Are the Baltimore Riots Today's Boston Tea Party?

All Fox News can do is caterwaul about the violence in Baltimore, but what about these incidents that occurred in just the last week?

• A drunk Staten Island cop pulled her service weapon and opened fire, hitting the car of the wife of the man she was dating.
• A drunk off-duty New York cop opened fire on a man in a car, hitting him several times, apparently for no reason whatsoever.
• A drunk NYPD detective shot his partner by accident, and then drove the hospital drunk.
• Thirteen current and former North Carolina cops were arrested by the FBI for drug trafficking.
• A Georgia sheriff who compares himself to Batman shot a real estate agent in a model home "in a tragic accident" while "practicing police tactics."

Clearly, being a cop says nothing about your character. Or competence.

All conservatives can do is complain about "thugs" and "animals" running riot in our cities. But why are they rioting? Because the cops who are supposed to be protecting us are acting like thugs and animals.

Six cops arrested Freddie Gray for the abominable crime of running away from them in fear. They beat him up, injured him, bounced him around in the back of a van while he was cuffed and shackled, ignored his cries for help, delayed seeking treatment for him when he was clearly in distress, then lied about the whole thing. At some point in the affair they broke his spine, which killed him a week later.

Some people think these attacks on African Americans are all about race, and that's part of it. Some of the cops charged in the death of Freddie Gray were black. Some of the cops involved in other shootings and the subsequent coverups are also black.

The bigger problem is that way too many cops think they should hold a privileged position in this country, and their unions think they should be above the law. And they just lose it when people disobey or disrespect them. When people like Freddie Gray in Baltimore or Walter Scott in South Carolina run from police, the cops' reflexive action seems to be to run them down and arrest or shoot them. Even if there's zero evidence that they are guilty of any crime.

Freddie Gray, it turned out, had done nothing wrong. He had a knife whose legality the various camps are bickering about. Conservatives point to this as evidence of some evil intent. I'm curious: if Gray had had a concealed pistol, which conservatives seem to think is a panacea for making the world a safer place, would they now be touting him as hero for defending second amendment rights?

In short, the very act of disobedience is a crime punishable by death in the eyes of these cops.

There is clearly a strain of lawlessness, arrogance and violence in American law enforcement. They run roughshod over the civil rights of Americans, rarely being called to account for their crimes.

Clearly, not all cops are bad. Clearly, some of the rioters in Baltimore are just vandals and opportunists.

Equally as clearly, there are a lot of bad cops who dish out violence with high-handed impunity. The people of Baltimore have a right to be extremely angry about them.

If American conservatives truly believed in freedom and the threat of a tyrannical government, they would be the first ones to criticize these bad cops and demand accountability for law enforcement officials who constantly overstep their authority.

But right-wingers and Fox News keep fixating on the riots in Baltimore and Ferguson. And in doing so they are missing clear parallels with American history: they are cheering for the bad guys.

The Boston Tea Party was just one of many acts of vandalism and civil disobedience leading up to the Revolutionary War, including the burning of the Peggy Stewart.

Before the Revolutionary War, the Sons of Liberty protesters would have been called terrorists and thugs by the conservatives of the day: they burned the home of Massachusettes Lt. Gov. Thomas Hutchinson. They stole and burned the New York governor's coach to ash. They destroyed the home of Fort George's commander, breaking windows and stealing from the wine cellar.

The Sons of Liberty used violence to protest the Stamp Act and Sugar Act, tax laws imposed by the British government on a nation that yearned for independence. The rioters in Baltimore and Ferguson are protesting the harassment, thievery and wanton murder of American citizens by corrupt and arrogant cops.

You'd think Americans who call themselves patriots would be on the right side of history, rather than siding with Tories and petty tyrants in the police department.