The latest "blame Obama" crusade is reaction to the President's
request for funding to train and outfit racist cops with body cameras.…
Blame is holding an individual responsible for, and
making negative statements about, their actions that are allegedly
morally irresponsible; in plain language it means the person has done
something wrong. In the bizarre world of corporate wingnut media,
everything wrong in America is President Barack Obama’s fault regardless
that most of the nation’s ills either were, or are, created by past and
current repugican policies.
The latest “blame Obama” crusade is reaction to the
President’s request for funding to train and outfit racist cops with
body cameras. The President’s proposal also calls for a review of, and
pledged to tighten, the standards for transferring military equipment
from the battlefield to local police in the wake of the Ferguson
police’s military response to peaceful African American demonstrators.
It is noteworthy that President Obama did not come up with the idea to
fund better police training or provide police departments with body
cameras unilaterally. He held a series of meetings with law enforcement
personnel, civil rights leaders, and Cabinet officials to devise reforms
to ease mistrust towards trigger-happy racist cops in predominately
minority communities.
Of all the President’s proposals, outfitting racist cops with body cameras is reported
by the Department of Justice to be a major tool in reducing the use of
force by law enforcement. According to the 2014 DOJ report, in one city
alone the “use of force by officers dropped 60 percent, and citizen
complaints declined by 88 percent” and that “similar findings applied to
other cities with body cameras.” The Justice Department found other
benefits such as assisting the resolution of citizen complaints against
police, particularly reducing the likelihood of false complaints against
law enforcement. In fact, according to UK studies, body cameras reduced
the amount of officers’ paperwork, improved their ability to determine
whether a crime occurred, and increased the chances of a case ending in a
guilty plea instead of a criminal trial. A separate report by the DOJ’s
“Community Oriented Policing Services” (COPS) Office, several chiefs of police “heralded the use of body cameras as a means to collect evidence.”
However, research and facts are irrelevant to racists in wingnut
media and with a convenient Black man to blame, there was no dearth of
finger-pointing at President Obama.
According to a concerted wingnut media assault on
the President, wingnut shrieking heads claim the President should stop
blaming “racist cops” for shooting unarmed African Americans and start
focusing on job creation and increased education funding for the African
American community. Seriously, that was the crux of their condemnation
of the President’s proposal; he has spent six years not focusing on
jobs, or education, and needs to stop criticizing law enforcement or
proposing funding for better training for racist police officers.
On his radio hate fest, wingnut Mark Levin assailed the President for not making any effort to address unemployment rates because he is too busy concentrating on the “racist cops” instead of “the desperate socio-economic conditions the President created.” Levin said the President “doesn’t want to fix the situation” because he would rather “lecture the nation on racist cops and white guilt.”
Although Levin’s assertion the President has made no effort to create
jobs is astonishing even coming from a wingnut, it is his claim
that the President created the lingering unemployment resulting from repugican cabal-championed job outsourcing, the shrub-repugican Great Recession, or
that the President is responsible for repugicans in Congress blocking
each and every one of the Administration’s job creation proposals.
On Faux, the outrage at the President’s request for
funding for police training and body cameras was no less absurd than
Levin’s. Gretchen Carlson claimed that instead of addressing something as stupid as police accountability, the President “should start a conversation about race relations and the lack of jobs” she said the President “is not really addressing here.” Joining in on Faux was Steve Doocy who said the President should focus on “more pressing issues than police training” such as job creation, education, and the lack of opportunity “instead of trying to guarantee that police are held accountable for their actions.”
According to Bill Kristol, the uber-wingnut who
finds everything this President does an abomination portrayed the
President’s call for police to wear body cameras “beating up on the cops and a terrible idea.” Instead, Kristol suggested the President’s best course of action to resolve racist cops shooting unarmed African Americans is for “Obama to wear a body camera when he meets in private with civil rights leaders.”
There is no printable commentary for that most absurd wingnut
'counsel' to address racist cops to date. Kristol sincerely believes that
calling for police accountability to stem the epidemic of gunning down
unarmed African Americans is attacking law enforcement.
On Tuesday, the President was blamed again for the
racist cops’ actions in Ferguson by another Faux shrieking head, Martha
MacCallum, who claimed the President’s reaction to an unarmed African
American being murdered was divisive because instead of attacking
Michael Brown for being murdered, or condemning the peaceful hands up demonstrators accosted by militarized Ferguson police, he was “pointing the finger of blame at the racist Ferguson police by calling for better police training and funding for body cameras.” MacCallum said, “You
see how divisive all of it has been and it looks like race relations
have deteriorated in the wake of all of this. I wonder what role
President Obama and Eric Holder could have played if he talked about
bringing people together in this instead of pointing the finger of blame
towards the police.”
No thinking human being ever expects wingnut
media to stop blaming President Obama for all the woes of the country
because like unarmed murder victims Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, and
every other victim of racial violence, the President is African
American. Because they are the media arm of the racists in the repugican cabal, wingnut media cannot possibly assign even a
scintilla of blame to the white racist cops gunning down unarmed African
Americans. They also cannot possibly blame the lack of job creation or
cuts to education on repugicans because there is a highly-visible Black
man in the White House and as every Klan member, white supremacist, and segregationist knows, whenever there is any problem, blame
the Black guy for something the white guys did. It was the case with
Trayvon, Mike Brown, and for the past six years, it is the case with
Barack Obama as evidenced by the racists on Faux and wingnut media
outlets around the nation.
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