Shawn Vestal: The political shift in the Valley isn’t quite the left turn the far right thinks it is

If you’re still wondering how a lawmaker who pals around with people who fantasize about “skull-stomping” commies online continues to be re-elected, and whether that trend will continue, consider a pair of recent comments from the Spokane Valley mayor and the former county treasurer.

And wonder no more.

Mayor Rod Higgins and former Treasurer Rob Chase are true Spokane Valley conservatives, which means they are not politically red but mahogany. Each has, in his own way, come to the recent defense of Rep. Matt Shea, R-Armageddon, even as the scariest, fringiest, most potentially violent components of Shea’s circle come to light.

One defense shows the alternative-universe thinking that has allowed Shea to thrive politically in the Valley. The other reveals possible cracks in that foundation at long last.

Start with the soon-to-be-ex-mayor. Higgins recently told a crowd in the Valley that Shea is the victim of unfair smears and maliciously slanted reporting. This is the standard response in the echo chamber when an obvious extremist – or, you know, the president – receives unflattering attention. That damn messenger is not to be trusted.

Higgins said Shea is a victim of the damn messenger just like, you know, those cops in the Rodney King video.

Now, someone who reaches back for a case of media victimhood and comes up with that 1991 incident seems very likely to be smuggling some of the unreconstructed racial attitudes that animate Shea-world. The notion that the takeaway from the King beating, the trial and acquittal, and subsequent rioting was that the media was biased against cops … well, let’s just say it satisfies a certain kind of itch for a certain kind of thinker.

But set that aside, and consider just the part Higgins said out loud.

Those poor beleaguered cops in the Rodney King video, he said, just like poor beleaguered Matt Shea, are the victims of an incomplete story. A media smear. Sure, it looked like they were just beating him relentlessly, over and over, 56 times in all, well past the point of necessity. But what the video doesn’t show, Higgins said, was that King was on drugs and had been “violent” before the video.

So not only was the beating OK, the police could have shot him instead, Higgins suggested.

Because cops can totally shoot people who are on drugs. Or who were violent at some point earlier, back before the 30th or 40th baton strike.

Higgins’ comments were reported first in a recent Los Angeles Times story about the Valley as a hotbed of far-right activity. He’s not the only one who has the revisionist view of the beating, which the jury shared as well. But it was a preposterous verdict then, and remains so now, and even if you agree with it, to ignore the massive, well-deserved review of police tactics, and changes in the use of force by police nationwide that emerged from it, is to go basically full-throated in defense of police brutality.

That’s what Higgins did. The Times reported that Higgins told the crowd that police “should have” shot King.

Later, when confronted by his own comments, he immediately fell into the yoga pose known as: press victim.

As he told KHQ later, “It was so slanted, twisting what I said.”

Then, in trying to deny what he said, he all but confirmed it instead.

“The cops later were acquitted, when they were tried,” Higgins told the TV station. “It came out that there was more to the video than what we’d all seen. There was a lead-in to the video where Rodney King was obviously high on drugs, very violent, and what I said was that the cops would have been justified in shooting him, if it’d come to that.”

So slanted. So twisted.

Now for Exhibit 2. Chase recently posted an article online in which he argued that the Valley had gone liberal. Liberal! Who’d have thunk? It’s true that a number of candidates who are not aligned with Matt Shea were elected, over candidates who wear the Shea stamp of approval, and there is now a more moderate council majority. But if you actually think they’re liberal, you should check out Spokane’s City Council some Monday night.

The political divide in the Valley is not red vs. blue, but Shea-world vs. real-world conservatism. Sheriff Ozzie Knezovich stands at the head of this real-world conservatism, in a feud that has long been bitterly personal. For this, Chase deems him, ludicrously, a Democrat who pretends to be a Republican.

The blog post is titled “Ozzie Comes Out of the Closet,” and is decorated with photos of Knezovich – gasp! – posing with a series of RINOs (Republican in Name Only) and even Democrats.

City Councilwoman Brandi Peetz, who defeated a Shea acolyte, is another example of a Chase “liberal.” Peetz is actually a GOP precinct committee officer – but she’s actually just “posing” as one, Chase says.

Also, the Republicans of Spokane County club. Complete RINOs.

Now, one recent election victor, Tim Hattenburg, is a longtime Democrat, if a conservative one. But it’s nuts to think that liberals are taking over Spokane Valley. About as nuts as carrying around an old grudge on behalf of the cops who so savagely beat Rodney King.

But it’s not at all nuts to note that the radicals are in retreat in the Valley, and rationalists are on the rise. As former Mayor Dean Grafos put it in a recent Spokesman-Review story, “We don’t want to be a part of the state of Liberty.”