Yesterday during a segment on Donald Trump’s “responsibility” for the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting on Fox New Channel’s “The Five,” host Jesse Watters argued that when police officers were shot during former President Barack Obama’s tenure, “no one blamed Barack Obama for his anti-police rhetoric.”
At one point Watters observed that when police were massacred in New York City and Texas, “no one blamed Barack Obama for his anti-police rhetoric, or supporting Black Lives Matter”:
No one linked him to that. No one said his rhetoric contributed to an atmosphere where cops were killed. We were all very prudent and responsible.
The words were scarcely out of Watters’s mouth before co-host Juan Williams snickered at their absurdity. “Jesse, you’re a good guy,” he responded patronizingly. “That’s not analogous. That’s not right. It’s not the same as him saying ‘I think there’s a problem with police abuse in this country.'”
Will this presidential election be the most important in American history?
Would that it were that simple. Since Obama left office, the number of police shootings has dwindled, though police have now become the enemy of all of the radical Left, as the sign held by this Antifa demonstrator reminds us:
But during Obama’s time in office, ambushing police became a sport of sorts among angry blacks. The aforementioned execution-style murders of police in Dallas and New York were just the tip of the iceberg. Headlines carrying horrific announcements like “Surge: 4 cops shot in 24 hrs in incidents across country; 3 considered targeted killings” were anything but rare.
No, Barack Obama never pulled the trigger in any of these shootings, but if words could kill, his did. As Heather MacDonald of the Manhattan Institute wrote the after assassination of three police officers in Baton Rouge:
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.
“Peaceful” protest!
And how did the mainstream media handle the police shootings? LU’s own Jerome provides a stroll down memory lane:
Obama’s allies are helping fuel the black rage behind recent murders of policemen in Dallas and Baton Rouge. As the Daily Caller reported, Zack Ford, an editor at the progressive website ThinkProgress, responded to the Baton Rouge cop massacre Sunday by saying black people were “taking justice into their own hands.” Three Baton Rouge cops were murdered by Gavin Long, a member of the anti-white Nation of Islam who viewed police as racist killers. Ford declared that “Given how police haven’t been held accountable for murdering black people, it’s no surprise some are taking justice into their own hands.” Never mind that one of the three officers slain, Montrell Jackson, was black. ThinkProgress is the voice of the Center for American Progress, which is a close ally of the Obama administration, and has been aptly described as “Obama’s Idea Factory” by Time magazine. Ford was doubtless saying what many in the White House think but would never be so foolish as to say openly.
So if Trump speaks of the migrant caravan as a problem facing the nation, he is a racist and bears direct responsibility for an anti-Semite who bursts into a synagogue with guns blazing because “Jews support the caravan.” But if a black sniper egged on by incendiary rhetoric of a black president opens fire on Dallas police officers, he is acting in the name of justice.
