a Republican appears on the scene!
What about the poisoned people in 2013, when there were only Democrats involved? Did those black lives not matter?
At this time of year, it's appropriate to look back at Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and re-voice his words of wisdom:
I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.
If this is the belief held up as a sterling example, why would anyone want to headline their movement with a racial discriminator? Why must we say that Black Lives Matter, particularly? They certainly do, or ought to, but so do white lives, and brown lives, and red ones, and yellow, and even blue.
Yet if someone dares to say that all lives matter, they're pilloried as a racist and forced to apologize. Even Mr. Obama complains that Black Lives are the only ones that need to Matter.
What they were suggesting was, there is a specific problem that is happening in the African-American community that’s not happening in other communities.
Indeed so. But it's not the relative handful of people shot by police, most (though not all) of whom are criminals for whom death by bullet should be more of an occupational hazard than it is.
The true scourge upon black Americans is crime, much of which is perpetrated by other blacks and very little of which happens at the hands of the police. So why should race have anything to do with it? Let's deal with all criminals, and protect all innocent, without regard to color.
If they start talking about that, we'll think that Black Lives Matter to Democrats. As things stand, it's blatantly obvious that they don't.