This picture, man.
It’s from an incredible, appalling true-life James Ellroy story taking place in Orange County. The bruised face belongs to defense attorney James Crawford. On Wednesday, according to the Los Angeles Times, Crawford was beaten bloody by a cop working for the Orange County district attorney’s office, after Crawford got charges dismissed against his (Crawford’s) client. The Times says Crawford’s client’s acquittal is the latest “humiliation” for the DA’s office, which “has seen case after case unravel in an ongoing scandal regarding the misuse of jailhouse informants.”
The DA investigator–whose name is still not public and who has not been arrested for this beatdown–“made more than $206,000 in total compensation in 2014.” The sheriff’s union head speculated that “this is an effort by a criminal defense attorney to drum up a payday.”
Bear with me here. I see that bloodied face serving as some sort of metaphor for Donald Trump’s campaign and movement, after the truly awe-inspiring direct action by teachers, unions, and activists in Chicago Friday night that forced Trump to cancel a rally of his supporters. Whatever else comes of this– more good than ill, but more violence seems a given–at the very least. seventy-plus-year-old rednecks will think twice about sucker-punching young black men.
I also imagine bloodied is a good description of how the Hillary Clinton campaign feels in the wake of its Very Bad Day yesterday, which began with Hillary praising Nancy Reagan–Nancy Reagan!!–for starting a national conversation about AIDS.
Uh. No. Writes Sam Biddle of Gawker:
In an interview conducted at Nancy Reagan’s funeral today, Hillary Clinton recounted a version of history that didn’t happen, lauding the former first lady’s “low key advocacy” for the cause of HIV/AIDS awareness. “Low key” is one way of putting it. In fact, the Reagan White House is infamous for its lengthy, deadly silence on the epidemic.
It took twitter no time to erupt in a chorus of near-universal derision. Hillary actually sort of apologized, saying she misspoke, but nah…
Her political acumen, such as it is, was on display yet again in the evening. The streets of Chicago were filled with Trump supporters and the aforementioned protesters. It was all everyone on twitter could talk about. One got the sense (or I did, anyway) that the game was changing. Trump had absolutely paralyzed the parties and the elites, and here a bunch of kids, and workers, and teachers had stood up to his bullying, ethno-nationalist steamroller and turned it around. Bernie Sanders happened to be on the scene, at a pre-scheduled rally that ended in great good cheer and a rousing version of Woody Guthrie’s should-be national anthem “This Land Is Your Land.”
Clinton got it, that she had to do SOMETHING to respond to the moment. So she issued this:
If anything, this made her look more out-of-touch than her afternoon debacle. Here’s a representative reaction:
Protesters shut down Trump bc he emboldens coward racists like Dylan Roof, how dare you use CHARLESTON to shame them https://t.co/MzFwfVziLq
— Rebecca Pierce (@aptly_engineerd) March 12, 2016
Lost in the big news day, this: it emerged Friday that feminist trailblazer and icon bell hooks announced that she can no longer support Hillary.
I don’t find it productive to criticize Hillary on her personality or “leadership” qualities because these terms are so nebulous, useful only in narrowly-defined horse-race discussions of the relative merits of the two (only two) candidates pre-selected by the major parties and their donors. Policies. Let’s talk about policies.
In Hillary’s case, her policies are a smoldering garbage fire of corporatism, interventionism, neoliberalism and vaguely uplifting platitudes. The events of Friday convinced me that, even if her policies weren’t awful, Hillary seems overwhelmed by our particular historical moment.
I find many of Obama’s policies reprehensible, but I never doubt his capacity for understanding what’s actually happening around him. With Hillary, the events of Friday, and her tone-deaf reactions to them, make me question her basic grasp on reality.
Of all the candidates running, only Sanders seems to have any sort of clue. Events might be too big for him as well. We’re looking at a 1968 kind of year. And yet I’m pretty certain that people working on his campaign are going to come in to work this week with a sense of destiny and purpose. Really don’t think you could say the same for the Clinton campaigners.