The Unbearable Stupidity of Maxine Waters

Featuring the two important words that she, and all politicians, should practice saying every time there’s a court case.

It is my experience both professionally and personally that police officers come in two flavours. The first are good people who believe the job they do is a worthwhile and integral to a functioning society.

They tend to be pleasant if somewhat uptight at times.

I would say this represents about eight out of ten police officers I’ve worked with or met. I was once pulled over for speeding by an officer like this. It was 11pm and I was doing 40mph through a rural village. I should’ve been doing 30mph, but it was quiet and I didn’t notice the police car behind me until the sirens and the lights came on.

Ten out of ten for observation from team penguin.

The officer that pulled me over was pleasant enough. I was asked to get out of my car. This being the UK and not the US, I wasn’t overly terrified of being beaten to death. I climbed in the back of their car and he showed me a video of me driving at 40mph past a sign that said ‘30mph’.

I’m argumentative by nature but even I know when I’m beaten.

I’m prone to making humorous comments when under pressure and I can’t remember what I said but I can assure you it was hilarious. My officer laughed, his partner in the driver’s seat didn’t even crack a smile.

He was the second type of police officer.

A self-proclaimed arbiter of justice. These officers enjoy the powerful position their job elevates them into. They laugh a little too loudly at their own jokes and, it would seem, not at mine.

I hate it when this type of officer shows up on my communication skills training. I know I’ve got a tough day ahead of me. Not only do they have little skill in communication outside of a barking hierarchy but they also lack the self-reflection to notice and their egocentricity prevents them from learning.

I’ve always got the impression this sort of officer could easily be morphed into violent henchmen for the nation. It wouldn’t take much, a new hat, a shiny new uniform — some guidelines about how the law has changed and now it’s permissible to kill people and off they’d go in their death squads.

I’m wary of these types of people. History should tell you why.

Convicted murderer Derek Chauvin was a poster boy for the latter type of police officer and that’s why I’m pleased he’s going to jail for a long time. I loved writing ‘convicted murderer’ at the start of that sentence.

I’ve waited patiently to be able to write those words and now I can.

The historical trial concluded with the verdict that I, and a hefty percentage of liberals and conservatives, wanted to see. It took ten hours of deliberation and there were no questions for the judge. Guilty on all three counts.

I say the trial concluded… there’s still wiggle room and it was provided by the self-immolating left and Kerosene Maxine.

The power of two very simple words

A few years ago I attended a police station at the request of the police. They received information I had committed a crime and wanted to speak to me. They didn’t arrest me but I gave a voluntary interview under caution with a solicitor present.

For the record I hadn’t committed the crime in question, it was fairly easy to demonstrate this fact, and a few weeks later all the allegations were dropped and I was never charged. Nevertheless, it was one of the single most awful experiences of my life to date. If I wasn’t keen on the police before this point, this didn’t help matters.

I had some time with my solicitor before I was interviewed and she advised me to do a ‘no comment’ interview. She would refute the allegations and give my side of the story before the interview started, by reading from a prepared statement we’d drafted together.

Then regardless of what else the officers asked I would say only two words. ‘No’ and ‘Comment’- I would say them in English and I would say them in that order. I had a practice and found they tripped off the tongue with relative ease.

I don’t know about you but I’m the sort of person who likes to comment.

Commenting is my natural state of action, that’s true on Medium and in real life. I balked a little at the idea of such a tactic — ‘doesn’t that make me look more guilty?’ I asked. ‘Shouldn’t I try and help them sort this whole thing out?’

See…. I thought the police officers would be reasonable people. They’d been friendly enough when I organised coming in. Sure, there were no kisses on the bottom of the e-mails but they’d been polite and affable. I wanted to be helpful and believed this would be a reasonable discussion between reasonable people.

I was about to have my bubble burst.

“These people aren’t your friends.” my solicitor told me, “This isn’t a nice friendly chat, most police officers think everyone who comes through the door is guilty and they’re going to throw everything at you. They’re going to try and confuse you, bait you, cajole you and do anything they can to make you speak and implicate yourself. We say only one thing. What is it?”

“No comment” I replied, somewhat glum.

“Good, and if you need a break then just signal to me and I’ll ask for a five-minute breather” — I was a little concerned. She was making it sound like trial by combat. Who needs a breather from saying two words over and over again?

Not me, that’s for sure.. I’ve been sayings whole sentences since I was four. On this I was entirely wrong. We had a break after an hour.

The officers tried every conceivable trick in the book to get me to budge from my ‘no comment’ position. At one point I coughed, they seized on it as an indication that I had agreed with their most recent statement.

At one point I raised an eyebrow and this was taken as a sign that I was alarmed until my solicitor intervened. The grand total of things I said in that room were. “Sorry, that was a cough” (once) and “No comment” (approx 8 bajillion times).

It wasn’t that I didn’t want to talk. I did. It wasn’t even the fact I didn’t have anything to say. I had plenty to say. Inside, I was an angry ball of penguin rage and I wanted to shout and scream about how wrong they were and how wrong the system was.

