THIS Outrage Hits Newsweek

THIS Outrage Hits Newsweek

Patti Davis, Ronald Reagan's daughter, has penned a piece for Newsweek on last week's botched heroically-executed raid on nefarious drug kingpin innocent Berwyn Heights, Md. mayor Cheye Calvo, his mother-in-law, and his two slavering pit bulls Black Labs.

Entitled America's Troubled House, I strongly urge you to give it a read. Here are some of of the highlights:

Mayor Cheye Calvo came home late in the afternoon of July 29 and discovered a package addressed to his wife that had been left at the front door. He brought it inside, didn't open it and set it aside for his wife. Calvo said hello to his mother-in-law, Georgia, who lives with them, and took the family's two black Labrador retrievers, Chase and Payton, out for a walk. He waved to several people who were sitting in cars near his home, never suspecting that a nightmare was about to unfold.

When he came back, Calvo went upstairs to change clothes for an evening event. His mother-in-law was in the kitchen when she saw masked men with guns running toward the house. Not surprisingly, she screamed as they kicked in the door. They shot Payton who was standing beside her. They then turned their weapons on the other black lab, Chase, who was running away from them. They killed him, too.

If you read the gun boards where incidents like this are reported regularly (which means, of course, they occur regularly), shooting the dogs seems to be standard operating procedure.

Mayor Calvo came downstairs into a new time in America, in which no one is presumed innocent and guilt is only an assumption away.

--

Several days after the raid, authorities arrested several men, including a FedEx delivery man. And County Police Chief Melvin C. High finally admitted that "Ms. Tomsic and the Calvo family were innocent victims of drug traffickers."

He's probably tired of reporters coming up to him with microphone in hand and saying, "You must be High."

While Chief High later expressed regret for the incident, he stopped short of offering an apology. And Sheriff Michael A. Jackson, whose department executed the raid, defended his department's actions.

It's not the first time something like this has happened in Prince George's County. In November, another family was targeted for what was later deemed a mistake. Their dog was shot to death in their front yard. When Calvo called for a U.S. Justice Department investigation last week, he noted "reports of similar misconduct, including service of warrants at the wrong address, excessive use of no-knock entries and other unjustified killings of family pets. This has happened before, and without oversight, it will happen again." Calvo acknowledged that because of his position as mayor, his case has been getting the kind of exposure that the average citizen could never hope for. "What saddens us most is that all too often, these injustices go unnoticed by law-enforcement officials and those who are victimized are forced to suffer in silence," he said.

Gee, Ya THINK??

Imagine being Georgia Porter, one minute cooking dinner, the next handcuffed on the kitchen floor, inches from the bloodied body of a dog who was part of her family. Imagine Cheye Calvo hearing the shots from upstairs, not knowing what was happening, and then finding himself handcuffed, helpless, forced to kneel in his underwear. Imagine Trinity Tomsic dealing with her defiled home--not only did the police slaughter their dogs, they tracked blood all over the house in a search that yielded nothing.

You need to imagine all these things because, in a way, we all live in that house. It's called our country, and this is what's starting to happen here.

It's not starting, Patti, it's been going on (and worse, much worse) for quite a while. The legacy media is just now starting to take notice, but that's because media serves as the ecclesiastical arm of government, not as the fourth check and balance on government.

But here's the key excerpt:

Prince George's official country Web site defines itself as "a county of livable communities." That's what we all wish for--a livable community, a home where we feel safe. We want to feel that if the bad guys come, we can call the police and they will be the good guys. We want to believe that if we're innocent, armed men with government badges won't handcuff us and shoot our pets and wave their weapons in our faces.

But more and more of us don't believe that.

A spot-on observation in a national news outlet.

By all means, read the comments, from the bottom up.

I've got another Überpost forming in my brain that isn't going to crawl its way out of my skull until sometime after I get back from the Para Blogger's shoot. I'm hoping nice long conversations with the other attendees will help inspire me in saying what I want to say the way I want to say it.