CNN is reporting that Joe Biden’s lead over Donald Trump has narrowed to 4 percent, and that is not good. Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by 2 percent in 2016, so if the polls get any closer, that is worrisome. Unfortunately, the choice of Kamala Harris as Biden’s running mate did not create a “bump” up in the polls, it may even have created a “bump” down, hopefully only temporary; certainly it couldn’t create the kind of “excitement” that, say, Bernie Sanders as VP would have generated on both sides of the political spectrum.
Right now I see a growing problem with this continuing George Floyd protest movement that Fox News is taking advantage of to scare its viewership. Some older people may recall the rioting at the 1968 Democratic Convention. Many accused the handling of “peaceful” protesters by Mayor Richard Daley and the Chicago police for turning it into a prime time debacle. The mayhem people saw on their television sets damaged Hubert Humphrey initially, trailing Richard Nixon by double digits while losing much of the labor union vote to George Wallace. But Humphrey began turning it around, swinging haymakers at the enemies of the political left, and won back most of the labor union vote, and ended up losing the popular vote by just 0.7 percent. The Nixon campaign—besides engaging in its “Southern Strategy” to gain the white racist vote—was already up to its dirty trickery, with a Nixon “mole” in the Vietnam peace negotiations who probably sabotaged a peace agreement as early as October 1968 (U.S. forces would continue to fight in Vietnam into 1973), and no doubt had an agreement occurred it would very well have carried Humphrey to a Truman-like comeback victory.
But had it not been for the damage done by the televised rioting at the 1968 convention, Humphrey would have easily have won the 1968 election, and Nixon and Watergate would never have happened. Today, the longer these George Floyd “protests” continue accompanied by the usual collateral damage, only Fox News and Trump’s propaganda efforts are the beneficiaries, as even people who are in general sympathetic start to tire of it all—especially when it has little to do with their own communities. People are being led to believe that "socialist" cities like Seattle are under siege by rioting because of a few incidents that are recycled over and over again by the right-wing media, and the odd business owner claiming on Fox News that they are moving out not because there is almost no customer foot traffic because of the stay-at-home orders, but because of some phony crime claims that Fox News will readily eat-up in exchange for giving the Trump-supporting business owner his 15 minutes of “fame.”
Michael Brown’s death in 2014 did not create nation-wide protests because we had a president who protesters believed was not supportive of police abuse of power in the way Trump is. The Obama Justice Department could be counted on to examine the case seriously for civil rights abuses; the Trump Justice Department obviously can not be counted on to do the same in the Floyd case. However, Brown was a career criminal and had just been seen on security video engaged in a “strong-arm” robbery in a convenience store; he wasn’t a particularly “sympathetic” victim for the country at large. Floyd’s rap sheet also reads like that of career criminal, but he had been trying to get his act together since he had been released from prison for home invasion and armed robbery in 2013, and his death by choking by a Minneapolis police officer was so out-of-bounds not just because the officer refused to listen to Floyd’s pleas for help, but because the officer simply did not care how bad his actions looked even while they were being recorded on video.
The problem, however, is that some people with too much time on their hands all over the country have used this as an excuse to go about causing pointless mayhem. We can certainly speculate that the reasons why homicide rates in Chicago and New York are up this year is because of “stay-at-home” orders and high unemployment combined with anger over the Floyd incident, providing motivation to vent the frustrations of life and lack of power to do anything about it in the age of Trump—who acts only on the whims of a small-minded minority and insults everyone else. But political and civic leaders have to step up and say enough is enough, and continued “protest” to no useful purpose has reached a point where it is now counter-productive and alienating some voters.
Not that the police are “innocent” in all of this. If police know they are under a microscope, why are there officers who still insist on behaving like thugs? You need “proof” that some cops are natural-born thugs who like to abuse the power they are given? Former Bellevue, WA police officer Mike Hetle was such a man; after being forced to “resign” after his second fatal shooting incident under questionable circumstances, he was charged earlier this year with the murder of a black National Guardsman (who was also a neighbor), over some petty personal complaint. The NYPD union caused a stir with its endorsement of Trump, but their complaint that they have to treat “suspects” with “velvet gloves” comes across as more whining about how they are not allowed to beat on people they way the see actors playing cops do in the movies. If police were not so busy acting on their “instincts”—usually of the racial profiling variety—and stopped defending and covering-up for bad apple colleagues, they would be respected more than they are.
Still, I am under no illusions about the world I live in, and being an “ethnic” person my concerns don’t really intersect with those of these “protesters” here in Seattle, save perhaps in a mutual desire to see Trump out of office. Hypocrisy abounds. Bigoted comments that so-called “progressives” would fear to say to a black person they readily hurl at a “Mexican,” especially males. Of course, not everyone is even claims to be “progressive” in Seattle, either. I was walking to work today when a young white female called out to me from a moving vehicle “Piss on you, too.” I didn’t know her, and the only thing she knew about me was that I was just some Mexican-looking guy, and she probably assumed (rightly) that I would think someone like her was just another Trump-loving white nationalist, xenophobic Nazi.
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