Instead, I squeezed my nails into my hand and left the interview with self-imposed stigmata.

They piled up their questions, prodded me, glared at me, offered me water, told me that it would be fine to talk, it would be much better for me if I did. I disagreed then and I still disagree now.

I was already in a complex emotional place and would’ve got myself into a mess. I would’ve misremembered key pieces of information, I would’ve contradicted myself whilst trying to be helpful, I would’ve got angry and flustered and worked up and cried. Eventually I would’ve tried in vain to flip the interview desk they’d pointedly screwed to the floor for that very reason.

My solicitor knew it and the police knew it. Only one of them was on my side. Spoiler, it wasn’t the police.

Back to Maxine Waters

When asked to comment, you don’t have to. This is also true even if you really really really really want to. In some instances, like the one outlined above it’s better if you don’t. When your ability to understand the implications of your words is under question, silence should be your go-to strategy.

I always go to Factcheck.org when researching my articles. I would advise everyone on Medium to do this whatever political position you take. This is what they recorded about Maxine Waters recent incident.

“We’re looking for a guilty verdict,” Waters said. “We’re looking for a guilty verdict and we’re looking to see if all of the talk that took place and has been taking place after they saw what happened to George Floyd. If nothing does not happen, then we know that we’ve got to not only stay in the street, but we’ve got to fight for justice. But I am very hopeful. And I hope that we’re going to get a verdict that says guilty, guilty, guilty. And if we don’t, we cannot go away.”

“And not just manslaughter, right?” a reporter asked.

“Oh, no, not manslaughter. No, no, no,” Waters said. “This is guilty for murder. I don’t know whether it’s in the first degree, but as far as I’m concerned it’s first degree murder.

A reporter then asked if Chauvin isn’t convicted on all charges, “What should protesters do?”

“Well, we gotta stay on the street,” Waters said. “And we’ve got to get more active. We’ve got to get more confrontational. We’ve got to make sure that they know that we mean business.”

Those are her words. Now ‘getting more confrontational’ and ‘making sure people know you mean business’ covers a lot of semantic ground. Context matters. It’s somewhere in between a strongly worded letter and an out-and-out nationwide race riot.

When my grandmother returns faulty clothing to shops, she tends to get confrontational and show people she means business. She’s 4"11 but size is not a valid indicator of malevolent intent. When the Russians line up forces on the Ukraine border, they’re getting more confrontational and showing people they mean business.

Maxine’s words have an absolute truck-load of ambiguity.

When she started talking about ‘first-degree murder’ someone should’ve taken her by the elbow and led her away for a sit down and anti-racism themed cake. Why? Chauvin was not charged with first-degree murder. Rather, he was charged with second and third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter.

It was an indication that she didn’t really know what she was talking about and was already out of her depth. You can’t be found guilty of something you’re not charged with. Whenever the press can find someone inclined to talk about something they aren’t qualified to discuss, they bee-line in for more words.

Their job, after all, is to make news — and Maxine Waters obliged.

People benevolently inclined towards her position are going to pass it off as a harmless misunderstanding. Those malevolently inclined towards her are going to call it an incitement to riot and mob rule.

Those discussions are largely tribal and borderline irrelevant.

I’m going to take the centre ground position. I think she’s being willfully taken out of context, but also she’s a damn idiot for saying anything in the first place. This is where I think moderates should be able to meet and agree.

The same discussions occurred with Trump’s infamous ‘Stand back and stand by’ comment. When Trump was impeached, I said it was a pointless and futile exercise and I stand by that. You interpret according to your bias. Shared language, but private understanding a la Wittgenstein.

The recent attempt to censure Maxine Waters is equally pointless. This is playground politics, back and forth, red vs blue. It’s about who gets to control the narrative and who gets to look hypocritical this week.

But Eric Nelson (Derek Chauvin’s lawyer) has one job and he does it very well. Barely had the words tumbled out of Maxine’s mouth before he was on his feet and asking for a mistrial. It was almost like he was waiting for it — I suspect he was. I would’ve prepared that defence.

An idiot trap requiring only one prominent person to set it off. Joe Biden almost did when he said he was “praying the verdict is the right verdict”. For the record, we were all thinking it Joe, when you’re the President you don’t say it.

It suggests you want a particular outcome, which of course you do — but vocalising such a thing could be considered instructing the jury to reach the same conclusion as you. Lucky you never said what that conclusion should be. This skirted around the trap with a slight ‘uh-oh’ and a flail of the arms.

I bet White House lawyers called you into the oval office for quick ‘briefing’ about half a second after you finished speaking. I hope that briefing involved shouting at you about how you nearly derailed a legal trial.

What you want, Mr President, is for the law to be fair and for the jury to reach a fair conclusion based on the evidence presented. Whatever they conclude is ‘right’ until proven otherwise, that’s how the law works.

