Creaky Nancy Does A Chauvin Imitation

It isn't unusual to see perfect synchronization between Democrats and the media. A new day, a new set of rehearsed phrases. It began years ago with "the walls are closing in," and "the beginning of the end," and lately it's been "Trump lied, people died," an attempt to revise history, and flailing attempts to paint President Trump as a racist, somehow responsible for the death of George Floyd.

So it's odd to see poorly imagined, one-off flails such as today's photo-op of Democratic congresspeople such as Jerry Nadler, Chuck Schumer, and Nancy Pelosi don Kente cloth stoles in a gesture of solidarity with...Africa?

Perhaps it's just because Floyd is black, and Kente is an African thing, and it's less offensive than pulling a Trudeau and going in blackface, or getting matching gold grilles.

They didn't think the optics through very well. The failures are numerous enough to merit a list.

• Kente cloth is worn on special occasions such as graduations or weddings. What are Democrats celebrating? Perhaps turning Floyd's death into a political spectacle.
• No one wants to kneel on a marble floor for one minute, let alone nine (the amount of time former officer Derek Chauvin knelt on Floyd's neck). So they brought little pads. Mini-pads, maybe.

• Jerry Nadler will be 73 next week. His small frame was wrecked by years of extreme obesity. He was physically unable to kneel, and remained standing awkwardly among his cohort. He's short enough that he didn't stand out that much, but you'd think he would've just sat it out, or stood against the wall, perhaps proffering his little hammy fist in a Black Power salute.
• One of the women who knelt tried to prevent the cameras from getting an up-skirt shot by awkwardly holding her phone in front of her groin. The problem is, the phone screen was lit, creating the appearance that she was filming her own nether regions. Did no one rehearse this? Just a boozy spur of the moment Pelospiration? How embarrassing.

• Nancy Pelosi is 80. Presumably this was her idea. She couldn't even stand up again after the nine minutes of vigil-stunting. One imagines a stiff cocktail or five soon rushed to the aid of her stiff knee.

• Lastly, the very pose they struck is tone deaf. It was Chauvin who did the kneeling, why are people emulating him? How did Colin Kaepernick's disrespectful stunt of kneeling for the national anthem--a very specific body language phrase--become conflated with Chauvin's lethal kneeling? If protesters want to honor Floyd, they should be on their stomachs with their hands behind their backs. If you're going to virtue signal, do it right, you geezers.

What a disaster, from clunky start to self-own finish.

The "Defund" Debacle

Another area in which a little rehearsal might have gone a long way? Cries to "defund police." What an absolute political face plant by a coterie of leftists over the past 48 hours.

Democrats, usually so careful to put a happy name on an awful idea, failed this time. For instance, they gave abortion providers the feel-good title of Planned Parenthood. You think they would have come up with something sweet for "defund police" like "Reimagining Civic Care."

The folks they sent out to explain this defunding folly didn't help much. Condescending about "privilege" and "systemic racism" is a tough sell to communities that have seen their businesses looted, and to individuals who have watched the entire world lose its collective cool over a drug addict's unfortunate demise at the hands of a bad cop.

Lisa Bender is the Minneapolis City Council President. Without any hesitation, she explained today on CNN that it is the council's plan to "dismantle" the police department. When the host, Ms. Camerota, asked who she would call if someone broke into her home, Bender replied that the question came "from a place of privilege," and that other citizens of Minneapolis live in a "reality" where they can't call the police and expect a response.

Other voices have tried to do damage control on the issue that is getting away from Dems. TV personality and humorist John Oliver dedicated his most recent vlog episode to defunding. Hilariously, to explain our current predicament, he had to point to Bill Clinton's campaign promise in the early nineties of 100,000 new police officers, and to Joe Biden's recent "shoot 'em in the leg instead of the heart" comment.

Oliver is a much better salesman for the idea than the train wreck that is Bender, but despite his snide quips and British accent, he can't avoid the fatal liberal trap of outcomes. Just as Affirmative Action and college admittance diversity quotas have for decades sought to push too many square pegs through so many round holes, the idea that a "community response team" would serve the same role as police is too hopeful by far.

The left fails to account for evil men of all colors. A well-trained police force is a deterrent to crime. A group of therapists and guidance counselors is an easy mark for a criminal. A red carpet.

Oliver didn't mention Biden authoring the 1994 crime bill that put a generation of young black men into the prison system, mostly for drug-related offenses. Nor did he mention the "carceral state" that is the darling of writers such as Ta-Nehsi Coates, because that would create a path to the next step of the far-left's plan, which is to abolish the prison system.

That's right. You saw it in giddy spasms during the panic of COVID-19: liberal governors simply releasing prisoners under cover of "distancing" rules. Not the nonviolent ones, either. Sex offenders. Given the ability to do so, these same people will eventually seek to return all of our criminals into society.

Watch this conversation on "defunding" police. It's code for the rejection of law and order, for putting all of us in a place to better appreciate our "privilege." It's their twisted idea of payback for a crime none of us committed.

• The Key Casualty Of War Is truth…The Culture War Is No Different
• ‘Defund The Police’ Will Murder Thousands Of Black Kids With Gang Violence, But White Girls Don’t Care, They’d Rather Virtue Signal