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Lies from the Highest Levels Fueled the Dallas Fire
Less than three months after President Obama first took office, a rapist shot and killed four Oakland, CA police officers. The President sent a letter to their funeral. Eighteen months into his second term, a robbery suspect was killed after beating and trying to disarm a Missouri police officer. The President sent an entourage to the suspect’s funeral.
Just a few weeks after the Oakland tragedy, the President hosted his infamous “beer summit.” That hastily concocted “teachable moment” came after he described a Massachusetts police officer as “acting stupidly” while investigating a possible burglary. If you don’t recall, the officer’s error was insisting on getting identification from a man at a house that was reported as being burglarized. The man happened to be a black professor, Henry Louis Gates, who inflamed a simple encounter into baseless racial animosity by steadfastly refusing to simply identify himself. Unfortunately, the teachable moment taught the President nothing about the nuance and consistent uncertainty of policing.
The events last night in Dallas are the responsibility of no one but whomever fired the shots. It is foolish and immoral to blame evil on those who harbor no such intent. But there can be no doubt that America’s leftist political leadership at every level has reinforced an ambiance for distrust of the police by embracing lies, ignorance, and moral ambiguity.
A worldview based on lies and ignorance is no different than that of a schizophrenic wandering the streets talking to people who aren’t there. It can only lead to confusion and frustration.
And that is where America finds itself — frustrated, confused and morally ambiguous.
Last night, in the moments before the shots rang out, a largely black crowd marched through downtown Dallas chanting “hands up, don’t shoot.” The basis of this phrase is a horrible, destructive lie generated to support the fiction that Ofc. Darren Wilson of the Ferguson Police Department shot a robbery suspect in the back as he surrendered. The physical evidence subsequently proved the absolute lie that is “hands up, don’t shoot,” but the fiction persists because our political leaders — including the President himself — lack the moral courage to call liars liars.
And moral ambiguity has become the rule of the left’s approach to law enforcement.
The worst part of the Dallas march before the shots were fired was the moral smear of marchers who conflated two cases of completely different men. In Baton Rouge, ex-convict and deadbeat dad Alton Sterling was shot as he struggled with police officers who screamed at him about a gun in his pocket. All Sterling had to do was lie still and he would still be alive. Actually, had he simply complied with the police to begin with, he wouldn’t have been harmed at all. But, in the world of Black Lives Matter, police are supposed to allow suspects to actually grasp weapons before defending themselves — giving them literally a split-second to live or die.
Disgustingly, the Dallas protesters and their political sycophants have wrapped the stain of Sterling’s violence around what seems to be a horrendous (and quite possibly criminal) tragedy, the killing of Minnesota resident Philando Castile. Whereas Sterling fought the police, disregarded instruction, resisted force, and fought with officers while in possession of an apparently illegal gun, Castile appears to have complied and cooperated while informing an officer about a gun he legally carried. He was shot within moments and died for reasons that are objectively unclear.
To BLM, motives, intent, and the content of a man’s character are irrelevant. It’s the color of their skin that matters. So, their deaths are treated as equal tragedies and equal crimes.
And their political apostles fall right in line. “Would this have happened if the driver were white, if the passengers were white?” Minnesota Gov. Mark Dayton asked Thursday. “I don’t think it would have.” The investigation is incomplete. Literally the only evidence he has is the race of the individuals involved. Yet an elected leader assumes things about all involved based solely on that — race.
I’m fairly certain judging people based on race is racism, but maybe that’s just me.
Drayton repeated the fiction favored among leftist politicians that “no one deserves to be killed over a tail light.” Which is as true as it is irrelevant to use of force. No one should be killed while helping someone in a hospital, but that didn’t keep a criminal from murdering Ofc. Steve Sandberg.
As I write this, the Los Angeles Chief of Police is meeting with Snoop Dogg, a rapper with a lengthy criminal record including incidents in which police officers were injured. What a great message to send to his subordinates.
But this is not unexpected. Chairman of the LA Board of Police Commissioners Matt Johnson has spent the last several months forcing a change to the department’s use of force policy. Strangely, he has not met with officials of the department’s union, the LA Police Protective League. In fact, according to the league, Johnson dismissed an invitation to experience a use of force simulation to better inform his perspective. Allegedly, Johnson, an entertainment attorney, replied that it would be as futile an exercise as trying to teach cops to write contracts for Oprah.
Stunningly, in May, Johnson wrote a 1,600-word OpEd for the African-American-focused Los Angeles Sentinel newspaper about his determination to change the LAPD force policy. In a tome the size of two standard newspaper columns about the primary safety policy of LAPD officers, he made absolutely no reference to the dangers cops face or his commitment to protecting them. In fact, he didn’t reference police officers as people even a single time.
Conversations that make progress require integrity and facts to develop clarity and understanding. The last decade of American leadership has left us with anything but. We are frustrated, confused and in desperate need of leadership.
