What Evil and Destruction Hath Barack Obama Rought?

The Stillborn Legacy of Barack Obama

by

Charles Krauthammer

National Review

2016 October 6

His signature domestic legislation and his foreign policy of preening disengagement are both coming apart at the seams. 

Only amid the most bizarre, tawdriest, most addictive election campaign in memory could the real story of 2016 be so effectively obliterated, namely, that with just four months left in the Obama presidency, its two central pillars are collapsing before our eyes: domestically, its radical reform of American health care, a.k.a. Obamacare; and abroad, its radical reorientation of American foreign policy — disengagement marked by diplomacy and multilateralism.

Obamacare

On Monday, Bill Clinton called it “the craziest thing in the world.” And he was talking about only one crazy aspect of it — the impact on the consumer. Clinton pointed out that small business and hardworking employees (“out there busting it, sometimes 60 hours a week”) are “getting whacked . . . their premiums doubled and their coverage cut in half.”

This, as the program’s entire economic foundation is crumbling. More than half its nonprofit “co-ops” have gone bankrupt. Major health insurers such as Aetna and UnitedHealthcare, having lost millions of dollars, are withdrawing from the exchanges. In one-third of the U.S., exchanges will have only one insurance provider. Premiums and deductibles are exploding. Even the New York Times blares, “Ailing Obama Health Care Act May Have to Change to Survive.”

Young people, refusing to pay disproportionately to subsidize older and sicker patients, are not signing up. As the risk pool becomes increasingly unbalanced, the death spiral accelerates. And the only way to save the system is with massive infusions of tax money. 

What to do? The Democrats will eventually push to junk Obamacare for a full-fledged, government-run, single-payer system. Republicans will seek to junk it for a more market-based pre-Obamacare-like alternative. Either way, the singular domestic achievement of this presidency dies.

The Obama Doctrine 

The president’s vision was to move away from a world where stability and “the success of liberty” (JFK, inaugural address) were anchored by American power and move toward a world ruled by universal norms, mutual obligation, international law, and multilateral institutions. No more cowboy adventures, no more unilateralism, no more Guantanamo. We would ascend to the higher moral plane of diplomacy. Clean hands, clear conscience, “smart power.”

This blessed vision has just died a terrible death in Aleppo. Its unraveling was predicted and predictable, though it took fully two terms to unfold. This policy of pristine — and preening — disengagement from the grubby imperatives of realpolitik yielded Crimea, the South China Sea, the rise of the Islamic State, the return of Iran. And now the horror and the shame of Aleppo.

After endless concessions to Russian demands meant to protect and preserve the genocidal regime of Bashar al-Assad, we finally capitulated last month to a deal in which we essentially joined Russia in that objective. But such is Vladimir Putin’s contempt for our president that he wouldn’t stop there.

He blatantly violated his own cease-fire with an air campaign of such spectacular savagery — targeting hospitals, water-pumping stations, and a humanitarian aid convoy — that even Barack Obama and John Kerry could no longer deny that Putin is seeking not compromise but conquest. And he is prepared to kill everyone in rebel-held Aleppo to achieve it. Obama, left with no options — and astonishingly, having prepared none — looks on.

At the outset of the war, we could have bombed Assad’s airfields and destroyed his aircraft, eliminating the regime’s major strategic advantage — control of the air.

Five years later, we can’t. Russia is there. Putin has just installed S-300 antiaircraft missiles near Tartus. Yet, none of the rebels have any air assets. This is a warning and deterrent to the only power that could do something — the United States.

Obama did nothing before.  He will surely do nothing now.  For Americans, the shame is palpable.

Russia’s annexation of Crimea may be an abstraction, but that stunned injured little boy in Aleppo is not.

“What is Aleppo?” famously asked Gary Johnson. Answer: the burial ground of the Obama fantasy of benign disengagement. 

What’s left of the Obama legacy?  Even Democrats are running away from Obamacare.  And who will defend his foreign policy of lofty speech and cynical abdication? 

In 2014, Obama said, “Make no mistake: [My] policies are on the ballot.” Democrats were crushed in that midterm election.

This time around, Obama says, “My legacy’s on the ballot.” If the 2016 campaign hadn’t turned into a referendum on character — a battle fully personalized and ad hominem — the collapse of the Obama legacy would indeed be right now on the ballot. And his party would be 20 points behind. 

