Five police officers were slaughtered by a racist black militant at a Black Lives Matter rally in Dallas last Thursday, so President Tee-Time had to take time off from golfing, SportsCenter and fundraising to give a speech at the memorial for the fallen officers. By all accounts, it started off well — at least as well as any speech this Community Organizer-in-Chief can be expected to deliver.
Circumstances forced Obama to say nice things about a group of Americans he would rather have criticized.
“For 15 minutes, the president’s speech was — and this is a word I use advisedly — magnificent,” said John Podhoretz in the New York Post. “It was elevated and powerful and profoundly moving.”
Having lulled his audience into a false sense of unity, Obama then swerved into the divisive, hyperpartisan political rhetoric he is known for. Most people wouldn’t have been able to pull it off. The jobs of the officers in attendance have become more difficult and dangerous thanks in large part to this president’s own disgraceful racial demagoguery. But Obama’s race card never seems to expire and he always gets a special pass.
During the memorial, the “Consoler-in Chief” felt the need to equate the murders of the five Dallas police officers with the killings of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile. However, the cases are not at all alike. The hero cops were targeted for slaughter by a racist madman because they were white. The Sterling and Castile cases involved officers who, during the commission of their duties, confronted men armed with guns and the confrontations ended violently. Those cases are still being investigated, so it is premature, irresponsible and grossly unfair to already claim that the shootings were unjust or racially motivated.
Unable to restrain himself, the president also showcased his gross misunderstanding of crime statistics: “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,” Obama intoned.
Keep in mind that the president unpacked this nonsense at a memorial service for fallen officers — not at a campaign rally or on a debate stage. No one had the opportunity to offer a counterpoint, nor would they have wanted to. This was a memorial service. But in another setting they might have informed the president that studies show that high crime rates — not racial profiling — drive patrol patterns. There is no evidence that black murderers serve longer prison terms than comparable white murderers, and virtually all reliable research on capital punishment finds that the death penalty does not discriminate against blacks.
Obama’s politicization of a memorial service would probably not have been accepted as recently as fifteen years ago. In 2002, when Senator Paul Wellstone (D-MN) died, and Democrats turned his memorial service into a political pep rally, Americans of all political persuasions recoiled in horror.
Democrats in recent years have worked hard to turn innocuous, non-political events and holidays into propaganda opportunities. Every Thanksgiving and Christmas we see a flurry of stories about Democrats trying to ruin the holidays with preachy talking points about gun control, ObamaCare, climate change, or what have you. Their hyperpolitical efforts have become expected.
But Obama’s hijacking of the Dallas Police memorial took the cake. He used it as an opportunity to preach to his audience of cops about the “legacy of slavery” still plaguing police departments all across the nation. As Podhoretz noted, Obama as usual “made strange use of the word ‘we,’ because when he says ‘we,’ he means ‘you,’ and when he means ‘you,’ he means people who aren’t as enlightened and thoughtful as he and his ideological compatriots are.”
“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,” Obama lectured.
Of course, any Obama address after a mass shooting wouldn’t be complete without an attack on the 2nd Amendment. His absurd assertion that it’s easier for a poor kid in a struggling neighborhood to get a Glock than it is to get a book was the sort of nonsense you might find on the Democratic Underground or Daily Kos.
But as bad as that was, for me personally, the most galling moment came when the president decided to defend Black Lives Matter.
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. 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.
Shut up, Obama. I’ll dismiss whatever I want.
Does anyone remember how this alleged “unifier” roundly mocked the grassroots and genuinely peaceful tea party when it bubbled up in 2009 to protest the stimulus bill and the bailouts? The tea party wasn’t “mostly peaceful.” It was 100% peaceful. I say this as someone who attended many tea parties from 2009 – 2012, including one of the first in the nation on February 28, 2009, in Kansas City, Missouri. During a snow storm.
“Those of you who are watching certain news channels on which I’m not very popular, and you see folks waving tea bags around,” the thin-skinned president said in April of 2009. “Let me just remind them that I am happy to have a serious conversation about how we are going to cut our health care costs down over the long term, how we are going to stabilize Social Security.”
No one was “waving teabags around.” We were trying to have a serious conversation about the president’s ruinous spending plans. Seven years and six trillion dollars in debt later, we have Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen seriously considering negative interest rates. Health care costs after ObamaCare have skyrocketed just as we predicted they would, and Obama’s never had a “serious conversation” about Social Security. President Bush is the one who tried to reform Social Security in 2005, but his efforts were blocked by Democrats.
During an interview in November of 2009, Obama disdainfully referred to tea partiers as “teabaggers.” In April of 2010 he mocked tea partiers again:
“I have been amused a little over the past couple of days where people have been having these rallies about taxes,” Obama said. “You would think they would be saying ‘thank you.’ That’s what you’d think,” Obama said, speaking to about 1,000 Democratic donors in Miami, at a fundraiser for the Democratic National Committee.
Obama cited tax cuts in the $787 billion stimulus plan of a year ago as one reason that Americans who think taxes are too high should be grateful to him.
Beginning in 2010, the president, in speech after speech, called out the tea party group Americans for Prosperity by name.
“Right now, all around this country there are groups with harmless-sounding names like Americans for Prosperity who are running millions of dollars of ads against Democratic candidates all across the country,” Obama said at a DNC fundraiser in Austin, Texas. “And they don’t have to say who exactly the Americans for Prosperity are. You don’t know if it’s a foreign-controlled corporation. You don’t know if it’s a big oil company, or a big bank. You don’t know if it’s a insurance company that wants to see some of the provisions in health reform repealed because it’s good for their bottom line, even if it’s not good for the American people.”
On September 28, 2010, Obama said: “You’ve all seen the ads. Every one of these groups is run by Republican operatives. Every single one of them — even though they’re posing as nonprofit groups with names like Americans for Prosperity, or the Committee for Truth in Politics, or Americans for Apple Pie. (Laughter.) I made that last one up. (Laughter).”
He repeated the “I made that last one up” line over and over again — for various made-up names designed to mock conservatives, like “Americans for Apple Pie” and “Moms for Motherhood.”
Starting in 2010, upon the direction of its headquarters in Washington, D.C., the IRS began targeting tea party groups seeking tax-exempt status.
IRS purposely stonewalled the approval of non-profit applications from Tea Party and other conservative groups seeking tax exempt status between 2010 and 2012. We know the IRS used a “be-on-the-lookout” (BOLO) list of terms which would trigger applications to be flagged for extra scrutiny.
The mocking of grassroots conservative groups morphed into full-blown persecution that lasted for years. To this day, no one has been held accountable.
And now he asks us to embrace Black Lives Matter???
2010 Obama warns Americans to turn away from “shadowy groups” like Americans for Prosperity because they are “not good for the American people.” Then he sics the IRS on them.
2016 Obama tells America not to “turn away and dismiss those in peaceful protest as troublemakers or paranoid” — meaning Black Lives Matter — a movement that has become known for violent protests and radical, anti-police rhetoric.
An anonymous police officer summed up his outrage very well at the pro-cop website Blue Lives Matter:
The fact that he even uttered the words “Black Lives Matter” at a memorial service for 5 Police Officers, murdered because of their race and their profession, by an angry racist black man is absolutely disgusting. In doing so, he gives a movement founded on lies that has constantly incited hatred, violence, division and racism more cause to continue as if they have done nothing wrong. I will say it now and I will say it again, everything about the Black Lives Matter movement is wrong. They are a group funded by politicians, ill intentioned business owners, and celebrities who want nothing more than to see this false narrative further divide our nation.
How about we be about as respectful of Black Lives Matter as the president was of the tea party. Sound fair?
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