Louisiana Voice

When it comes to political rhetoric, the human attention span is roughly equivalent to that of a squirrel. That is to say, roughly one full second – or if the squirrel happens to be focused on an acorn, four seconds. As Casey Stengel would have said, you can look it up right HERE.

That’s why Donald Trump gets away with spewing his distortions to his cult followers: they have the approximate focusing ability of an Irish Setter and apparently, more than twice the unquestioning loyalty and unconditional devotion.

So, when Trump says something so asinine as the claim that Joe Biden, if elected president would DEFUND THE POLICE, it becomes not simply a distortion, but an outright lie. And his base eats it up and nothing I say here is going to change that.

But I’m going to say it anyway – because pathological liars are a clear and present danger and Trump is a pathological liar, maybe even a psychopathic one.

Let’s take a look at the facts, something that neither Trump nor his tunnel-vision devotees ever bother to do.

Way back in 1982, then-President Ronald Reagan was pushing a bill that would legalize asset forfeiture, a practice that has come under widespread abuse by profiteering police departments, it was then-Sen. Joe Biden of Delaware who pre-empted the White House with his own bill that essentially gave Reagan everything he was seeking. It passed the Senate by a bipartisan 95-1 vote (source: Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America’s Police Forces, by Radley Balko, p. 146).

Fast forward to 1989, when the first President George Bush created “joint task forces” to further coordinate between the military and law enforcement agencies for drug enforcement, it was Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Biden who told the Associated Press, the Bush-Bennett (Drug Czar William Bennett) plan “is not tough enough, bold enough, or imaginative enough to meet he crisis at hand.” (Source: Balko, pp. 167-168)

Nor was the escalation of the so-called drug wars restricted to the Republicans. Realizing that police departments had morphed into an “us versus them” mentality on both sides of law enforcement, President Clinton in 1994 launched a new grant program under the Justice Department called Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS).

Under COPS, local police departments were supposed to use the grant money to hire more officers who would implement more community-oriented policing strategies. The first year’s funding for the program was $148.4 million. The second year, appropriations jumped to $1.42 billion (that’s billion with a “B”). (Balko, p. 217)

But instead of cops twirling batons, whistling and walking beats, learning the names of school principals and attending community meetings, cops were beating people over the heads with batons and teargassing reporters in communities where citizens protested the needless killings of American citizens. Grant money meant to solidify relations between police and American neighborhoods were used instead for the purchase of military hardware to invade those same American neighborhoods – all in the name of busting some teenager with an ounce of pot in the country’s failed drug war.

The influx of federal grant money and income derived from asset forfeiture made policing a profitable enterprise, even in the country’s smallest communities who suddenly saw a pressing need for their own SWAT teams, low instances of terrorism and hostage-taking notwithstanding.

Born in Los Angeles, SWAT teams soon began invading wrong addresses, killing innocent people – and spreading across the landscape to such crime-infested communities as Mukwonago, Wisconsin (pop. 7,519), Middleburg, Pennsylvania (pop. 1,363 – half the adult population must’ve been members of that local SWAT team), Mt. Orab, Ohio (pop. 2,701), and Butler, Missouri (pop. 4,201).

The grant money also went for military hardware, that many small nations could envy. Between 1997 and 1999, the Pentagon doled out $727 million in equipment, including 253 aircraft (mostly six- and seven-passenger airplanes and Blackhawk and Huey helicopters, 7,856 M-16 rifles, 181 grenade launchers, 8,131 bulletproof helmets, 1,161 pairs of night-vision goggles, assault vehicles, boats and (for a Wisconsin police department) one periscope

So, when people talk about “defunding” the police, they’re not talking about what Trump calls turning over the cities to the Islamic hordes or domestic terrorists – though to listen to his followers to respond to such dog whistles, you’d certainly think so.

The term “defunding the police” does not mean abolishing police departments; it means reallocating or redirecting funding away from such macho programs and mind-sets at the growing militarization of police departments and directing them back to that original intent of community interaction instead of reaction, cooperation instead of confrontation, assistance instead of antagonism.

No one is naïve enough to believe we ever had or will have the Norman Rockwell image of citizen police. But neither should we have the mentality that no one has a right to question or protest official actions or policy. That’s what this country is all about – having your voice heard.

I’m certain there will be those who will attack me as a bleeding-heart liberal. Never mind that I was a conservative Republican for more than 30 years until I saw what the Wall Street Republicans and corporate greed were doing to this country and to the working people who form the backbone of democracy.

You can attack me all you want, but that doesn’t change the facts that I have given you here. You can twist my words, spin your own philosophy to fit that of an ill-educated, egocentric would-be dictator, but that doesn’t change history.

And that history is that Joe Biden, no matter any of his other faults and shortcomings (and he has those; we all do), the one big lie of Donald Trump is that Biden is anti-law enforcement.

Nothing – absolutely nothing – could be further from the truth.

The biggest mystery of it all is if I can dig those figures up sitting her in Denham Springs, Louisiana (with more than a little assistance from author Radley Balko), why haven’t those so-call investigative reporters and political pundits at The Washington Post, The New York Times, and the rest of the MSM done so?

It’s to their everlasting shame that they haven’t. And it’s a pity that 40 percent of this country won’t accept those facts when – and if – they’re placed in front of them.

Deal with it. And try to focus longer than a squirrel contemplating an acorn.