By continuing to cast aspersions on police in general even as they're being gunned down, Obama fans the flames of this madness and gets blood on his own hands
Obama's legacy: Dead cops
I do not make this statement lightly. I thought about it a lot. I used to roll my eyes at liberals who blamed Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush for everything under the sun - including things that clearly had nothing to do with them. I don't want to behave in the same silly way now just because we have a liberal president and my political bias makes me want to hang something bad on him.
But Barack Obama's behavior with respect to the recent police shootings has been so disgraceful, I simply cannot in good conscience spare him from the admonishment he has so clearly earned. We now have angry cop-killers taking to the streets in multiple cities and gunning down police officers because they've bought into the lie that cops are targeting black people simply out of racial animus. And Obama is one of the people telling this lie.
He did it again last week in Dallas, even at the memorial service of one of these very murdered officers. I would say he can't help himself, but it's not that he can't. It's that he doesn't want to, so
he says things like this:
“We have all seen this bigotry in our lives at some point,” Mr. Obama told an audience of about 2,500 at a concert hall in Dallas. “None of us is entirely innocent. No institution is entirely immune. And that includes our police departments. We know this."
The officers — Michael Smith, Lorne Ahrens, Michael Krol, Brent Thompson and Patrick Zamarripa — were killed during a Black Lives Matter protest Thursday night by a black sniper who told police he targeted white officers.
At the interfaith service, photographs of the slain officers were displayed on the stage. Five empty seats in the arena were adorned with folded U.S. flags and duty officer hats to signify their loss.
The president, who has been criticized by law enforcement officials for supporting the Black Lives Matter movement, doubled down on that theme in front of the slain officers’ colleagues and families, saying Americans “cannot simply turn away and dismiss those in peaceful protest as troublemakers or paranoid."
"We can’t simply dismiss it as a symptom of political correctness or reverse racism,” he said. “We also know that centuries of racial discrimination, of slavery and subjugation and Jim Crow, they didn’t simply vanish with the end of lawful segregation.”
What could possibly be the point of making such a statement at the funeral of a murdered police officer, if not to lend credibility to the disgusting notion that police officers in some way bring their murders on themselves by being part of racists institutions that target blacks just because they are black?
For one thing, if Obama did his homework at all, he would know that what appears to be an explosion of killings-by-police is actually just an explosion of media hype on the rare occasions when it happens, often without any of the context that would help people explain why a certain thing happened. A responsible president would urge people to wait for the facts and recognize that even though they can make mistakes, police officers have dangerous, difficult and crucially important job such that they do not deserve to be painted with a broad brush as a bunch of racists.
Instead, Obama wields the brush. He'll show up after the fact - as he did in Dallas and did again on Sunday in Baton Rouge - and condemn the killings. But he won't condemn the notion that racist cops are on the rampage. He feeds it, constantly, even telling an overseas audience last week that the United States needs "police reform."
This is nothing new, either. During his very first year in office, he was mouthing off about police "acting stupidly" in a situation he knew absolutely nothing about. He mouthed off again in 2014 after the Michael Brown shooting in Ferguson, Missouri - again suggesting police had used excessive force without knowing the facts, and ending up being proven completely wrong. He also rightly drew a rebuke from the Fraternal Order of Police at the time for his careless statements.
Of all the terrible legacies of the Obama presidency, this is the worst
I'm sure Obama did not make these statements with the intention of inspiring a killer to murder cops. He made them because they reflect his left-wing worldview and because he is generally an irresponsible person who neither appreciates nor much cares about the impact of his words given his position. But once the shootings started, he should have knocked it off entirely. Yet there he was again in Dallas, doubling down on the same anti-police themes even as the families of the slain police officers were mourning their loved ones.
Today it is open season on police, and it is just about a weekly occurrence that we hear about yet another piece of garbage taking down officers. Everyone who has helped to create this environment has blood on their hands. That certainly includes the news media, who play up every incident by going straight to the racial angle regardless of whether it rightfully applies, implying again and again that the police are out to kill blacks. And it also includes the president of the United States, who should have the cops' backs, but in fact does exactly the opposite.
Of all the terrible legacies of the Obama presidency, this is the worst.
Dan Calabrese -- Bio and
Archives |
Comments
Dan Calabrese’s column is distributed by HermanCain.com, which can be found at HermanCain
Follow all of Dan’s work, including his series of Christian spiritual warfare novels, by liking his page on Facebook.
