Obama blames America first for bad cop incident in Minneapolis
Just as race riots lay waste to Minneapolis and cities well beyond, out comes the baleful presence of Barack Obama, to hector the nation that elected him that it's full of racism.
Here's his blame-America-first statement, via NPR:
It's natural to wish for life "to just get back to normal" as a pandemic and economic crisis upend everything around us. But we have to remember that for millions of Americans, being treated differently on account of race is tragically, painfully, maddeningly "normal" — whether it's while dealing with the health care system, or interacting with the criminal justice system, or jogging down the street, or just watching birds in a park.
This shouldn't be "normal" in 2020 America. It can't be "normal." If we want our children to grow up in a nation that lives up to its highest ideals, we can and must be better.
It will fall mainly on the officials of Minnesota to ensure that the circumstances surrounding George Floyd's death are investigated thoroughly and that justice is ultimately done. But it falls on all of us, regardless of our race or station — including the majority of men and women in law enforcement who take pride in doing their tough job the right way, every day — to work together to create a "new normal" in which the legacy of bigotry and unequal treatment no longer infects our institutions or our hearts.
Which is pretty obnoxious, given all those 'racists' who elected him twice in 2008 and 2012. Naturally, he socializes the blame: "We can and must be better."
What the heck is he talking about? Who is this 'we' you speak of, Kemosabe? This is no case of collective guilt, this is a heckuva bad cop with 18 previous complaints employed in a solid-blue city, who finally killed someone.
Every last person who saw the police brutality video from Minneapolis condemned it with unparalleled ferocity. President Trump blasted it. Fox News's Hannity excoriated it. Trump launched a civil rights investigation within hours of the news of the matter. Everyone is against what happened. The cop who did that heinous act, putting the weight of his knee on an unarmed, unresisting black suspect's neck as he cried for help, killing him, has absolutely no defenders. None. Firing and arresting the guy for murder came pretty quickly. There's no debate about whether that's exactly what should have been done, and done a long time ago. He pretty obviously commited a crime and the entire country wants him punished. That's a national consensus.
If there's any collective subcategory of guilt, look to the solid-blue one-party city of Minneapolis which protected the miscreant, again and again, through the very public employee unions Obama champions.
In that kind of an atmosphere, only leftwingery counts. The police officer in question had 18 complaints against him and a powerful police union defending him. Characters like this can't be fired, because public employee unions are always going to defend them. And not surprisingly, far-left philosopher Cornell West, who's one of Obama's stated heroes, says that Obama's the problem, laying the blame for the Minneapolis situation on Obama's failures. "Black faces in high places" didn't deliver, he opined, before spinning off into a call for more socialism.
Then he socializes the guilt again - we're all guilty, see:
to work together to create a "new normal" in which the legacy of bigotry and unequal treatment no longer infects our institutions or our hearts.
Listen up, bub: It was one guy and three craven workmates who stood around while it happened. We don't even know the motive in this - was it racism? It appears to be that, but there was also the issue of both the cop and the victim working at the same nightclub in security -- for years. It may well have been a workplace dispute, with the bad cop using the color of state to kill his victim for other reasons. We don't know just yet, which is why Obama's claim about 'bigotry' that 'infects' our 'hearts' is so disgusting.
Work together? That sounds like a call for more consultants and diversity officers from college grads with otherwise unemployable majors, ordering institutions around and declaring them guilty, with a dangled offer of redemption so long as 'summer jobs' are on the table. Been there, done that. Tom Wolfe wrote about it in the '60s - six decades ago.
Here's another revolting element of Obama's obnoxious blame-America-first letter: His dismissal of coronavirus lockdown concerns. Look at that opening paragraph:
It's natural to wish for life "to just get back to normal" as a pandemic and economic crisis upend everything around us. But we have to remember that for millions of Americans, being treated differently on account of race is tragically, painfully, maddeningly "normal" — whether it's while dealing with the health care system, or interacting with the criminal justice system, or jogging down the street, or just watching birds in a park.
All those beauty parlor owners and California surfers being busted for lockdown violations are somehow the bad guy now, falsely juxtaposed against a criminal cop who's going to jail. Democratic blue-state governors, of course, are bigtime supporters of extended and effectively permanent lockdowns, constantly moving the goalposts. (Reminds them of the prisons they're so fond of). Conflating the issue of a shut down economy and millions of people out of work and being unhappy about it with a single criminal act by a bad cop everyone wants in jail, and then saying those concerns have no legitimacy compared to the crime at hand, is also disgusting.
He even threw in Central Park Karen for good measure, and we don't even know anymore if Amy Cooper's act was racially motivated at all, her stupid act was to not want to put her dog on a leash in a leash-only part of Central park and then getting into an altercation with a total stranger who was a dedicated bird watcher. Based on the racism argument, her life is pretty well ruined, she's lost everything -- her job, her dog, her right to walk in Central Park, and she will never be able to get a job. All this, despite her abject apology, something real racists don't do. Oh and she voted for Obama twice, which might be why he brought her up. She was a typical Obama voter and therefore an embarrassment.
What we are seeing here is Peak Obama, a wretched leftist failure of a president looking at the crisis at hand as an opportunity to not let go to waste and trying to find a way to make political hay out of it by blaming every American instead of his own beloved one-party blue cities. That's not on us, that's on Obama's political machine allies. His bid to socialize the blame is also accompanied by a bid to personalize the gain. To heck with that. He needs to get off the stage.