By Kevin D. Williamson
Sunday, January 31, 2016
Professor Melissa Click of the University of Missouri
criminally assaulted an undergraduate student and, though local prosecutors
were slow to move on the case — there was video of the incident, and the facts
were not in question — she eventually was charged with third-degree assault.
She will not be convicted of a crime, and, so far, her tenure-track position is
safe.
Ironies abound. Click, a professor of Lady Gaga studies
(no, really), enjoyed an appointment in Mizzou’s journalism department, which
for mysterious reasons is highly regarded. The undergraduate she assaulted was
a student journalist going about his proper business, covering a campus protest
of which Professor Click was one instigator.
The subject of that protest was, in part, “white
privilege,” which the protesters held up in contrast to the purportedly rough
and unfair treatment that African Americans, particularly young men, receive at
the hands of the police.
Which brings up the obvious question: What do we imagine
would have happened to a young black man who criminally assaulted a white
female college professor — and then, as Professor Click did, attempted to
instigate mob violence against her? On campus? On video?
There would have been handcuffs, at least. He almost
certainly would not have been given the option of performing 20 hours of
community service in exchange for deferred adjudication, which is the deal
Professor Click is getting from Columbia’s shamefully cowardly prosecutor,
Steve Richey. He would not be, as Professor Click is, on track to a lifetime
sinecure from which he effectively cannot be fired.
Other scenarios are worth considering: Say the assault
had been perpetrated by a burly football coach against a young black woman.
We’d have had the president himself baying for blood.
But he’s selective in his baying. A few months back
congressional Republicans found themselves dismayed that the Veterans Affairs
hospitals had, through their negligence and stupidity, killed more of our
servicemen than died during any year of the Iraq war, and then engaged in a
massive criminal cover-up. Legislation was introduced to make it easier to fire
people for — let’s focus here — killing
veterans through their negligence and stupidity. But government employees
are the single most important Democratic interest group, and the president and
his congressional allies complained that the bill was too harsh on public
servants who were killing veterans through their negligence and stupidity. And
so the bill died in the Senate, with Donald Trump’s pals Harry Reid and Chuck
Schumer breathing a sigh of relief.
But killing veterans through their negligence and
stupidity is not the only species of shenanigans that the VA system gets up to.
Oh, no. The VA has a very generous program for covering employees’ relocation
costs — payments that can reach into six figures. What could possibly go wrong
with that? Only
the obvious.
Responding to the financial incentives, VA employees set
about securing for themselves cushy jobs that required relocation. Kimberly
Graves, a VA official who oversaw several offices in the northeast, pressured a
colleague into accepting a position in Baltimore so she could take his job in
St. Paul. She had much less responsibility in the new position, going from
being responsible for 16 VA regional offices to being responsible for one — but
kept her $174,000 salary and pocketed $130,000 in moving costs. How one racks
up $130,000 in moving costs is a mystery to me.
A second colleague was paid $274,000 to move . . . from
Washington to Philadelphia, 134 miles away. That’s about $2,000 a mile. At that
price, it would have been cheaper to have a New York City taxi dispatched from
Manhattan to Washington to haul her worldly goods to Philadelphia before
returning to New York, running the meter the whole way.
The VA’s inspector general issued a very amusing report
on the matter, and made a criminal referral in the case. Employees were
suspended. And then . . . nothing.
Worse than nothing, really: Graves has just been
reinstated to her position. Another suspended employee will have a hearing on
Monday, and may also be reinstated.
In the Treasury Department, the EPA, and the FCC,
employees have been found to routinely spend the equivalent of a full workday
every week watching pornography on their office computers. Most of those
crank-yanking bureaucrats are still on your payroll. At the Commerce
Department, paralegals spent their days shopping online and trolling dating
sites because they were assigned no work — their supervisors were afraid giving their employees work would
“antagonize the labor union.” In California, the teachers’ union has gone to
bat to keep pedophile teachers on the payroll after they were found to be
having sex with children. In New York, Governor Andrew Cuomo managed to corrupt
an anti-corruption task force. The IRS and the ATF are routinely used as political
weapons. The nice liberal Democrats in Flint, Mich., poisoned the city’s
children in the name of infrastructure spending.
Despite all of the dark whispering about the NRA and
“dark money,” the right-wing bogeymen mostly are minor players. The two major
teachers’ unions are between them the biggest political spender in Washington,
with the NEA and the ATF spending a combined $50 million in the 2014 cycle. AFSCME,
the government-employees’ union, spent $11 million that cycle, and was the
twelfth-largest overall political spender. The NRA, which barely cracks the
top-300 list, spent less than $1 million. Beyond spending on (overwhelmingly
Democratic) political campaigns, government workers and their unions also show
up to vote, to knock on doors, and to bully, harass, and threaten
nonconformists. They are the backbone of the Democratic party — and they are
thieving, lazy, grasping, thieving, dishonest, thieving, pervy, thieving,
detestable, despicable, thieving, thieving thieves with a minor sideline in
violence and intimidation.
Which brings us back to Melissa Click, who criminally
assaulted an undergraduate student journalist for attempting to commit an act
of journalism. As of this writing, she is still on track for tenure. Jail? She
won’t even be formally convicted of her crime if she manages to go twelve
months without committing a significant crime in public.
For all the talk about “privilege,” this is a much more
familiar phenomenon: This is what it means to have a ruling class.
And it cannot be repeated often enough: We are ruled by
criminals.
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