Del. Pat McDonough of Baltimore and Harford Counties always reminds me why I'm glad I live on the west side of Baltimore County. Our pols are far from perfect, but at least they're not demagogues pandering to the worst fears of constituents.
McDonough is best known for his incessant attacks on Hispanics. He calls them attacks on illegal immigrants, but his discernment of who's legal and who's not is something he's spent no time honing. All Hispanics are illegals, so far as he's concerned. Of course he's spearheaded the crusae to repeal Maryland's effort to make the children of illegals full citizens with strong educations and a likelihood of being productive members of society. Wouldn't want that. Better to send them all home. Of course, you can never catch them all to send home, so that means you just create a sub strata of society that has no chance of advancing on the economic ladder. Unless they're Cuban, of course.
But McDonough's usual racist attacks on Hispanics isn't today's subject. No, our hero took the opportunity of the last day of the legislature's specials session to call for martial law in Baltimore's Inner Harbor.
Here's a quote from The Sun about the "news release" McDonough put out. The title of the release is just so subtle. "'Black Youth Mobs Terrorize Baltimore on Holidays.' In it, McDonough said he had sent a letter to Gov. Martin O'Malley urging him to use the state police to help prevent attacks and to declare the Inner Harbor area a "no-travel zone" until safety can be guaranteed."
Let's just think about the stupidity here. The solution to a few incidents of youths causing fights is to shut down the businesses at the Inner Harbor, and barring that, to scare as many people away from patronizing those businesses as possible. How's that helping the city?
Keep in mind that no one has been killed in any of these incidents. In fact, no one has been seriously injured, viral video of one guy being knocked down, robbed, and stripped naked notwithstanding. That guy was so drunk he didn't even remember the incident or report it to the police until the next day.
Now, there's no question the police need to be on the scene in large force whenever these incidents occur. Plentiful arrests of these bands of bozos, who appear to think they're just engaging in some fun, will put an end to it quickly enough.
The real issue isn't misbehaving youths. The issue is that McDonough feels it's necessary to point out the ethnicity of the youths. Quoting The Sun again, "McDonough refused to back down, saying he had heard from police that the crowds involved in several recent incidents were all black. Failing to mention the race of the participants, he said, would be 'political correctness on steroids.'"
McDonough, of course, has no first hand knowledge of the ethnicity of the youths and cites no specific person with such knowledge. He's citing the grapevine. There's a persuasive source.
Then there's what he calls "political correctness". This remains one of my favorite bullshit terms the loons on the right use. It's so broadly used as to be almost meaningless, but it boils down to a label for anyone who doesn't agree with them and points out the utter baselessness of their assertions.
For instance, what relevance does ethnicity have? Is McDonough saying that everyone should be forewarned to run away from black people? It certainly seems that's the only possible relevance. So, if you run across an NAACP meeting, make sure to run and hide, lest the distinguished members suddenly turn into a violent mob and attack you. Even if his warning is limited to black youth, I'd have to say he and his adherents avoid Ravens games. Most of the team is black. They're young. They might go charging into the stands to assault people at random.
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