Coming To The Table?
Once upon a time, not so very long ago, the president of the eponymous Robert King’s House of Wingnuttery puffed himself up and declared that even discussing racial profiling was the same as calling all police officers racists.
Suddenly this week comes the news, via the Merc and via Theo, that King has decided to come to the table as the city creates a new committee on racial profiling.
“[A]lthough [the mayor] did not technically say we’re racist,” he said back in October, “it’s impossible for those watching on television and reading in the newspapers not to conclude that officers are acting in a way that’s racist or racially motivated. I don’t see how we respond to that without feeling we’re labeled racist.”
So has King changed his mind? Is even the mere discussing of racial profiling no longer the same as calling cops racists?
Well, check out the Editor’s Statement in the December issue of Rap Sheet (pdf), the official monthly publication of Robert King’s House of Wingnuttery. In it, King’s waterboy Detective Peter Simpson proceeds to attack the Listening Sessions Report (pdf) as “another attack on Portland Police Officers”.
So, if discussing racial profiling, in the minds of the leadership of Robert King’s House of Wingnuttery, indeed still is the same as attacking the police for being racists, then just why is King coming to the table to discuss racial profiling?
Simpson explains: “[B]ecause in the world that we live in, if we aren’t at least within earshot, we could find that policies or procedures are put into place that aren’t supported by our members.”
There’s your answer. Robert King’s House of Wingnuttery isn’t actually coming to the table as part of the city’s new racial profiling committee to discuss racial profiling. They’re coming to the table to make sure they can obstruct anything that might actually come out of that committee, just as they’ve always done under Robert King’s “leadership”.