The Washington Post editorializes this morning about the proposed three-week suspension of a Fairfax County SWAT officer who shot and killed a guy who was suspected of being a suburban bookie. The Post:

For months before this egregious shooting, an undercover police detective had been placing bets with Mr. Culosi, who had no criminal record; had never owned a firearm; and presented no threat of violence, flight or resisting arrest.

The police union, far from deploring the obvious cock-up on the part of one of its members, is complaining that a three-week suspension is ‘off the charts’, i.e. that it’s too severe.

The editorial concludes:

The chief prosecutor in Fairfax, Robert F. Horan Jr., already declined to prosecute Mr. Bullock or refer the case to a grand jury, yet now police union officials howl that even a three-week suspension is unfair. It’s not. It is in fact little more than symbolic discipline. But in such a case symbolism is important and well placed.

A lot of people on the left side of the political spectrum like to yell ‘police state!’ because the government is doing things like investigating organizations that have as their goal the destruction of the United States and its allies. I don’t particularly think that this is evidence of a looming police state.

I do think that this Washington Post editorial is, though. The Post is past even complaining that this cop isn’t being prosecuted: at this point, the complaint is that even ’symbolic discipline’ isn’t going to be meted out, if the union has its way.

Little things like the life of a citizen must not be allowed to get in the way of the police: that’s the definition of a police state. And the fact that the Post isn’t as interested in this as it was in whether or not George Allen was Jewish strongly suggests to me that we’re living in a police state already.

We think we know what a police state looks like: political prisoners, conversations held on sidewalks to avoid bugs; random interrogations; internal passports; gulags. Despite what the left-wing lunatic fringe likes to think, we don’t have any of these in the United States. Most of the rights guaranteed under the Fourth Amendment are, as a practical matter, long gone, but we’ve still got guns and we can still say what we like — at least if we don’t say it to a cop or in a school. A well-armed population, all writing blogs about their dislike of the government doesn’t really look like a police state.

The trouble is that our image of a police state is really just our image of the Soviet Union. We should not be surprised that the police state looks different here, or that it is not inconsistent with a reasonably free and healthy society. You might say that the difference is between a police state and a police society. We’ve already got the police state. When the Post stops even complaining about things like this, you’ll know we’ve arrived at the police society.

Opening the cream of celery soup for some terrible casserole that I don’t eat. These days, most soup cans have this ‘easy to use’ pulltab thing, which means that you don’t need a can opener.

What the Campbell’s people apparently forgot was that the can-opener method is close to failure-proof. And that the old steel cans could be opened at both ends, meaning that no matter what went wrong on one end, you could open the other instead.

Today’s can can only be opened on one end, and it can only be opened with the tab, because the rim on the top is too tall for a can opener to actually pierce the top of the thing. Now there’s thinking at work.

Eventually, it was possible to open the thing with a Swiss Army knife.