in a column titled Suicide of a Dishonest Officer, for today's New York Times
Blow is addressing what we now know is the suicide by Police Lt. Charles Joseph Gliniewicz in Illinois, who staged his suicide to make it look like he was murdered. The officer was used as a focal point by many to lambast Black Lives Matter and President Obama by those claiming both were responsible for violence against police. Blow cites examples of how the narrative played out.
Perhaps this will be in the Abbreviated Pundit Roundup this morning, but in case it is not, I think everyone should read this column, especially the final four short paragraphs, with which I now end this post by offering:
In the same way that not every black life taken is taken with malice, or without an awareness that it matters, not every police life taken is the result of a hostile policing environment in which calls for justice translate into a call for retribution.
Sometimes bad people simply do bad things. Not everything in real life fits neatly into a narrative. And indeed, trying to force everything pushes out the legitimacy from otherwise honorable pursuits.
The people who sought to politicize Gliniewicz’s death should feel chastened and embarrassed. Rather than simply mourning his death, empathizing with his family and waiting for the results of the full investigation — the very same thing they ask of those unsettled by the deaths of people at the hands of police officers — they pushed an association that didn’t exist.
So eager — or at least too recklessly willing — were they to add another tick mark to the tally of officers fallen in the supposed war on the police, and to ding protesters and the president, that they built a sham argument on a sham murder. Shameful.