The teaser to an article in The Atlantic in 2015 by Ta-Nehisi Coates asserts that “the United States needs more than a good president to erase centuries of violence.”
That may well be true, but it’s not a proposition that’s yet been tested. This is lost on Coates and his ilk, who think the sun rises and sets on Barack Obama. But the simple reality is that the promise of a post-racial America that some saw in his election in 2008 never came to pass. If anything, the U.S. is more divided today on the subject of race than it was when our first black (technically half-black, though he completely discounts his white heritage) president took the oath of office for the first time.
As Larry O’Connor observed today at Hot Air, Obama has made a cottage industry out of racial division through us-vs.-them comments like “The police acted stupidly” (uttered before he knew the circumstances of the arrest of his buddy Skip Gates by Cambridge, Mass. police) and “If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon.” What he was attempting to communicate with this second remark remains a mystery to this day.
Will this presidential election be the most important in American history?
But when it comes to the issue of Black Lives Matter, which Obama is now attempting to sell falsely as another civil rights movement, the president really goes off the deep end. He ignores entirely the many fictions that gave rise to this movement (think “Hands up, don’t shoot”) and the violent chants that have come out of its protests (“What do we want? Dead cops” and “Pigs in a blanket. Fry ’em like bacon”).
One of the best analyses of the how far off the mark Obama strays in his attempts to promote Black Lives Matter was delivered on Fox News Channel’s “Special Report with Bret Baier” last night by the show’s former host, Brit Hume. Here is the video. The transcript follows:
In Dallas, Tuesday, President Obama will be trying to calm racial tensions that his own behavior has done much to aggravate. From his denunciation of the Cambridge, Massachusetts, police as acting, quote, stupidly in the arrest of law professor Henry Louis Gates, to his assertion that the motives of the Dallas cop killer are unclear, they aren’t.
The president has consistently chosen to see things through the eyes of an aggrieved black activist rather than of a president of all the people. He’s not failed to speak out whenever a black is killed by a white police officer, but has said next to nothing about the continued slaughters of blacks by other blacks in the streets of Chicago, Baltimore, and other cities.
He has made his sympathy for the Black Lives Matter movement obvious and never mind that the whole premise of the movement seems to be fallacious. No case has given the movement more impetus than the false claim that Michael Brown was shot down in cold blood while trying to surrender to a cop in Ferguson, Missouri two years ago.
And now a study led by a black Harvard law professor has examined 15 years of crime data from 5 major cities and 2 counties. The study found that while police were more often likely to get physical with black suspects than with white ones, when it came to police shootings, there was no racial bias. Did you hear that, Mr. President? No racial bias.
