Leftists are upset about what they view as a double standard with respect to the Baltimore/Ferguson affair and the recent Waco gang shootout. They’re right, too—there sure is a double standard.
And, as usual, it’s their own.
Consider, for example, an Associated Presspiece by one Jesse J. Holland titled “Differing perceptions of Waco, Baltimore bothering some.” Holland starts out writing that the “prevailing images of protests in Baltimore and Ferguson, Missouri, over police killings of black men were of police in riot gear, handcuffed protesters, tear gas and mass arrests. The main images of a fatal gun battle between armed bikers and police in Waco, Texas, also showed mass arrests—carried out by nonchalant-looking officers sitting around calm bikers on cellphones.” The idea is that while the black thugs in Baltimore and Ferguson received harsh treatment and coverage, the primarily white thugs in Waco were, relatively speaking, handled with kid gloves.
But pardon my tongue, this brings us to another complaint. Holland cites people who say that while Barack Obama and other politicians called the Baltimore miscreants “thugs,” no such descriptive is applied to the white Waco punks. He mentions in particular radio and TV commentator Roland Martin, who tweeted, “So the mainstream media refuses to talk (hashtag)WacoThugs, huh?” And Martin has a point: While the black Baltimore rioters and looters were called thugs, no white Waco rioters and looters were thus characterized. I wonder, why might that be?
Oh, yeah, that’s right: there are no white rioters and looters in Waco.
Minor details such as this seem to escape the notice of two-brain-cell journalists in search of a story, but a prerequisite for having “police in riot gear” is actually having, you know, a riot. The incident in Waco was an unforeseen event, meaning, the cops had no time to don any kind of special gear.
Perhaps they don’t teach proper analogizing in journalism school, but the Waco biker thugs aren’t analogous to the Baltimore rioter thugs; rather, they’re analogous to the person the latter were rioting over: drug dealer Freddie Gray. And no one went out of his way to call Gray a thug.
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