(Ronald Kessler-Newsmax).If you are black and act in a belligerent and threatening manner toward a police officer, you may be invited to the White House.
That’s the message President Obama has sent in his effort to undo the political damage he caused with his remarks about the arrest of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr.
As anyone who has watched a police traffic stop on television knows, the most respectable citizens can rage out of control when police confront them. If they refuse to obey orders or continue to act in a threatening and belligerent way, they are arrested.
Although Gates and Crowley are “two decent people,” Americans should be “mindful of the fact that because of our history, because of the difficulties of the past, you know, African-Americans are sensitive to these issues.” Even when you’ve “got a police officer who has a fine track record on racial sensitivity, interactions between police officers and the African-American community can sometimes be fraught with misunderstanding,” Obama opined.
Obama said he hopes the incident will be a “teachable moment,” leading people to spend “a little more time listening to each other.” But rather than teaching blacks and whites to be more tolerant, Obama sent a message to police officers that, if they do their duty and arrest a man who happens to be black, they may find themselves criticized and maligned by the president of the United States on prime-time television.
Obama’s decision to inject himself into a local arrest was “politically costly for the nation’s first African-American president, who has sought to cast himself as a clear-eyed arbiter of the nation's racial divisions,” the Washington Post said in a news account. “That image was challenged once before, in a controversy surrounding another Obama friend [the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr.].”
To the law enforcement community and a large swath of Americans, Obama’s bias is unacceptable. Nor does it sit well with white liberals. Americans thought they were electing a post-racial candidate. Instead, Obama exposed himself as having the same prejudices as Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, and Obama’s longtime mentor Rev. Wright.
Together with his failures on the economy and world affairs, Obama’s insistence on siding with Gates undercuts his credibility and, ultimately, jeopardizes his presidency.
That’s the message President Obama has sent in his effort to undo the political damage he caused with his remarks about the arrest of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr.
As anyone who has watched a police traffic stop on television knows, the most respectable citizens can rage out of control when police confront them. If they refuse to obey orders or continue to act in a threatening and belligerent way, they are arrested.
Although Gates and Crowley are “two decent people,” Americans should be “mindful of the fact that because of our history, because of the difficulties of the past, you know, African-Americans are sensitive to these issues.” Even when you’ve “got a police officer who has a fine track record on racial sensitivity, interactions between police officers and the African-American community can sometimes be fraught with misunderstanding,” Obama opined.
Obama said he hopes the incident will be a “teachable moment,” leading people to spend “a little more time listening to each other.” But rather than teaching blacks and whites to be more tolerant, Obama sent a message to police officers that, if they do their duty and arrest a man who happens to be black, they may find themselves criticized and maligned by the president of the United States on prime-time television.
Obama’s decision to inject himself into a local arrest was “politically costly for the nation’s first African-American president, who has sought to cast himself as a clear-eyed arbiter of the nation's racial divisions,” the Washington Post said in a news account. “That image was challenged once before, in a controversy surrounding another Obama friend [the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr.].”
To the law enforcement community and a large swath of Americans, Obama’s bias is unacceptable. Nor does it sit well with white liberals. Americans thought they were electing a post-racial candidate. Instead, Obama exposed himself as having the same prejudices as Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, and Obama’s longtime mentor Rev. Wright.
Together with his failures on the economy and world affairs, Obama’s insistence on siding with Gates undercuts his credibility and, ultimately, jeopardizes his presidency.
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