Elisabeth Hasselbeck is "sure" that Sandra Bland "could have" because "someone has." Err...HUH??? [View all]

[Miles Archer]

On Monday’s edition of “Fox & Friends,” Elisabeth Hasselbeck speculated that an “irritated” Sandra Bland could have “attacked” Officer Brian Encinia with her cigarette, because the co-host is “sure someone has, in the history of this land, used a cigarette against a police officer.”

Putting aside the fact that “the history of this land” contains a nearly infinite number of otherwise innocent objects that could, in a pinch, be used by someone, somewhere as a weapon. At this very moment, I have access to pens, a lamp, a cup of rapidly cooling green tea, not to mention the very keyboard on which I type these words — any one of which could conceivably be used to attack another human being.

Just because I could toss a cup of lukewarm green tea at any police officer who walks into my office doesn’t mean that, should a police officer actually enter my office, he or she should feel immediately threatened by my Bigelow. There’s no logic to that logic — it’s effectively a license to live in perpetual fear of everyday objects, and Hasselback wants to grant it to law enforcement.

But Hasselbeck continued, albeit oddly, stopping and starting almost as if her brain didn’t want allow her mouth to eject the words it’d ordered her to say. “What if, I mean, there are times, I’m sure, someone has, in the history of this land, used a cigarette against a police officer,” Hasselbeck said. “Maybe chucked it at him — pushed it at him?”

http://www.salon.com/2015/07/27/fox_news_elisabeth_hasselbeck_justifies_sandra_blands_arrest_she_could_have_used_cigarette_as_a_weapon/