Some 25,000 policemen turned out for the funeral of NYPD officer Rafael Ramos in Queens, some of them flown to New York, free of charge, by Jet Blue. This was the sea of blue outside the church where the funeral was held:
Ramos’s family, before the service. I had not realized it, but Ramos reportedly was studying to be a minister:
Mayor de Blasio has been trying to mend fences with the police department, but so far many of them aren’t buying it. Thousands of officers watched the funeral service on a big screen outside the church; when de Blasio spoke, they turned their backs:
Somewhat ironically, the funeral featured a lineup of Democratic Party speakers: de Blasio, Andrew Cuomo and Joe Biden. Biden’s speech was platitudinous–appropriately so. Biden is perhaps the only senior member of the administration who could have struck the right note, and sounded sincere doing it.
The national outpouring of support for the police following the murders of Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu has cowed all but the most hard-core leftists into silence–temporarily at least–and it has exposed as juvenile and out of touch the anti-police racial politics of Barack Obama and Eric Holder. One assumes that it will be a while before Obama again reminds us that his “go-to guy on race” is Al Sharpton.
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