Last week, Attorney General William Barr gave an address to a gathering of police at an awards ceremony held by the Justice Department. Much was made, and rightfully so, of his comments about “communities” that do not show enough respect for law enforcement possibly finding themselves “without the police protection they need.” This is a remarkably lawless comment by the nation’s chief law enforcement officer – police are sworn to protect the communities they serve, regardless of their political views, attitudes, etc. But what’s even more troubling is Barr’s lead-up to these comments, which I’ve only seen reported in any detail on by the Majority Report.
He began with a long rant about the fabled widespread vitriol and contempt shown to veterans returning from the Vietnam war, and how the public sentiment about members of the military turned around during the Gulf War, when Barr was serving in the first Bush Administration. His point with respect to policing was that officers are no less at war than soldiers on the battlefield; that police endure a daily conflict with “predators”, and when they come home at night, there’s no parade, no celebration, and their “war” never ends. This extremist, adversarial view of policing sounds like that of an unreconstructed Reagan-era ultra conservative, in favor of mass incarceration and heavy-handed police tactics. But Barr’s worldview draws from a much deeper well.
When Barr was a freshman at Columbia University in 1968 during that year’s massive protests against the Vietnam war, he followed his father’s example in criticizing the protesters. Of course, Barr was draft age. Before his confirmation last year, he had said that he wasn’t required to register for the draft, but later retracted that statement as it obviously wasn’t true. Barr was draft age in 1968; I don’t know, but my guess is that he had a college deferment that year, then drew a high number in the first draft lottery at the end of 1969. According to Vanity Fair writer Marie Brenner, Barr hated the protests because they kept him out of the library. He saw them as anarchic – a view his conservative headmaster father shared. Barr’s father lost his job at the somewhat progressive Dalton School for his right-wing views. Brenner suggests that may have contributed to his contempt for liberals. Hard to say … but he seems to embody some of the same nastiness you find in other chicken-hawks.
Of course, the line he spreads about Vietnam veterans returning home to a land ruled by ungrateful hippies is nothing new or unique. Old-school conservatives have been repeating this trope for years, and those of us old enough to remember those years know that it’s mostly hogwash. My family was full of anti-war people. We had friends who went to Vietnam, and we loved them to pieces. They were as against the war as we were, and I hasten to add, it was an era when nearly anyone could end up in Vietnam via conscription … so today’s hippie was often tomorrow’s infantryman.
Barr is a menace to justice in America. He is also a shameless front man for a crackpot president … and, dare I say it, more dangerous even than Jefferson Sessions. Frankly, we can do better than either of them.
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