— Charles Krauthammer is a nationally syndicated columnist. © 2016 The Washington Post Writers Group.

CAN THIS COUNTRY WITHSTAND 4 (or 8) MORE YEARS OF THE OBAMA CORRUPTION, DECEIT, AND CAPITULATION?

Only In America!

No. 10 — Only in America ... Could politicians talk about the greed of the rich at a $35,000.00 per plate Obama campaign fund-raising event.

No. 9 — Only in America ... Could people claim that the government still discriminates against black Americans when they have a black President, a black Attorney General and roughly 20% of the federal workforce is black  while only 14% of the population is black, 40+% of all federal entitlements goes to black Americans: 3 times the rate that go to whites, and 5 times the rate that go to Hispanics!

No. 8 — Only in America ... Could they have had the two people most responsible for our  tax code, Timothy Geithner (the head of the Treasury Department) and  Charles Rangel (who once ran the Ways and Means Committee), BOTH turn out to be tax cheats who are in favor of higher taxes.

No. 7 — Only in America ... Can they have terrorists kill people in the name of Allah and have the media primarily react by fretting that Muslims might be harmed by the backlash.

No. 6 — Only in America ... Would they make people who want to legally become American citizens wait for years in their home countries and pay tens of thousands of dollars for the privilege, while they discuss letting anyone who sneaks into the country illegally just 'magically' become American citizens. (probably should be number one)

No. 5 — Only in America ... Could the people who believe in balancing the budget and sticking by the country's Constitution be called EXTREMISTS.
   
No. 4 — Only in America ... Could you need to present a driver's license to cash a check or buy alcohol, but not to vote.

No. 3 — Only in America ... Could people demand  the government investigate whether oil companies are gouging the public because the price of gas went up when the return on equity invested in a major U.S. Oil company (Marathon Oil) is less than half of a company making tennis shoes (Nike).

No. 2 — Only in America ... Could you collect more tax dollars from the people than any  nation in recorded history, still spend a Trillion dollars more than it  has per year - for total spending of $7 Million PER  MINUTE, and  complain that it doesn't have nearly enough money.

No. 1 — Only in America .... Could the rich people—who pay 86% of all income taxes—be  accused of not paying their "fair share" by people who don't pay any income taxes at all.

IS THIS A GREAT COUNTRY OR WHAT!

The World As We Know It Today

I am sick that our President spent more time justifying the murders than eulogizing the slain.

by

Ben Stein

2016 July 15

Ha! I bet you wonder why you haven’t heard from me for a while. It’s because I have been sick.

I’m sick of athletes who are paid millions of dollars per month to run up and down a wooden court and throw a ball blasting, slandering, sliming police officers who get paid in a year what the athletes get paid for a few minutes. The athletes are superbly well trained and skillful and their performances sell a lot or cars and soap. And beer.

But the athletes who get paid tens of millions of dollars a year don’t leave their kids behind with their wives going off into a combat zone the way the police do. The athletes are wildly famous but they don’t put their lives on the line the way the police do every time they pull over a speeder or approach a man who refuses to show his hands.

That’s it. That’s what I’m sick with: the viral insanity of these men who live in gigantic mansions libeling the police officers who risk their lives to patrol the black community based on incidents in which it’s already been well established that the officers acted reasonably and lawfully.

I have been sick, still am sick, at the idea that the thin blue line who stand between decent people and murderers and rapists and thugs gets slandered by the Beautiful People in sports and Hollywood and politics and the media while the slanderers eat their caviar and ride in their Bentleys and pretend to be brave fighters for social justice.

I have news for you, gentlemen. There is only one group consistently offering up their lives for social justice and decency — and they are called the POLICE.

I have been sick to death that when our President, Mr. Obama, spoke at a memorial for five police officers murdered by a black psychopathic racist, the President of all of the people spent far more time trying to justify the murders than to eulogize the slain.

Mr. Obama kept insisting it was all about racism. And Mr. Obama was right: It was all about the racism of a creature sick with evil who was jacked out of his mind by miscreants who simply make up “facts” of a white racist assault on black America. I am sick that these people, who go by names like Black Lives Matter and the New Black Panthers, completely ignore the truths about how so many young blacks die at each other’s hands and how few die from police bullets even once a confrontation has begun. I am sick that the prestige media lets these liars get away with it.

