It is essential to the Democrats’ hopes for a strong black turnout in November that the manufactured narrative of evil white cops assassinating an innocent black teenager be maintained.  As Richard Baehr noted to me, “…after the video appeared of the robbery and theft, a new narrative was needed for Michael Brown. It is not only the robbery/ assault/in the store, but the reports of violence to the officer (damaged eye socket), and admission by Brown's team that he was in an altercation with officer in the car, that has impacted public opinion that he was a choirboy.”

The New York Times, the semi-official Democratic Party organ, stepped up and does the job today, with this article by John Eligon:

Michael Brown Spent Last Weeks Grappling With Problems and Promise

 FERGUSON, Mo. — It was 1 a.m. and Michael Brown Jr. called his father, his voice trembling. He had seen something overpowering. In the thick gray clouds that lingered from a passing storm this past June, he made out an angel. And he saw Satan chasing the angel and the angel running into the face of God. Mr. Brown was a prankster, so his father and stepmother chuckled at first.

“No, no, Dad! No!” the elder Mr. Brown remembered his son protesting. “I’m serious.”

And the black teenager from this suburb of St. Louis, who had just graduated from high school, sent his father and stepmother a picture of the sky from his cellphone. “Now I believe,” he told them.

As Rich Baehr commented: “Who knew Michael Brown was a man of the cloth?”

To be fair, the Times story does admit his faults:

Michael Brown, 18, due to be buried on Monday, was no angel, with public records and interviews with friends and family revealing both problems and promise in his young life. Shortly before his encounter with Officer Wilson, the police say he was caught on a security camera stealing a box of cigars, pushing the clerk of a convenience store into a display case. He lived in a community that had rough patches, and he dabbled in drugs and alcohol. He had taken to rapping in recent months, producing lyrics that were by turns contemplative and vulgar. He got into at least one scuffle with a neighbor.

But as Baehr, notes, it is supremely ironic that that a paper which sees little value in organized religion, Christianity in particular, seeks to use a pull toward religion as a mitigating factor in the life of a thug (my term, not his).