PINHEADED PUNDITRY OF THE MOMENT

On The McLaughlin Group for the week of June 18, 2000, host John McLaughlin revealed an entirely indiscriminate positive regard for the behavior of New York City police officers.  The incident under discusion concerned sexual assaults on possibly dozens of women by an undetermined number of men in Central  Park last Sunday in proximity to the Puerto Rican Day parade; specifically at issue was the alleged failure of some police officers to respond appropriately (or at all) to cries for help and immediate verbal repoirts of the attacks from the women involved.  In his setup remarks, McLaughlin maintained that criticism of such unresponsiveness was unfair.  Reminding his audience of the flack that NYPD officers have received recently for actions which they have taken, such as the shooting of Amadou Diallo, McLaughlin stated that police are "damned if they do and damned if they don't" and he repeated that phrase in the course of the general discussion. 

Personally, I feel that the "damned and damned" locution should be reserved for truly dire dilemmas; it tends to lose its bite when applied to lesser cases, and this certainly is a lesser case; in fact, the dilemma here is utterly nonexistent. McLaughlin seems totally unaware that there are a vast variety of proper behaviors available for dealing with policing situations which fall in between doing nothing in response to a plea for assistance and firing 41 shots at an innocent, unarmed civilian in the doorway of his home and then concocting a story to place the blame on the victim, a story which the victim can't contradict because he is conveniently dead.  Michael (the moron) Barone only added to the knee-jerk support for police misconduct by pointing out the negative effect of criticism on morale within the NYPD.

The image at the top of this page is from the homepage of The McLaughlin Group website