We’re in the middle of the week so we’re having our regular Wednesday shower here at Enon World Headquarters. This week’s rain isn’t all that dramatic, though, as it’s rarely got harder than the occasional cloudburst. It’s still unusually cool, though, and far too damp for Otis and I to take our afternoon constitutional. C’est la vie.
But never mind all that. As Paul Harvey used to say, “And now, the news.” The Minneapolis police officer involved in the shooting death of Daunte Wright Sunday evening has been identified. Her name is Kimberly A. Potter and she’s had quite an active 48 hours. She resigned from the force yesterday and was arrested today on charges of second-degree manslaughter.
Potter is a 26-year veteran of the Minneapolis police force and was, at the time she shot Wright, training a young officer. The investigators say she made a mistake in pulling her service revolver rather than her Taser because of a mix-up of where each was holstered.
She was also president of the police union and while she’s never been involved in a shooting before, she did council the officers who shot Kobe Dimock-Hisler, a man with severe autism accused of lunging at them with a knife during a domestic disturbance call, in August 2019. She told them to turn off their body cams, get into separate squad cars, and not talk to each other reports say. No one was charged in the shooting. Dimock-Hisler’s father and grandmother both say he was calm by the time the officers had arrived and the shooting was unnecessary.
Video from the scene of the Wright shooting shows Potter yelling “Taser” before firing the fatal shot. It does make one wonder how an officer of nearly three decades’ experience could make that huge a mistake. The manslaughter charge would carry a maximum of 10 years. Potter has no connection with Derek Chauvin, the Minneapolis police officer on trial for the death of George Floyd which entered its third week and is hearing from the defense. However, apparently, Floyd’s girlfriend and Wright worked at the same place.
It should be noted that Potter initially pulled Wright over for expired tags and an air freshener hanging from his rearview mirror, the latter of which is not allowed in Minneapolis. He did have an outstanding warrant out for illegal possession of a firearm but there’s some question as to whether wires got crossed in issuing the warrant for an April 2 Zoom conference. The shooting kicked off three nights of protests not only in Minneapolis but all over the country, which is seeing an uptick in force from police.
Moving on, President Joe Biden announced he’d pull all U.S. troops from Afghanistan by September 11. He noted that he’s the fourth president to come into the office after the U.S. sent troops to Afghanistan to stomp out the Taliban in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. That was 2001 and we’re now seeing kids being sent there who weren’t alive when the Twin Towers went down.
That’s why it’s been called a Forever War. Notoriously considered the “Graveyard of Empires,” Afghanistan never has much cottoned to foreign forces trying to boss them around. Initially welcome of U.S. forces after Osama bin Laden and his bunch, the conflict quickly fell into the usual mess of some country, well, trying to tell the Afghanistan government and people what to do. An ever-shifting game of supporting one warlord over another and the conflict has long been an unnecessary sore thumb.
In any event, Biden’s announcement is pretty big news and will be quite a feat if he can pull it off. Both Trump and President Barrack Obama promised to scale back the morass in the Hindu Kush but nothing they did ever really amounted to much. America likes war and since there’s so much money to be made in figuring out new and exciting ways to blow people up, the Powers That Be aren’t keen to throw in the towel. The measure has met some resistance from not only Congressional Republicans and figures in the defense industry but also members of the D.C. press who still won’t own up to how badly they screwed the pooch about Iraq way back when.
As for Biden, he’s never been known as much of a dove. While he was a constant critic of the way George W. Bush’s administration handled Iraq and the War on Terror in general, he voted for pretty much every measure that gave the then-President the power to wage war. Furthermore, Biden’s requested a national security budget for 2021 that totals over $753 billion, which depending on how one figures things, is the largest on record and has caught flak from both sides.
One thing the GOP doesn’t like is they’re claiming Biden’s budget puts not enough emphasis on offensive capabilities as opposed to structural spending, such as maintenance and pay raises. Regardless, a unilateral pullout from Afghanistan will be a tough row to hoe and time will tell how it actually plays out. If we live by any axiom, it’s this one: “money talks and bullshit walks.”
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