To understand Amy Klobuchar, all you need to know is how she treats her staff. An aide once carried her bags and a salad onto a plane for a short flight. Once onboard, the aide realized the horrible mistake he made: somewhere between fumbling with the Minnesota senator’s luggage and her lunch, he’d somehow lost her eating utensils. The flight crew didn’t have anything forks onboard so Klobuchar screamed at the aide and then pulled a comb from her bag and used it to eat the salad and when she was done, much like Cersei Lannister before her, Klobuchar turned to the aide, who was probably still reeling from being dressed down, and told him to clean her fork.
Everyone believes that Amy Klobuchar is an asshole. She’s such an asshole that it’s time for presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden to come out an say, “I’ve heard the story about Amy eating the salad with her fork and her inconsistent prosecutorial record of going after cops who kill black folks and as such I’m no longer considering her for vice president.”
Something tells me he’s going to fuck this up.
As the world is focused on Minnesota and more importantly Minneapolis, it’s important to note that Klobuchar’s comb of not giving a fuck about black death is all over this salad.
From the Washington Post:
Christopher Burns, a 44-year-old black man, was unarmed and at home in Minneapolis with his fiancee and three young children when the police arrived in response to a domestic violence call. The officers put him in a chokehold, and he died on the scene, according to the medical examiner.
The 2002 incident marked the third killing of a black person by the city’s police department that year, prompting local activists to stage rallies and demand that the two officers involved in Burns’s death face charges.
The focus of the community’s anger was Amy Klobuchar, the up-and-coming attorney of Hennepin County, who had declined to prosecute police accused of using excessive force against black suspects.
Klobuchar had a habit of punting on charging police involved in black death to a grand jury whom always found reasons not to charge the officers. And now Klobuchar is being vetted to possibly become Biden’s running mate at a time when Minneapolis is undergoing a full on revolution prompted by police officers’ excessive use of force that lead to the death of 46-year-old George Floyd.
It also comes at a time when America needs black votes more than ever if it has any plans of pushing the evil orange ogre out of office. The problem is this: Minnesota is mad white so no one cared about Klobuchar’s record of prosecuting police involved in black deaths and now that she’s in a national spotlight, they do and it’s not looking too good for ol’ Salad Comb.
Also from the Post:
As chief prosecutor for Minnesota’s most populous county from 1999 to 2007, Klobuchar declined to bring charges in more than two dozen cases in which people were killed in encounters with police.
At the same time, she aggressively prosecuted smaller offenses such as vandalism and routinely sought longer-than-recommended sentences, including for minors. Such prosecutions, done with the aim of curbing more serious crimes, have had mixed results and have been criticized for their disproportionate effect on poor and minority communities.
Aggressively prosecuting vandalism, you say? Maybe that’s why with damn near all of Minneapolis smoldering from an uprising over black death, Klobuchar felt the need to tweet this:
Yep, that’s it. That’s the tweet from possibly America’s next second-in-command and it is with this that I ask Karen Klobuchar to STFU. At this point, I would rather see Madonna’s son’s dance to end racism than hear anything else this woman has to say. If I learned that Klobuchar was calling me to tell me the alternative ending to the horrible Game of Thrones finale, the best I could do is let her speak to my mother-in-law, who would tell me what happened once she hung up.
Klobuchar could have auditioned for the NFL the way she punted police cases to grand juries. She even had a run-in with 19-year Minneapolis police veteran Derek Chauvin, who was last seen with his knee firmly on George Floyd’s neck. Chauvin was the man whose actions lead to Floyd’s death.
But, the Guardian reports that two of the officers–Chauvin and Tou Thao, is a 10-year veteran of the force—were involved in previous incidents while on duty.
Chauvin joined the force in 2001 and “had already been involved in several incidents, according to a database by the Minneapolis’ Communities United Against Police Brutality,” the Guardian notes.
In 2006, Chauvin, along with several officers, was involved in a shooting of a man who stabbed multiple people before turning towards the police. Although the Hennepin County district attorney at the time, Klobuchar failed to prosecute the officers; instead the case went to a grand jury, which chose not to charge the officers in the shooting.
If Klobuchar wants to talk about Myon Burrell, then I’m willing to listen. Burrell is the then-teen who Klobuchar helped send to prison for life in the killing of Tyesha Edwards, an 11-year-old girl who was killed by a stray bullet. In an attempt to find the killer, Klobuchar used testimony from several jailhouse snitches, some of whom have recanted their stories, and stories paid for by the then-lead homicide detective to convict Burrell, who is probably innocent.
And, now, after she’s been called out, Klobuchar is calling for an independent review of Burrell’s case.
“Why is the man who killed George Floyd not in jail?” Minneapolis’ mayor, Jacob Frey, asked as he called for charges on Wednesday. “We cannot turn a blind eye, it is on us as leaders to see this for what it is and call it what it is.”
Klobuchar has always had trouble calling it what it is, and now that the world is listening, she’s trying to do a tap dance loud enough that we ignore the racial injustices of her past. Well, she can keep dancing and rapping about vandalism in a time of black crisis, but when she was in control, when the ball was literally in her hands, she punted.