When Life Gives Other People Lemons...

I'm so glad our capital's civil unrest can help out American conservatives wanting to smear President Obama.  I tend not to head over to The Corner, since it has a pretty poor reputation, but curiosity got the better of me on this occasion.

Turns out, that reputation was very much deserved.  The progression of this article is as follows:

1. Some people are comparing the London riots to the LA riots.  Let's assume the comparison is a reasonable one;
2. President Obama may or not agree that the original flash-point of the two riots can be considered similar.  Let's assume he does;
3. Obama wrote something about the LA riots almost twenty years ago, which he may or may not still stand by.  Let's assume he does;
4. What he said was that the riot demonstrated deep distrust and dissatisfaction in the current system of power.  Of course, someone who actually wanted to use the proletariat to destroy capitalism would say the same thing.  Let's assume Obama is one of those people.

If all that's true, then Obama is clearly a terrifying threat to the American way of life!  You know, unless acquitting cops who were proved to have lied after beating a black guy to within an inch of his life is different from a drug-dealer getting shot, or Obama's positions have changed have changed in two decades, or there's a logical fallacy in arguing Obama is anti-capitalist because of a quote I've assumed he meant as anti-capitalist, because of how anti-capitalist he is! [1] 

A couple of days ago two of my friends were staying in London, and had to barricade themselves in the bedroom because they heard a looter trying to break into the house downstairs (mercifully, said miscreant was unsuccessful).  I'm sure they'd have gathered up their belongings and handed them over immediately if they knew it would help Stanley Kurtz pretend Obama is plotting to destroy America, or money, or whatever.

Oh, and for the record, whilst its using the current crisis to fuel his lunatic agenda that's making me despise Kurtz right now, he can fuck off for co-opting the LA riots as well.  A jury (which was five-sixths white and contained no black people) exonerated four cops of blame for a vicious assault which had been captured on camera [2].  Pretending Obama was out of line for suggesting the resulting riots had nothing to do with a mistrust of power is quite simply historical revisionism, and its historical revisionism at the expense of black people in an attempt to smear the first black US president.

[1] Bighead would want me to point out that this is what the phrase "begging the question" actually refers to.

[2] The cops claimed their actions were justified because King was tripping on PCP and tried to resist arrest.  The video shows him crawling along the ground during a beating that lasted over a minute.  A drugs test for PCP came back negative.