Rotten Rudy, Bully Bush and the New Authoritarianism

The Master Blogger Digby has a post with some compelling video:

"You Gotta Ask Me Nicely"

by digby

When a man questions why a policeman has pulled him over and refuses to sign the ticket, the policeman electrocutes him to make him comply:

The Deseret Morning News has the full story:

Trooper's Taser use pops up on YouTube

By Geoff Liesik
for the Deseret Morning News
Published: Wednesday, Nov. 21, 2007

ROOSEVELT — A Utah Highway Patrol trooper's conduct during a Sept. 14 traffic stop in Uintah County is being called into question after a video of the stop was posted on the Internet.

As an armed security guard at a military installation, my job is similar to a police officer (but not as stressful). It gives me the authority under the color of law to engage in activity's that under normal circumstances would be considered a felony (If I pull someone to the side and detain them against their will because of questions about their ID, I better have a damn good reason. If I did that as a Civilian, I could be charged with kidnapping!)

As for the use of pepper spray or ASP, forget it. Macho cowboys or cowgirls who think that they have to prove they are in charge would be kicked off the line. They are bully's and fools, not professionals.

The power we as a society invest in our law enforcement apparatus is astounding, and yet we fear very little in the way of a Pakistan or Iranian style secret police arresting us without cause, at least until the Boy King took charge 7 years ago. That the arrest of citizens without charge when sanctioned by the President should occur in the dawn of the 21st Century sounds like a plot from a bad SciFi Movie.

The creeping authoritarianism of the Bush administration. So far it is only those other people who have been brutalized, so maybe Mr. John Q. Citizen does not care what happens to Juan Q. Citizen. This is a major mistake.

In the excellent article in Salon.com by Cintra Wilson, we get a glimpse of the future if that jackboot Fascist Mr. Rudolph Giuliani, the darling of the RNC, should get elected.

His political career may have been defined by his willingness to confront scary bogeymen, but during slower periods when there were no obvious villains around, Giuliani's interpretations of who or what constituted an immediate threat became increasingly bizarre, personal, puritanical and dangerous. Before the planes hit, when he had too much power and not enough to do, Giuliani, like an old soldier who comes home and starts abusing his family in lieu of a real enemy..., looking for vices to confiscate and sins to punish. By the mid-'90s, Mayor Rudy was abusing authority according to the whims of his own paranoid, hyper-defensive personality disorder in way that would have made Tiberius self-conscious.

...Safir's NYPD beefed up the Street Crime Unit, a corps of hyper-macho officers once described by the Village Voice's Nat Hentoff as "a rogue police operation whose members make Clint Eastwood's Dirty Harry look like Mahatma Gandhi."...New York's nonwhite citizens became increasingly alarmed by a police force they perceived as hostile, overzealous and racist. Go figure: members of the Street Crime Unit, Hentoff reported, delighted in wearing T-shirts emblazoned with such intimidating slogans ..."There is no hunting like the hunting of man, and those who have hunted armed men long enough and like it never care for anything else."

Inevitably, perhaps, "the hunting of man" resulted in the killing of man. In 1999, unarmed African immigrant Amadou Diallo, mistaken for a rape suspect, was shot 41 times by Safir's Street Crime Unit while he fumbled for his keys at his own doorway. "

To paraphrase (badly) Mr. Miyagi: "This is no SciFi Movie Danial-san. This for real"