The Atlantic: What if Eric Garner Had Been White?

[LiberalElite]

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/12/what-if-eric-garner-had-been-white/383420/?google_editors_picks=true


-snip-
Imagine that Eric Garner had been white. Imagine that he’d been living in Idaho. Imagine that the law-enforcement officers who killed him had been federal agents.

His death would be a Tea Party crusade.

Think about it. The police hassled Garner because he had a history of selling untaxed cigarettes. It’s the kind of big-government intrusion that drives Tea Partiers nuts. One of the events that helped launch the Tea Party, in fact, came in January 2009, when activists from Young Americans for Liberty donned American Indian garb to protest the soda taxes proposed by then-New York Governor David Patterson.

Garner responded to being hassled with a statement of “don’t tread on me” anti-government defiance: “I was just minding my own business. Every time you see me you want to mess with me. I’m tired of it. It stops today!”
-snip-

[99th_Monkey]

1. There's a problem with the premise

Tea Party gun-totting freaks can pretty much do whatever the fuck they want, wherever they want ...
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/06/25/1309370/-Another-Texas-WTF-Open-Carry-Gun-Extremists-To-Prance-Through-Black-Neighborhood

Funny though, (not ha-ha) I don't recall ever seeing a news story about how police "had no choice" but to gun them down in the street to lay for 4 hours in August heat, or strangle them to death in a 5 police take-down.

[LiberalElite]

2. Not my premise - The Atlantic's

[99th_Monkey]

3. I Didn't mean it personally

Just responding to the OP

but thanks for letting me know.

[LiberalElite]

4. ok that did occur to me later

[PSPS]

5. That's not the point at all.

Read the linked piece. Why isn't the "Tea Party" and Fox going nuts over these tragedies? Well, we all know why. The linked piece ends with this:

But the right’s largely indifferent response illustrates just how much the Garner case really is about race. Had Eric Garner been a rural white man with a cowboy hat killed by federal agents, instead of a large black man choked to death by the NYPD, his face would be on a Ted Cruz for President poster by now.

[99th_Monkey]

6. It's totally the point in my universe

you are of course welcome to your own version of what the OP "really means",
but please don't try to force-feed me with it.

That said, I don't don't think we're more than 2-3 degrees off from one another.

A tempest in a tea pot?