Having spent a good portion of my life punching the happy-hour clock at dive bars and brew pubs and associating with drunken derelicts and derelict drunks, I’ve run into a fair amount of people who’ve gotten pulled over for drunken driving and slapped with a well-deserved DUI. Some of those folks have been my friends. All of them have been assholes.

One thing that I’ve learned about these lawbreakers is that almost to a man their stories are the exact same: they had two drinks at a bar, an officer pulled them over for some bullshit reason like a broken taillight, and that measly two drinks caused them to blow a .15. Sometimes mouthwash is to blame and sometimes it’s because they downed that final drink just before hopping in their car, but usually it’s just the mischievous work of breathalyzer gremlins.

Now, the key component of this tale of woe comes down to the two drinks. The number is always the exact same.

See, these assholes know that we know that nobody goes to a bar and has just one drink. It doesn’t happen.

And they know that we know that if you drink three drinks back to back, well, you begin to feel it.

So, they always say that they only had two drinks and then they stopped drinking.

Dishonest dillweed douchebags.

Which brings me Charleston County Sheriff Al Cannon. See, I’ve got the sneakiest suspicion that Sheriff Al ain’t being all that honest when it comes to down to his actions during the Jan. 30 arrest of Timothy McManus.

As you know, McManus allegedly led officers on a high speed chase before the cops ran him down, let a dog chew his arm, and otherwise beat the shit out of him. Now, all of that makes for great video, but it doesn’t make for a conviction. At the very least, McManus will pocket a nice hunk of change once all of this is said and done.

Well, in the days before the video of arrest surfaced, Cannon let it be know that he “slapped” McManus.

Ha.

Little girls slap.

Pimps bitch slap.

And teenage boys slap the salami.

But grown men — and tough guy cops at that — they don’t slap. They punch. Hard. Like right in your fucking belly. The kind of punch that knocks the wind right out of you.

So consider me skeptical of Cannon’s claims that he only “slapped” McManus. It’s not like that slap was captured on video, so it’s pretty much impossible to dispute the sheriff’s claims.

Well, now there are two competing petitions out there — one asking for Cannon’s removal, the other asking that the sheriff keep his job. Both are meaningless time-wasters that create the false impression among the signers that they are actually fucking doing something for a change.

Now, I’m not defending McManus. Or drunk drivers. They deserve to get salami slapped in the mouth and it all should be done on camera and uploaded to YouTube. That’s a video I’d really like to see.

But it’s not the place of law enforcement to administer this kind of punishment, as much as they might want to and no matter how hot-tempered the heat of the moment gets. Nope. That kind of hardcore punishment is up to the courts. Law enforcement needs to refrain from slapping or be prepared to get slapped by a civil suit in return.

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