"Liberal" Presidents

Looks like the civil rights protesters were lucky to have Lyndon Johnson. The "Ferguson" protesters aren't so lucky.

“First and foremost, we are a nation built on the rule of law,” President Barack Obama said in his address to the nation following the Nov. 24 grand jury decision. Never mind that the legal proceedings in question had forestalled the most basic protections that safeguard such rule — the opportunity to mount a public inquiry into a police officer’s grave trespass against a private citizen. Instead it produced something of a parody of due process, via a highly irregular grand-jury proceeding relying mainly on the contradictory and implausible testimony of the would-be defendant.

Nevertheless, the president pressed on with his alternate-universe version of events. “We need to accept that this decision was the grand jury’s to make,” he announced — even though no one protesting was challenging the panel’s formal authority, any more than abolitionists or civil-rights activists had denied that the Supreme Court’s rulings in Dred Scott v. Sanford or Plessy v. Ferguson were the law of the land. What was in question, rather, was the actions of the grand jury, after its members had been prodded by St. Louis County Prosecutor Robert McCulloch, a notoriously cop-friendly DA, to contort the basic purpose of a grand-jury hearing out of all recognition.

[...]

Since they’re formal path-clearing inquiries, grand juries typically don’t hear the testimony of more than a handful of witnesses. McCulloch, by contrast, called 60 witnesses, who testified for more than 70 hours. Wilson alone testified without cross-examination for four hours — an unheard-of span of time for a prospective defendant, even in a police murder inquiry. Likewise, grand-jury proceedings in any criminal case rarely go beyond a day or two — but McCulloch kept this body empaneled for more than 100 days.

[...]

Most obviously, these maneuvers gave McCulloch the opportunity to shape the direction of the inquiry, and to elevate Wilson’s testimony over that of the many civilian witnesses who contradicted his account. Just as important, the protracted inquiry permitted a steady stream of leaks to reach the press during the proceedings — leaks that shored up Wilson’s version of the shooting, and put the lie to McCulloch’s whining complaint that media coverage had made the grand jury’s job much harder than it should have been.

[...]

What’s more, the totemic invocation of “rule of law” channels public attention into the reassuringly sanctimonious civic sport of deploring the genuinely deplorable outbreaks of rioting and vandalism that greeted the grand-jury announcement in Ferguson. “As [the police] do their work in the coming days,” Obama said in his statement, “they need to work with the community, not against the community, to distinguish the handful of people who may use the grand jury’s decision as an excuse for violence — distinguish them from the vast majority who just want their voices heard around legitimate issues in terms of how their communities and law enforcement interact.”

[...]

Protestors in Ferguson and elsewhere aren’t exercised over getting their “voices heard around legitimate issues”; they’re exasperated over the dodges and double-standards of a justice system that increasingly seems weighted against the value of black lives.

[...]

Hillary Clinton, the consensus Democratic frontrunner for the presidency in 2016, has outdone Obama’s diffident rhetorical performance by maintaining a complete silence about the shameful events in Ferguson.

  alJazeera