The view is that of Ben Rhodes, who served as Barack Obama’s deputy national security advisor for strategic communications. He expressed it in reaction to Pres. Donald Trump’s pardon of Sheriff Joe Arpaio. Other deep thinkers who have weighed in on the pardon include rising Democratic star Kamala Harris, who observed that Arpaio should not be pardoned because he was convicted of a crime. She must have played hooky from law school the day they taught the concept of presidential pardon.
Back to Rhodes, whose tweet follows:
Obama used his pardon and commutation power to give a second chance to people who deserved empathy, not racists who showed none. https://t.co/KXhBQk5MHu
— Ben Rhodes (@brhodes) August 26, 2017
Will this presidential election be the most important in American history?
Let’s have a look at some of the people “who deserved empathy” and were thus pardoned by Obama. There isn’t room in a normal-length blog post to list them all since Obama commuted 1,176 sentences during his time in office, 395 of them upstanding individuals who were doing life. He also set a record on Dec. 19, 2016 by granting clemency to 231 individuals in a single day.
Among his more noteworthy pardons was that of Oscar López Rivera, a Chicago community organizer turned FALN terrorist convicted of “seditious conspiracy” in 1981. If anything positive could be said for López Rivera it is, according to a 1980 Chicago Tribune editorial, that the bombs he placed were aimed at damaging “property rather than persons.”
The fact that Rhodes was able to compose his tweet with a straight face is a testament to how morally bankrupt and confused those on the far-Left truly are.
