Kevin O'Brien, the Plain Dealer's deputy editorial page editor, wrote that U.S. Atty. Gen. Eric Holder "lives and breathes racial politics" and that the Justice Department is "racially obsessed". These wicked insights from the leaning ivory tower of Planet PD were sent to the reader in O'Brien's screed about the clearance of Ferguson, Mo. police officer Darren Wilson in the fatal shooting of Michael Brown.
And whose investigation cleared the officer of guilt? Oh. The "racially obsessed" Justice Department!
I must tell you, folks, when weirdness and non sequiturs are permitted by press freedom - which I stoutly favor - you must grudgingly defend O'Brien, a fringe columnist, for being a reckless fool in disseminating his op-ed page crap.
There have been a number of occasions when I've been tempted to respond to O'Brien's right-wing notions simply because they in no way qualify as worthy of serious discussion in the biggest newspaper in the state. But journalism has many faults today, so I've backed off to leave other offended readers to gasp at one of the PD's higher titled editorial page writers. I used to think he performed only as the court jester , but I've concluded that the guy really believes everything that he writes. Even when he personally warned me back in my days as a newspaperman that when America's powerful enemies reached our shores journalists would be the first to be seized. Or, on another occasion, that an uninspected major bridge collapsed because we gave the feds too much to do. And today we shiver when somebody mentions that Louie Gohmert is in our midst.
So I can only report that his long rant against what he considers to be racially based injustices against white police officers failed to tell us of the feds' documented instances of Ferguson's institutional racial bias: Blacks stopped in traffic without cause; the top court clerk (since finally fired) sending emails casting President Obama as a chimpanzee or giving a black woman an award for crime-prevention for having an abortion. Or official indifference to higher traffic fines levied on blacks, and other evidence of an imbalance in carrying out the system of justice.
What about it, Kevin? Will that be included in your next column?.
As one who married into a fine Irish family, I can swear that the elders knew something about bias, too. Like signs that said "Irish need not apply". Or another that I remember: "Machine Gun Kelly was not an Italian."
In O'Brien's own city, the anti-Irish feeling was rampant in my days of covering mayoral elections there. As a couple of bar stoolers complained to me, there are too damn many Carneys, Feighans, Hagans and Corrigans thriving in the shadows of the Mother Church and running the city!
Funny,they didn't mention O'Brien. Sorry Kevin, you didn't make the cut.
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