Published in General
A stunning great post. Thanks.
Breitbart has some interesting information on Mr. Castile and his girlfriend – worth investigating before popping off like the Governor.
First, excellent article. Second, the strange issue with the very sad Castile incident is that the only evidence that I have seen of Castile’s reporting of his CCP and telling the office that he was carrying, is the girl friend’s testimony. Thirdly, have we gotten to the point where police will not patrol or enter certain minority neighborhoods? Who could blame them? Well, actually, we know who would blame them.
So did the Dallas police shoot Castile? Why is that even relevant? Our leadership, and the mobs like black lives matter want a race war. That will really work out well for blacks, just like all liberal programs have. We must continue and relentlessly tell the truth about what progressive programs and opportunistic parasitical black leadership have done to the black community. It is obvious to anyone not making a bundel from the problems or with an ounce of sense.
A president can set the tone, especially if he is cool and hip. Obama apparently is cool and hip with children, leftists, and hipsters. Unfortunately, he is at core a race grievance huckster. These hucksters thrive on race grievances. It is their role to accentuate them for personal gain. Thats what they do, and this one is Harvard trained and his pants don’t fall off, but essentially he is just a better looking Al Sharpton, elevated from “community organizer” to POTUS by people without any understanding of how a society works. He does not make anything better, he makes it all worse. That is his job. He is the world’s most successful race grievance huckster.
How anybody of voting age would conclude that he would not be destructive of race relations, I have always found utterly baffling.
Well, as he says, “take a gun to a knife fight”.
To call Soop Dogg’s police record “lengthy” is to not do the word justice. One of his altercations ended up with a man murdered. He and his accomplice were eventually acquitted. That being said, the LAPD Chief of Police has no business being in the same room with Snoop Dogg. What could he be possibly thinking?
Very good article, Mr. Parry.
I am sorry, but I cannot blame Obama and Black Lives Matter for the actions of a psychopathic murderous m**********r any more than I can blame the NRA or racist cops. We are all responsible for our own actions.
No evidence yet that Castile had a gun permit.
The Daily Mail has a reputation for being right-wing, but the reporters for the US version are hipster progressives. Pretty much every day there are “can you believe what this racist white guy did to this black person?!” stories. One of their reporters retweeted a lowlife who wrote “I live in a neighborhood with a dangerous gang that murders with no repercussions. And by that I mean I live near a police station.”
Reporting from the major news outlets over the last few days has been as fact-free and inflammatory as the film “Birth of a Nation.”
Our president is a racist. He’s a disgrace to the office.
Glad I’m not the only one bothered by this. I’m skeptical that the shooter would be a law-abiding citizen if the president didn’t harp on (alleged) police misconduct.
“Schizophrenia” . . . “insanity” . . . words fail.
Dark. Dark.
I don’t think the shooter would be a law abiding citizen, but if we are going to point to Islam as an inspiration for the Orlando shooter—not the cause of his crime, but a major factor in his motivation—it doesn’t seem unreasonable to me to say that the president has contributed to (rather than contradicted) this narrative: racist police officers murder defenseless black men. “Racist Murderer” sounds to me like someone a vulnerable mind could conceive of as “probably should get taken out.”
The Dallas shooter shares certain features with the Orlando shooter—both were young men, and young men (with and without significant mental health issues) are drawn to the idea of being warriors. The healthier ones hope to fight in a noble cause. They are pre-programmed to look to elders, especially males, for guidance. If the respected elders in a young man’s life say “nope, that cause is definitely not noble” it helps restrain him. If respected elders say “oh, yes, that’s a real thing and we need to do something about it” he’ll storm Omaha Beach on D-Day, charge the machine guns at the Somme, massacre the inhabitants of a Hopi village or gun down the Jews of Warsaw.
Context matters, and the president has helped to create the context.
Mister D: You are equating BLM with the NRA?
Did it also not make a difference that Dylan Roof liked to go on neo-Nazi websites before he shot up a black church? He was just as likely to have done so if he never went on racist websites but just frequented ESPN.com?
I am not going to blame Obama as if he is directly responsible for these murders, but he is responsible for what he does or doesn’t do, and he doesn’t often do the right thing.
For example, can you imagine Obama giving a press conference in which he states the following: “The Justice Department has thoroughly investigated the Michael Brown shooting. We have determined that Mr. Brown did not have his hands up, and that he was attacking Officer Wilson, forcing Wilson to shoot him in self-defense. The shooting was justified, contrary to earlier accounts, which turned out to be false. Several witnesses and the physical evidence corroborate this finding. I hope that the results of this investigation will calm some of the anger that has roiled the black community since the shooting.”
One can only wonder if he had the courage and wisdom to do that if those officers would be dead today.
The most lethal weapon in the world is an 18 year old boy. His body is mature enough to do massive physical harm but he hasn’t acquired enough judgement to restrain himself. How a culture uses this cohort speaks a lot to the culture.
