It's a funny thing how even when you have video of a man being killed by another man and a medical examiner has found that it was homicide, under certain circumstances, people will come up with all sorts of theories about what killed him. Literally, CNN had a Thursday morning segment featuring Dr. Sanjay Gupta titled "What killed Eric Garner?" As if it's a big medical mystery. Politicians, too, have their theories.
Sen. Rand Paul's theory is that Eric Garner was killed by something conveniently in alignment with Rand Paul's politics: taxes.
“Obviously, the individual circumstances are important, but I think it’s also important to know that some politician put a tax of $5.85 on a pack of cigarettes, so they’ve driven cigarettes underground by making them so expensive,” the Kentucky Republican said Wednesday on MSNBC’s “Hardball with Chris Matthews.”
He continued, “But then some politician also had to direct the police to say, ‘Hey, we want you arresting people for selling a loose cigarette.’”
That's right, the guy who
claims that "you'll find nobody in Congress doing more for minority rights than me right now, Republican or Democrat" thinks that the killing of a black man by a police officer was actually about taxes. Then again, at least Paul blamed something other than the victim,
unlike Rep. Peter King:
“If he had not had asthma and a heart condition and was so obese, almost definitely he would not have died from this. The police had no reason to know that he was in serious condition,” the New York Republican said Wednesday on CNN’s “Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer.” [...]
“I know people were saying that he said 11 times or seven times, ‘I can’t breathe.’ Well, the fact is, if you can’t breathe, you can’t talk,” King said.
The congressman added that police hear “all the time” from people resisting arrest comments such as “you’re breaking my arm” or “you’re choking me.”
You know, when the guy who says "I can't breathe" subsequently dies and the medical examiner says it was
because of neck compression from a police-inflicted chokehold and "the compression of his chest and prone positioning during physical restraint by police," I think it's fair to say he couldn't breathe. And while Garner's health was a contributing factor to the fact that the neck and chest compression killed him ... well, it was the neck and chest compression that killed him. Which is to say it was the police that killed him. Which we already knew, all the attempts to shift blame notwithstanding.