Here's Everything That Killed Eric Garner (Other Than A Cop)

For a bunch of people who forever criticize liberals for “never letting a crisis go to waste,” conservatives sure are trying hard to tie their onerous taxes hobbyhorse (among other things) to Eric Garner’s death. Sen. Rand Paul was the most prominent but by no means the only member of the right to try watering the tree of liberty with the blood of stupid. Here are a few more we have collected for you to read, because we hate you. (Kidding! We love you! Buy our coffee mugs! )

This is Charles C.W. Cooke, one of the more prominent “thinkers” at William Buckley’s Home for White Supremacists and Others What Write Good and Stuff. The first sentence of this tweet is actually correct. The second -- eh, not so much.

For starters, we as a people empower police officers to enforce laws like Eric Garner was violating without choking suspects to death, so even as sarcasm, this is a fail. For another, something else that we as a self-governing people have recognized is that cigarettes are an unhealthy habit that cause immense collateral damage and suffering in terms of illnesses and billions of dollars in increased healthcare costs that the rest of us have to pay when smokers fall ill, particularly if said smokers are uninsured. Which is why we have put in place barriers like high taxes intended to discourage more people from taking up the habit.

And before you accuse us of being a scold, know that several of yr Wonkettes enjoy a good smoke on the regular. We also enjoy a good drink but understand why society has laws discouraging us from knocking back a few and hopping in the car. Doesn’t mean the cops who pull us over can then choke us out if we get belligerent when they shove a Breathalyzer at us.

Dumb tax laws and gun control. A twofer for Dana Loesch! Anyway, see above on the nanny state argument and try not to shoot anyone.

Ah, big bad government employees stealing your hard-earned tax money to fund their lavish pensions so they can retire at the age of 50 and live out the rest of their lives in oceanfront mansions made of solid gold. Always a surefire winner with this crowd.

Oh, that’s it? So you’ll stop whining about Obamacare now? And Social Security? And Medicare? And regulations on businesses designed to keep them from polluting the environment and killing people? Cool.

Sure there are conservatives, including Houston Chronicle writer McKinley (she opposed stop-and-frisk), who have long been concerned with abuses of power by law enforcement. Conservatives are also the ones who less than a year ago were screaming that crime in New York City has dropped over the last couple of decades because of the law-and-order mayorships of Republicans like Rudy Giuliani and, yes, Mike Bloomberg, and the election of the communist menace Bill de Blasio meant a return to the bad old days of the 1970s when the city was a cesspool of criminality, murderers and squeegee men alike ran rampant, and Charles Bronson had to take matters into his own hands to clean up the streets. And now they are complaining that when they pushed the “broken windows” theory of policing, this is not what they had in mind? Okay. We’ll remember that the next time we hear a Republican politician talk about cleaning up the streets somewhere.

Yr Wonkette suspects that if Eric Garner, a poor man trying to hustle a few bucks to feed his kids, had been on that corner selling falafels out of an unlicensed cart or illegal DVDs or knockoff Kate Spade handbags or any one of the thousands of other items people sell on the streets of New York, and the cops had hassled him and he had still gotten as upset as he did over the rousting he was getting for selling loose cigarettes, the same chain of events would have played out, and he would still be dead. But that’s just us.

As a final bonus, here is bulbous compost heap Rep. Peter King blaming Garner’s death on the man’s obesity, asthma, and heart disease. If only he had been smart enough to not have any of those things, that cop could have choked him for hours and poor Garner would only have passed out, gotten a nice nap, and awakened in a jail cell with a disproportionate number of charges hanging over his head. And all conservatives would say is “One more thug off the street, he shouldn’t have resisted arrest, the cigarette tax is a stupid law but it’s still the law,” and so forth. Especially on Staten Island where the incident took place, because Staten Island is the most conservative borough in New York.

A++++ concern trolling from the wingnuts, would troll again!