It’s a canard of the liberal left in the USA that the country is on the verge of fascism, but it’s been 8 years now and an observer might reasonably ask, “When do they stop teetering on the verge and tip right over the cliff?”
When this sort of thing is starting to become such an everyday occurrence it’s not even notable any more, I’d suggest:
Police Raid Berwyn Heights Mayor’s Home, Kill His 2 Dogs
By Aaron C. Davis
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, July 31, 2008; Page B01
A police SWAT team raided the home of the mayor in the Prince George’s County town of Berwyn Heights on Tuesday, shooting and killing his two dogs, after he brought in a 32-pound package of marijuana that had been delivered to his doorstep, police said.
Yes. Delivered by undercover cops.
Mayor Cheye Calvo was not arrested in the raid, which was carried out about 7 p.m. by the Sheriff’s Office SWAT team and county police narcotics officers. Prince George’s police spokesman Henry Tippett said yesterday that all the residents of the house — Calvo, his wife and his mother-in-law — are “persons of interest” in the case.
The package was addressed to Calvo’s wife, Trinity Tomsic, said law enforcement officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the case is ongoing.
Tippett said police are working to determine for whom the drugs were meant.
Calvo said yesterday that he did not know how the drugs wound up on his doorstep. He works part time as the mayor and serves as director of expansion for the SEED Foundation, a well-known national nonprofit group that runs urban public boarding schools.
“My government blew through my doors and killed my dogs,” Calvo said. “They thought we were drug dealers, and we were treated as such. I don’t think they really ever considered that we weren’t.”
Calvo described a chaotic scene, in which he — wearing only underwear and socks — and his mother-in-law were handcuffed and interrogated for hours. They were surrounded by the dogs’ carcasses and pools of the dogs’ blood, Calvo said.
More
Here’s some more backstory on the shootings and much more here on the corruption and brutality of Maryland cops. They don’t have a great record.
The dogs were pets, labradors to be precise, hardly the most agressive of animals, and they were running away from paramilitaries invading their space. They weren’t shot because they were a threat, but purely to terrify and intimidate the mayor and his family.
These are classic School of The Americas terror tactics and exactly the kind of thing that was done in Chile, Argentina or any number of Central American puppet states to intimidate and harass elected officials who might threaten the military or police with accountability for their political and financial misdeeds.
Prince George’s County has a reputation for brutal, dirty cops but it’s hardly alone in that. It appears that America’s police and security forces have been turned into a unaccountable collection of virtually private paramilitaries, weapons to be used by the corrupt rich against the very people that are paying for that corruption.
When heavily armed police trained to be amoral, murderous thugs are then given free rein to profit from bribery and the ludicrous ‘war on drugs’, how then can anyone we be surprised when they use those same weapons to stop anything and anyone that might cut into those profits? It’s not as though anyone in government gives a damn that the US is way over that fascist cliff and accelerating. In the dying days of the GOP it’s everybody for themselves and the devil take the hindmost. If I was an as yet uncorrupted local politician I’d be buying myself a shotgun or two. Or several.