As I have written on other similar occasions, it’s a protest when you toss the tea into the harbor; when you grab the tea or, rather, the TV sets, liquor and sports equipment and take it home, it’s a riot and those who take part are not patriots, they’re thugs.

As I watched what was taking place in Ferguson after the Grand Jury returned its rational verdict, the thing that surprised me was that after Gov. Jay Nixon had announced he was calling in the Missouri National Guard as a backup to the St. Louis and Ferguson police departments, the only people I saw on the streets were black punks smashing windows, burning down businesses and carting off stolen loot.

In the bad old days, cops down South would turn dogs and fire hoses on black people who were protesting peacefully and it spoke to the consciences of white Americans. But over the past 40 years or so, it seems the order of the day is that every time black hooligans take to the streets, the cops are told to stand around and watch, only stopping short of passing out matches, gasoline and baseball bats.

So far as I can tell, St. Louis County Prosecutor Robert McCulloch and the nine members of the Grand Jury took their responsibilities seriously and did an admirable job. However, after reading his detailed statement to the press, one of the reporters asked McCulloch if witnesses who had done so much to inflame the situation on Day One by claiming that Officer Wilson had shot Michael Brown in the back or had shot him when he was standing still with his hands raised above his head would face perjury charges. To my astonishment, McCulloch basically blew off the reporter’s question.

Even though McCulloch said that most of those “eye witnesses” finally got around to admitting that they hadn’t even seen the shooting and were only passing on rumors as fact, he was obviously willing to give them the benefit of the doubt. What doubt that might be, he failed to explain. For my part, I have no doubt at all that they not only committed perjury, but were the major reason that Ferguson became a war zone in the first place.

In fact, I read the next day that Chief of the St. Louis County Police Jon Belman initially ordered his officers “to back off” and to treat the mob as they would the crowd at “a festival or a ballgame.”

Even at festivals and ballgames, I’ve seen barricades. But in Ferguson, they didn’t even block off the main drag, which had been the flash point of the riots back in August.

Clearly, the protests had nothing to do with the Grand Jury verdict. As it was with the Rodney King riots here in L.A., the verdict merely served as an excuse for black teenagers and young toughs to run wild because they know that the same shit that would get them a stiff prison sentence if they did it alone or with a buddy will be essentially ignored when done as a mob.

I did not have a business burn down and I was about 1,500 miles west of Ferguson, so for me, the worst part of the evening was listening to commentators, including Barack Obama, attempt to be balanced, talking about the racism that is still part of our culture and especially the culture of the police. It reminded me of the moral equivalence he always seems to find when comparing Israel to its vile Middle East neighbors.

What Obama and the media pundits should have been talking about was the culture of black communities that accepts record numbers of illegitimate births, black crime and welfare as a generational tradition, as the norm.

We’ve had half a century of black kids being raised by young black females, of black men who have unburdened themselves of familial responsibilities and of racists like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson stoking the embers of racial animosity by scapegoating white society.

The mere fact that a creep like Sharpton is still allowed to host his own show on MSNBC and be welcomed like a long-lost brother to Obama’s White House should tell you all you need to know about what the once honorable Civil Rights movement has come to in America.

If I owned a store in Ferguson that was burned or vandalized by the mob, I should be allowed to sue not only Gov. Nixon and the various police chiefs who basically gave the thugs carte blanche, but Sharpton and the various black politicians who all played an essential role in allowing it to happen. I should also be allowed to target Barack Obama and Eric Holder, who inflated the regrettable, but defensible, shooting of a bully into not only a national spectacle, but, if you recall Obama’s reference to it during his U.N. address, an international incident.

One element of the case left me scratching my head. As we heard in the aftermath, Officer Darren Wilson had been alerted by a police call that Michael Brown and his buddy were wanted for swiping cigars from a local convenience store and roughing up the store’s clerk. But the description apparently only mentioned that one of the two thugs – Michael Brown, as we came to learn – was wearing a red baseball cap and yellow socks.

What if he had tossed the cap and changed his socks? Would he still be running loose? In Ferguson, is it against police policy to mention that a perp happens to be black or that he tips the scales at 320 pounds?

Understand, I’ve never worked in law enforcement, but I can only imagine that it would make it a lot easier to find a needle in the haystack if you knew the needle was as big as a Volkswagen.