Obama on Ferguson: America's Racist, Give Me More Power

by Ben Shapiro 

On Monday night, after the media’s attempted racial assassination of Officer Darren Wilson shipwrecked on the rocky shoals of the criminal justice system, President Obama took to the podium to try to salvage their narrative of American racism. The media spent months portraying 18-year-old black man Michael Brown as a “gentle giant” victimized by cruel white racist Wilson, and by extension, charging America’s law enforcement establishment with the ultimate sin. Unwilling to let that narrative die, President Obama stepped forward – and in doing so, fueled the flames for future racial conflagrations.

 

Obama, of course, invested long ago in the notion that every incident involving a black victim and a white (or white Hispanic) shooter symbolizes America’s greater racial ills. There is no individual justice; there is only social justice. Darren Wilson and Michael Brown were not individuals; they were merely stand-ins for racial conflict. That’s why President Obama said that Trayvon Martin was like his fictional son; it’s why he told the United Nations that the situation in Ferguson demonstrated America’s failures. Every story fits into a narrative for President Obama.
Sadly for President Obama, the grand jury looked at the evidence – something Obama and his allies have never bothered to do – and decided that Obama would have to find a different symbol of racial injustice. But that didn’t faze Obama a bit. Striding to the podium, speaking off-teleprompter – which is when Obama truly says what he thinks, in all of its incoherent but radical glory – Obama explained that Wilson wasn’t really innocent, that America could never be absolved of its past racial sins, and that the only solution was for him to be given more power.

Obama opened by stating that America was a “nation built on the rule of law.” When millions of Americans stopped guffawing at the irony of President Executive Amnesty glowing over the value of process, Obama continued:

[W]e need to accept that this decision was the grand jury’s to make. There are Americans who agree with it, and there are Americans who are deeply disappointed, even angry. It’s an understandable reaction.

No, actually, it isn’t. As it turns out, justifiable anger should be based on evidence of injustice, not a vague sense of it purveyed by the media and opportunistic politicians. And there is not a shred of evidence suggesting that Officer Darren Wilson was a racist, profiled Michael Brown, or gunned him down summarily.

Why, then, is such anger justified according to the president? Because while Wilson may not be guilty, America is guilty:

[W]e need to recognize that the situation in Ferguson speaks to broader challenges that we still face as a nation. The fact is in too many parts of this country a deep distrust exists between law enforcement and communities of color. Some of this is the result of the legacy of racial discrimination in this country.

It is the year 2014. This is not Selma, as the president has acknowledged. The legacy of racial discrimination had nothing to do with Michael Brown, an 18-year-old who strong-arm-robbed a convenience store before allegedly twice attacking a police officer. Absent fathers, a culture of casual crime, disdain for education – all of these are “broader challenges” in our nation. But “deep distrust” is not. Neither are “issues in which the law too often feels as if it is being applied in a discriminatory fashion.” Feelings cannot be cured, unless a licensed psychotherapist is on hand. And Obama is not America’s psychotherapist.

Only behavior can be cured. And unless President Obama is willing to name specific cases of behavior, and recommend specific punishments, this is happy talk designed to win him raves in The New York Times and generate more federal government interventionism. President Obama creates amorphous “challenges” America must overcome, and which can only be solved by him and his minions:

I’ve instructed Attorney General Holder to work with cities across the country to help build better relations between communities and law enforcement. That means working with law enforcement officials to make sure their ranks are representative of the communities they serve. We know that makes a difference. It means working to train officials so that law enforcement conducts itself in a way that is fair to everybody. It means enlisting the community actively on what should be everybody’s goal, and that is to prevent crime.

Only Obama doesn’t want to prevent crime. If he did, he’d focus on the causes of crime, a list on which white racism does not even rank in the top 100. Obama prefers to focus on unsolvable problems, because unsolvable problems always carry the same solution: more power for the executive.