The fact they can be proven otherwise is why I don’t support the death penalty under any circumstances. It’s also why I don’t support trial by social media and public opinion. We have legal processes and we should stick to them, reforming them when they don’t work properly.

I digress, because whilst I was contemplating overturning the death penalty and social media, Kerosene Maxine just plopped herself straight into the trap without a second thought.

Here’s Eric Nelson. Waters “was making what I interpreted to be and what I think are reasonably interpreted to be, threats against the sanctity of the jury process, threatening and intimidating a jury, demanding that if there’s not a guilty verdict that there would be further problems.”

That man deserves a raise. Whatever you think about the morality of defence lawyers, he’s committed to the job of defending his client to the best of his ability. This is a valid legal argument and Maxine Waters gave him the helping hand he needed at the eleventh hour.

To the relief of almost everyone in the country the judge was having none of it. “I’ll give you that Congresswoman Waters may have given you something on appeal that may result in this whole trial being overturned.”

Those twenty-two words the judge said are chilling and on this matter he is bang on. If Chauvin’s legal team can demonstrate that the jury was intimidated by Maxine Water’s comments, the whole thing can be labelled a mistrial.

Ezinne Ukoha has already derided the judge for being a white supremacist for this observation. Given she could watch two nitrogen atoms bump in the vast vacuum of space and conclude it was white supremacy — I’ll take her view with a pinch of salt.

The penguin position is that this judge is bang on. The law must be applied fairly and that means that the jury cannot be influenced in their decision making. It could mean a new trial. The same pain and suffering all over again. Recalling witnesses. Rewatching the videos. Re-examining the evidence.

For what? Fair legal process that’s what. That’s what was demonstrated throughout the trial and progressives were delighted with the result. But we must stand by that process even when it means Maxine Waters may have messed it up.

It’s why the judge had been warning politicians to shut the hell up.

I don’t think for a second Chauvin would be acquitted in a second trial. The man has been found guilty and I think he’d still lose the case on appeal because the evidence against him is quite strong.

Like most reasonable people, I’m delighted he’s gone to jail. However he is entitled to a fair trial and an appeal. Now there’s a valid argument for one where one didn’t exist before. Cheers Maxine.

It’s wiggle room provided by Maxine Waters. A gift from her to Derek Chauvin carefully wrapped by the words of Eric Nelson.

So what now?

After Chauvin was led away, Maxine Waters could’ve stood up and shouted whatever she liked. It could’ve been sassy, it could’ve been undignified, it could’ve been offensive and ridiculous. She could’ve sung a song about him, called him a ‘heap of murderous shit’ or done the full Cell Block Tango in the style of Bob Fosse.

It would’ve made no difference to the trial whatsoever. But timing is everything — wait for the damn trial to be over Maxine.

Because you scored a massive own goal and others on the left should be telling her so. Someone higher up the Democrat food chain should give her a full bollocking for her lack of legal insight.

My money is on Pelosi. She seems to be the Democrat fixer… she’s not afraid of getting confrontational or showing people she means business. See what I did there?!

Maxine’s defence is that she’s being taken out of context. Well, duh… of course she is. Yes her words are being twisted to mean things she didn’t actually intend — but she put those words out there in the first place.

That’s what skilled rhetoricians like lawyers, broadcasters and spin-doctors do. It’s what they’re good at. She’s been in politics long enough to know that’s how the game is played. If you haven’t grasped the rules after 30 years in office, it’s time you were benched — you’re a liability on the field.

The entire US political system needs to harness the power of ‘no comment’. Or failing that, some variation on this theme. ‘I don’t think it would be right for a political figure like myself to comment whilst legal matters are ongoing’. Words have power, and misplaced words have the power to be turned against you with ease.

Run some ‘Simon and Garfunkel’ branded ‘Sound of Silence’ seminars whilst they have their coffee and toast in the White House cafeteria. Change all the computer screens in Washington to show ‘No Comment’ as a screensaver. Ask Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson to staple it to their damn foreheads in a special ceremony if you have to.

Just get it done.

Politicians need to learn not to comment when there are complex legal cases in operation because the law is a minefield. We should expect ‘no comment’ from them as the default position. It is NOT their field of expertise and they do more damage than good when they blunder.

Speaking out on political matters is a powerful tool and one that Maxine Waters has used time and time again for the betterment of marginalised people. In this instance, Derek Chauvin was a political AND legal matter and she should’ve used another tool — dignified silence.

Sometimes the best thing you can say is absolutely nothing at all. I learned this simple lesson a few years ago, bubbling with rage in an interview room whilst sat opposite two police officers. As an aside, there was one of each flavour and I presume they pair them this way.

I’d advise US politicians to learn the lesson too and particularly Kerosene Maxine, who has a history of not thinking before she speaks and getting her own side in hot water.

‘No comment’ is a potent weapon. Use it wisely.

Have I got any other articles that take a centre ground perspective on tricky issues?

‘No comment’