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http://gawker.com/5861688/its-a-food-product-essentially-fox-news-starts-spinning-pepper-spray-cops

‘It’s a Food Product, Essentially’: Fox News Starts Spinning Pepper Spray Cops

Tonight, Fox News hosts Bill O'Reilly and Megyn Kelly got to talking about a UC Davis police officer's appalling use of pepper spray on nonviolent protesters over the weekend. Guess what direction the conversation took!
If you guessed "needlessly deferential to authority and dismissive to the suffering of protesters," you guessed correctly!

"I don't think we have the right to Monday-morning quarterback the police," O'Reilly says, "particularly at a place like UC Davis, which is a fairly liberal campus." God forbid! We'd never want to question Lt. John Pike's decision to generously and indifferently dust peacefully sitting protesters with pepper spray from only a few feet away. Especially given that Davis is, you know, a liberal campus! And, gosh, even if we were going to Monday-morning quarterback the police, shouldn't we remember, as Megyn Kelly tells O'Reilly, that pepper spray is "a food product, essentially"?

Now, look, Kelly and O'Reilly aren't saying the cops did the right thing! God, no! "I agree [the tape] looks bad," Kelly says. It's just that the protesters were sitting in a place where they weren't allowed to sit, so it's kind of their own fault! And in any event what right do we have to judge a cop for spraying a simple food product on the faces of a bunch of liberal college kids doing something criminal? You know? Maybe he was just trying to feed them?


Eric D. Schwerin
Rosemont Seneca Partners, LLC
1010 Wisconsin Ave., NW
Suite 705
Washington, DC 20007
(202) 333-1880
eschwerin@rosemontseneca.com
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