Excellent post.
Man With the Axe, that is precisely the sentiment I had in mind while reading the thread. The BLM movement uses poster boys with extensive criminal histories who are, almost to a man, resisting arrest. Obama and his Justice Department have had opportunity after chance to point out that the victims in most cases were actively, physically engaging police officers, which is a crime.
Obviously, the police were responsible for some of the incidents. Obama is uniquely positioned to make it clear that police prosecutions happen, that in a country of 330M, unjustified murder of blacks by white officers is thankfully rare. I doubt that many of the protesters have any idea that the targets of police shootings (and police shooting of unarmed suspects) are overwhelmingly white.
Only a fool would blame anyone but Micah Johnson for the murders in Dallas. But the Obama administration has failed to bring context to the incidents and to lend its considerable influence to the cause of justice.
Mr. Parry, Good article, up to a point. Maybe we should gather some facts about that incident before we come to a hard decision on what happened in St. Paul, MN. Some of the facts/suggestions are coming out. There is some doubt that he had a Concealed Carry Permit, also I don’t think it is prudent to tell a cop that you have a gun and then start to reach into your pocket for your Drivers License. Especially when you might have robbed a convinence store with a gun a few days before and a couple of blocks away from where the stop took place. Incidentally, the local TV station, KARE, played the audio of the cop saying he was stopping the car because he looked like the perp that was seen on the convinence store video robbing the store pointing a gun at the clerk. The cars tail lights were working fine.
Yes, maybe we should sit back and take a deep breath and wait and see what happened in the real world. The cop was just doing his job. Hopefully he did not over react in a split second decision.
Actually the governor has a point, just not the one he thinks he’s making. Cops in fact may be more wary when dealing with black males, because they tend to be far more violent then the rest of society.
3% of the population accounting for 50% of the homicides, violent crime rate is 7X greater then for the white population (24.7/100k vs 3.4/100k).
Until the black population takes a long look in the mirror and does something to control the crime in their own community police would be fools to be anything but more anxious and defensive when dealing with them.
We have no leadership – the black community has no role models. Your statement that the content and character of a man no longer matters, but only the color of his skin – the words of Martin Luther King have been turned backward. Our world is now truth vs. lies, where we are suspicious of blacks, whites, Jews, Christians, Muslims, law enforcement, gays, rich people, corporate America, the military, the Russians, the Chinese, the government, Democrats, Republicans…….The Bible says people will cry Peace Peace, but there will be no peace, but evil lurks among them. The devil has won this round.
We must repeatedly point out the hypocrisy of the left.
Obama said of Micah Johnson “he’s no more representative of African-Americans than the shooter in Charleston was representative of white Americans…”
But why doesn’t Obama react in the same way as he did to Roof? In that case, he led a movement to ban the Confederate battle flag. Why doesn’t he now lead a movement to ban the black power and black separatist symbols that Johnson displayed?
Obama’s goal is division, weakening of community organizations and all of the organic underbrush that hold civilization together, including fostering racial divide, the Federalization of police, gun control, so yes he and black leaders are responsible for these murders, both sides, both kinds, the way any mob agitator is responsible for mob action.
Hillary Clinton asked for prayers for all the families of the victims of violence this week. “Alton, ” (she called him by his first name) is lumped in with the five police officers, as if it’s all the same.
It’s not the same.
Indeed.
Yes. This has been bugging me mightily since the stories broke: based on what’s known about them, their similarities are purely superficial.
I find nothing that is happening now particularly surprising. To a lesser degree the education system and teachers were subjected to the same charges of racism for years. Our leaders, principals and superintendents sold us and the system down the river. Any disciplinary procedures that had been effective were either watered down or completely banned. The consequence was that the schools have become daycare centers with little or no effective teaching and preparation for meaningful participation in a civil society. I expect that the same will happen with the police. They will be beaten down, defanged, and forced to ignore uncivil or illegal behavior if the perpetrator is black or claims to be.
IF this is the tipping point as a Blaze headline implies, it could go either way. With the kind of stupid, mindless leadership we have seen elected to federal and municipal governments, I suspect it is more likely to go in the wrong one. If Hillary is elected POTUS we will be disarmed and turned into what I have read South Africa has become, a land of home invasions where disarmed citizens are totally vulnerable.
Except in the Charleston shooting, the victims turn out to be something worse than initially painted. Just like in Ferguson, the lie takes on a life of its own. The truth, once known, is ignored. The pattern seems to be repeating in the two latest shootings by cops.
Please explain. What do I not know about Charleston?
I suspect EH meant “Except for the example of the Charleston shooting …” Or perhaps “”Except in the case of …” would be the more appropriate way to interpolate the intended meaning?
Yep.
The Charleston shooter was painted by the media as evil. The media had no trouble applying a little condemnation on him…and it was deserved.