The further to the left or the right you move, the more your lens on life distorts.

Monday, July 18, 2016

Empty

Hillary Clinton has implied (rather strongly, I might add) that she will continue the Obama legacy. One notable element of that legacy is an eight year history of disintegrating race relations, culminating with direct assassination attempts by black activists on police officers in New York, and more recently in Dallas (5 killed) and Baton Rouge (3 killed). This has been driven a series of killings of black men by police officers—each investigated in excruciating detail and then referred to the criminal justice system if the officers did wrong. But the violence is also driven by the narrative that "racist" police are targeting and killing black men without reason. The narrative is being promulgated by Black Lives Matter (BLM) agitators, the far-left in general and some claim, subtly supported by Barack Obama. Their trained media hamsters follow in lock-step.

BLM and the far-left aren't at all subtle, suggesting directly that "racist" cops should be "killed." At least a few of their deranged followers have taken that call seriously, killing cops in Dallas and Baton Rouge. Barack Obama, of course, is far more subtle, condemning the sniper attacks that kill cops, but at the same time, providing support for the notion that the nation's cops are out to target and kill black men.

Heather McDonald has done substantial research of crime statistics, cop killings and cop murders. She writes:
... this most recent assault on law and order [in Baton Rouge], taking the lives of three officers and wounding at least three more, is the direct outcome of the political and media frenzy that followed the police shootings of Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge and Philando Castile in Falcon Heights, Minnesota, less than two weeks ago. That frenzy further amplified the dangerously false narrative that racist police officers are the greatest threat facing young black men today.

President Barack Obama bears direct responsibility for the lethal spread of that narrative. In a speech from Poland just hours before five officers were assassinated in Dallas on July 7, Obama misled the nation about policing and race, charging officers nationwide with preying on blacks because of the color of their skin. Obama rolled out a litany of junk statistics to prove that the criminal justice system is racist. Blacks were arrested at twice the rate of whites, he complained, and get sentences almost 10 percent longer than whites for the same crime. Missing from Obama’s address was any mention of the massive racial differences in criminal offending and criminal records that fully account for arrest rates and sentence lengths. (Blacks, for example, commit homicide at eight times the rate of whites and Hispanics combined, and at about 11 to 12 times the rate of whites alone.) Instead, Obama chalked up the disparities to “biases, some conscious and unconscious that have to be rooted out . . . across our criminal justice system.”

Then five Dallas officers were gunned down out of race hatred and cop hatred. Did Obama shelve his incendiary rhetoric and express his unqualified support for law enforcement? No, he doubled down, insulting law enforcement yet again even as it was grieving for its fallen comrades. In a memorial service for the Dallas officers, Obama rebuked all of America for its “bigotry,” but paid special attention to alleged police bigotry:
When African-Americans from all walks of life, from different communities across the country, voice a growing despair over what they perceive to be unequal treatment, when study after study shows that whites and people of color experience the criminal justice system differently. So that 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. When mothers and fathers raised their kids right, and have the talk about how to respond if stopped by a police officer—yes, sir; no, sir—but still fear that something terrible may happen when their child walks out the door; still fear that kids being stupid and not quite doing things right might end in tragedy.

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.
The irresponsible zealotry of this rebuke was stunning. Obama was fully on notice that the hatred of cops was reaching homicidal levels. And yet his commitment to prosecuting his crusade against phantom police racism trumped considerations of prudence and safety, on the one hand, and decent respect for the fallen, on the other.
As I noted in a recent blog post, in 2008 and the years that followed, Barack Obama had a very real opportunity to speak directly to the African American community in the United States, to encourage them to jettison a victims' ideology and turn inward to improve their culture and communities. He chose to encourage the victim's ideology for political gain. Sad.

And now Obama's likely successor, Hillary Clinton, tells us that she'll continue what Obama has "accomplished." Sure, over the coming months she'll try to thread the needle by "bringing the full weight of the criminal justice system" down on those who kill cops, but also those cops who kill blacks (apparently, regardless of the circumstances). Of course, Hillary lies about virtually everything, so her words are empty.