The New Jersey cops must have been plenty ticked off to release to the public the videocam of a profanity-laced tirade delivered by Caren Turner, a former Hillary Clinton fundraiser and now former Port Authority commissioner.
Ms. Turner's daughter had been pulled over by the police, whom she distinctly regards as her social inferiors, and here is what happened (as described by Hot Air):
She spends most of the video’s eight minutes demanding to know why the cops stopped her daughter. We can’t tell you that, says PD. Your daughter’s an adult, therefore you have no right to know. Just ask her yourself. But Turner refuses, for seemingly no better reason than that she’s miffed that two nobodies from Tenafly, New Jersey would dare resist a Port Authority commissioner’s demands for information.
Ms. Turner flashed her badge as a Port Authority commissioner and with the signal gentility for which a large segment of our elite is known told the police that they could "shut the f—- up."
That, however, is not what you are going to remember from this video.
What will astound and offend you even more is this: Ms. informs the police that the car was carrying Yale and MIT graduate students, as if that means that the peons in blue should recognize them as their betters and not require them to obey the laws.
As a famous hotelier might have put it, traffic laws are for little people.
Should the police, in Ms. Turner's worldview, restrict themselves to pulling over drivers who attend trade schools or community colleges?
Let's hope Ms. Turner is an outlier, but her behavior nevertheless speaks volumes about privilege and lack of decency. There was a revolt against this kind of disdain for regular people in November of 2016. Some people, apparently, haven't yet grasped the message.
But the story does have a happy ending:
“The conduct was indefensible. The board takes its recently adopted Code of Ethics for commissioners extremely seriously and was preparing to form a special committee to review the findings of the Inspector General investigation and take action at this Thursday’s board meeting,” said spokesman Benjamin Branham. “Commissioner [Caren] Turner’s resignation was appropriate given her outrageous conduct.”
The car was pulled over because it had tinted windows, illegal in New Jersey, and the car's Nevada license plate was partly hidden by a vanity plate. The police also learned that the car's registration had expired.
Caren Turner had served on the finance committees of Clinton and New Jersey Governor Jon Corzine. Former governor Chris Christie had named her to the Port Authority Commission. She was chair of the Port Authority's Governance and Ethics Committee.
And here is the beautiful thing about the incident: it was a wonderful little lesson about democracy and decency that could be learned on the highways and byways of New Jersey without the expense of courses at Yale or MIT.