Barack Obama is getting police officers killed. He is doing it recklessly and irresponsibly. No, he is not the one pulling the trigger. But as president of the United States - an office whose power and prestige he has never understood and certainly not respected the need to wield carefully - he is giving legitimacy to the narrative that police officers, not just a few individual bad apples but on a systemic basis, are out there looking to kill black people.
He is doing all this, by the way, as part of an ideological pursuit. Obama hates the idea of local police with local autonomy. He thinks all law enforcement should be under the direction of the U.S. Department of Justice - the same people who just let Hillary off the hook. And the tarring of local cops as racist monsters is part of how he hopes to build support for that idea.
President Obama, speaking in Warsaw ahead of a NATO summit, called for greater urgency on police reform as he added his voice to the national outrage over fatal police shootings.
“What I can say is that all of us as Americans should be troubled by these shootings because these are not isolated incidents,” he said. “They’re symptomatic of a broader set racial disparities that exist in our criminal justice system.”
Obama praised the Justice Department for opening a federal civil rights investigation into Sterling’s death and noted that Minnesota’s governor has called for a federal investigation in that case.
“When people say black lives matter, it does not mean blue lives don’t matter. All lives matter,” he said. “But the big concern is that the data shows that black folks are more vulnerable to these kinds of incidents. This isn’t a matter of us comparing the value of lives, this is recognizing that there is a particular burden is being placed on a group of our fellow citizens and we should care about that. We can’t dismiss it.”
So what exactly does Obama mean by "police reform"? We have this thing called the Constitution that sets limits on what the police can do. We also have these things called state and local laws that establish the parameters of what the police enforce and how they do it. If a police officer shoots someone in violation of policy, or violates a person's civil rights, there are already procedures in place to deal with that. There is nothing the federal government needs to do to augment these procedures. When Beltway politicians stick their noses in local matters, what they usually do is sow confusion (see Ferguson and Baltimore just for two examples) rather than a sober understanding of the incident that waits for all the facts to come in.
And by the way, these are isolated incidents. The fact that you can name the recent ones off the top of your head in a few seconds - when you consider the hundreds of thousands of interactions between police and citizens on a daily basis - demonstrates exactly how isolated these incidents are. Our system of local policing works well for the overwhelming majority of people, and we certainly do not need Obama exploiting the current media-driven hysteria to swoop in with federal authority to change it.
But back to Obama's culpability in the Dallas shootings: It's very much akin to what I said the other day about the media's culpability. When a cop makes a mistake and shoots someone who didn't need to be shot, that is a horrible tragedy. But turning it into a national narrative about racist cops is a monstrously dishonest and wrong thing to do. Not only does it unjustly tar an entire profession of generally good and valiant people, it also feeds the rage of people like the maniac in Dallas who decided to go ahead and take some of these racist monsters out.
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The cops who lost their lives in Dallas were not what this guy thought they were. But he didn't get these ideas by himself. He got them from jackholes like your favorite media moralizer . . . and like Barack Obama.
Obama can claim to disapprove of the killings all he wants. It doesn't change the fact that he helped supply the killer with the rationale for his actions. This whole bogus narrative about racist cops is getting cops killed, and Obama of all people is complicit because he should be the one sticking up for America's law enforcement officers and destroying this false narrative. Instead, he's its biggest perpetrator.
Your president, America. Maybe this time you'll choose more wisely.
Barack Obama is getting police officers killed. He is doing it recklessly and irresponsibly. No, he is not the one pulling the trigger. But as president of the United States - an office whose power and prestige he has never understood and certainly not respected the need to wield carefully - he is giving legitimacy to the narrative that police officers, not just a few individual bad apples but on a systemic basis, are out there looking to kill black people.
He is doing all this, by the way, as part of an ideological pursuit. Obama hates the idea of local police with local autonomy. He thinks all law enforcement should be under the direction of the U.S. Department of Justice - the same people who just let Hillary off the hook. And the tarring of local cops as racist monsters is part of how he hopes to build support for that idea.
