New Orleans -- Another Stop In Gitmo America:
Ahh, it's good to know no matter what the disaster, the New Orleans Police Department won't change. The Rude Pundit has known a lot of great NOPD cops, who are paid absolute shit wages, and he's been fucked with by a few nutsucking sack of shit pigs, one of whom threatened to "beat the living crap out of you if you tell anyone a fuckin' thing" when the Rude Pundit watched a couple of NOPD members shakedown an old black street musician who had gotten a little too toasted. And, yes, asshole cops have been putting the beat down on poor blacks (and whites) before Katrina and before the Bush administration. But we live in Gitmo America now, and everything must be viewed through the filter of state-sanctioned torture at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib and elsewhere.

The New Orleans cops who beat the living crap out of Robert Davis, for, possibly and apparently, the crime of asking an officer a question about the curfew, have no doubt been under excruciating conditions since Hurricane Katrina, especially since they were abandoned by a couple hundred of pussy cops who just stopped showing up for work. So surely Rush Limbaugh's charming statement about the Abu Ghraib torturers would go for the three officers who bloodied Davis: "[Y]ou ever heard of emotional release? You ever heard of need to blow some steam off?"

And what about the AP producer, who was confronted by A.M. Smith, screaming about how he's been trying to survive in New Orleans? Surely filming such abuse by poor, overworked cops just aids the insurgents, all those looting black New Orleanians (which included, you know, some cops). Perhaps CNN's broadcast of the tape means that Bill O'Reilly will say that cops will be put in greater danger, as he says about the pictures of Abu Ghraib abuse will do to soldiers in Iraq. C'mon - the cop on the horse tried to block the filming of the event. Ain't it clear that official police business was being undertaken?

See, in Gitmo America, all bets are off when it comes to the treatment of citizens by people in authority. Davis's crime was to tell a police officer he was being unprofessional when a second cop interrupted Davis as the future victim of a head-bouncing was talking to the first cop, who was on horseback. Davis forgot that we live in a time when authority is absolute, that to question power is to automatically render you criminal, and that, indeed, we are mere subjects to the powerful. If you forget that, then you must be shown your place, on the ground, cuffed, abused, bloodied.

To its credit, the NOPD has gotten the officers off the street and decried the action. To his credit, Davis, who says he hasn't had a drink in 25 years, has not condemned the entire NOPD, which at one point in its recent history was so rife with stinking corruption that its cops felt free to rob and murder people. Yes, the three beating cops are rotten apples, but something made them feel free enough to beat a man on an open street without fearing recriminations, just like the torturers at Abu Ghraib.