AP Photo/Eric Gay
On Tuesday, President Obama descended on Dallas to hijack the memorial service for five slain police officers. He’d planned to do this for days – his White House stated in advance that Obama would get political.
But for the first few minutes of Obama’s address, it appeared that he might take stock of the moment and hold himself back.
Then it all collapsed.
Here are the seven worst moments of his latest opportunistic, highly political, egregiously inappropriate address:
1. Equating The Murders of The Dallas Police Officers With The Killings of Alton Sterling And Philando Castile. This is a trap into which the left has fallen consistently this week. It’s lazy thinking, and more importantly, it’s morally repugnant. The police officers murdered in Dallas were targeted because of their race. We know that for a fact. That is not speculation. They were targeted because they were white. We know virtually nothing about the Alton Sterling and Philando Castile cases. The police allege that Sterling resisted arrest and reached for a gun he was carrying illegally. We have no evidence yet as to what happened with Philando Castile, but there iscertainly no evidence that it was a racially-motivated shooting. Nonetheless, Obama said, “I see people who mourn for the five officers we lost, but also weep for the families of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile. In this audience, I see what’s possible.” Not all killings are equal. But to Obama, targeted killing of whites is equivalent to police killing blacks in disputed circumstances.
2. Suggesting That Today’s Police Departments Are Still Rife With The Legacies of Slavery And Jim Crow. The year is now 2016. Arrest statistics match up precisely with crime report statistics. There is no evidence of systemic discrimination against minorities. But that didn’t stop Obama from stating, “We also know that centuries of racial discrimination, of slavery, and subjugation, and Jim Crow; they didn’t simply vanish with the law against segregation…we know that bias remains. We know it, whether you are black, or white, or Hispanic, or Asian, or native American, or of Middle Eastern descent, we have all seen this bigotry in our own lives at some point. We’ve heard it at times in our own homes….No institution is entirely immune, and that includes our police departments. We know this.” Remember, Obama isn’t just wrong here – he’s saying this in front of the families of officers killed by a black anti-cop, anti-white racist. Despicable.
3. Reeling Off Meaningless Statistics To Indict Police. Obama’s favorite game is to pretend that minorities are unfairly targeted by police, without citing higher rates of criminal activity among minorities. Here was Obama today – again, at a memorial service for fallen officers: “if you’re black, you’re more likely to be pulled over or searched or arrested; more likely to get longer sentences; more likely to get the death penalty for the same crime.” Actually, studies show that blacks speed more often; have longer rap sheets and therefore are imprisoned for longer; and areunderprosecuted for murder thanks to lack of police resources in high crime communities.
4. Defending The Black Lives Matter Agenda. Dallas police officers were defending protesters – some of whom were mocking them – as a black anti-white racist shot at them. That didn’t stop Obama from backing the protesters’ agenda, without evidence. “When all this takes place, more than 50 years after the passage of the Civil Rights Act, we cannot simply turn away and dismiss those in peaceful protest as troublemakers or paranoid,” Obama said. “We can’t simply dismiss it as a symptom of political correctness or reverse racism. To have your experience denied like that, dismissed by those in authority, dismissed perhaps even by your white friends and coworkers and fellow church members, again and again and again, it hurts. Surely we can see that, all of us.” Odd. President Obama dismissed anyone who said he was lying about Obamacare as a kook; he called Tea Partiers terrorists. He’s happy to deny the experiences of people who actually know what’s going on in government, but he insists we legitimize the feelings of people who ascribe nasty motives to the cops without evidence beyond the anecdotal.
5. Pushing Government Spending. Obama stumped for more government cash, of course – but not on cops. On social programs that have failed for generations: “As a society, we choose to under-invest in decent schools. We allow poverty to fester so that entire neighborhoods offer no prospect for gainful employment.” We don’t “allow” poverty to fester – unless the “we” is Obama Democrats who refuse to fund the cops properly so that they can establish law and order in high crime areas, allowing for investment.
6. Pushing Gun Control. Obama dropped this whopper: “We flood communities with so many guns that it is easier for a teenager to buy a Glock than get his hands on a computer or even a book.” As I wrote today, you have to have been dropped on your head as a small child to believe this.
6. Pushing Gun Control. Obama dropped this whopper: “We flood communities with so many guns that it is easier for a teenager to buy a Glock than get his hands on a computer or even a book.” As I wrote today, you have to have been dropped on your head as a small child to believe this.
7. Ignoring Solutions. This was the key point: Obama thinks that solutions are secondary to talking about feelings. He believes he’s the national psychiatrist. “In the end, it’s not about finding policies that work. It’s about forging consensus and fighting cynicism and finding the will to make change.” This is perhaps the most concise summary of Democratic nincompoopery ever spoken. It isn’t government’s job to heal your soul. It’s government’s job to solve problems like crime. But Obama doesn’t care about that. He thinks he’s a soul-healer, and that government is the Great God-Being that can save us all, so long as we open our hearts to it.
Obama is a petty politician. And he used an important stage to air his petty politics. That’s despicable. And it’s tragic, too, because he’s a politician of unique rhetorical capacity. There were sections of his speech in Dallas that were quite beautiful. But he let his leftism swamp his better judgment, and the result was a moral turd sandwich.
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