I am sick that a movement that was once based with dignity on allowing grown men and women to be able to vote has devolved into a movement to allow drunken sailors to urinate in a bathroom next to my five-year-old granddaughter — and the President of the United States is so foolish that he actually believes this is a meaningful cause.

I am down with a fever that the President ignores the murder with knives of Israeli children by Arab terrorists but calls the leader of the only democracy in the Middle East a ‘chickens–t’ — especially when that leader, Benjamin Netanyahu, is the bravest head of government of any nation in the last hundred years, with more combat heroism than Mr. Obama could even read about.

The world has gone crazy. Just plain crazy. We have a mass murderer killing the innocent in Orlando, calling 9-1-1 to say he’s acting as an agent of the Islamic State — and the President says we don’t know his motives. We have the racist police killer in Dallas killing the police who protect the blacks at will and the next day the streets are choked with college students and bums attacking the police. And no one calls this insane. I will. It’s insane.

All right. No, it’s not all right. We have a political party whose leaders and cadres literally scream with frenzied delight at the thought of mothers killing their own children — while at the same time piously denouncing the manufacturers of guns. The toll from semi-automatic rifles is about one hundredth of one percent the toll from abortions. And this is something for women to scream about with ecstasy.

God help us.

And meanwhile, up here in North Idaho, the skies are blue. The clouds are fleecy white. The water tonight when I went to dinner over in Hope was like a mill pond. No craziness here. Just wooden ships on the water, very free, as the song goes. But once you leave this enchanted kingdom, it’s the jungle damned quick. And I start to feel sick. But then I am not terribly important. Al Sharpton, now he’s important. Mr. Obama, he’s important. God help us.

The Big Lie of the Presidential Campaign

The Big Lie of the Presidential Campaign By: Bill O'Reilly April 18, 2016 Apparently millions of American voters believe the federal government should be required by law to provide things for the folks – education, healthcare, good jobs, financial security in old age, on and on. That belief runs counter to how America was established in the late 18th century when our first-elected officials put their game plan into effect. Basically their vision was a limited one.  Citizens would have basic freedoms to worship, vote, speak openly without being punished, assemble without interference, and pursue happiness within the framework of the law. It was entirely up to the folks how they would use those freedoms.  No one was forced to go to the voting booth as they are in Australia, no one was forced to believe in God as they were in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Today the question of individual choice -- the quest to succeed or fail on your own -- has almost been obliterated by politicians and judges who don't respect the concept of competition and the struggle to prosper. In short, they are evolving away from how this country was established. In addition, they are deceiving the American people into believing that their success and well-being will be almost assured by a giant federal nanny state, which is absolutely impossible in a nation of nearly 320 million people. Politicians deceive because it is an easy way to seduce voters unhappy with their circumstance in life. When Bernie Sanders tells Americans that the economic system is rigged against them, he destroys incentive. Why work hard if the big banks will harm you no matter what?  If I am failing, it's not my fault -- the phantom billionaires are hurting me. Sanders is correct that the feds need to stop fraud in the marketplace, but his message of wall-to-wall capitalist corruption is false and pernicious. When a guy like Rand Paul tells Americans that they should be able to intoxicate themselves at will and public safety be dammed, he gives license to behavior that has destroyed untold billions of people the world over.  Not to mention the message that legalized drugs sends to children. We don't live in a vacuum here.  The condition of others can directly affect us, just look at the drunk-driving stats. When Al Sharpton and his grievance lobby assert that black Americans are oppressed by a racist system bent on hurting them, he provides an excuse for a litany of apathetic and destructive behaviors. The kid struggling in a bad school with parents who don't care needs all the encouragement leadership can give him or her, not a list of historical atrocities that can cause even more bitterness. The cold fact is very few powerful people are willing to address vexing problems by telling the truth to the folks. Here's what the government owes us: Protection from foreign concerns who would harm us. Protection from criminals who would harm us. A secure border system whereby our immigration laws are enforced and respected. An infrastructure of mass transportation that is safe and efficient.  What the U.S. airlines are doing to their passengers is a scandal and the fact that we don't have a high-speed rail system is flat out irresponsible. The government also has an obligation to protect our constitutional rights and to protect private property. Seizing assets after an American dies is abhorrent.  Many Americans work hard all their lives to give their children a better situation than they had. Finally, it is the duty of those in power to foster a system that allows every single American a truly fair shot at material and emotional success. That means schools with strong educational and disciplinary standards; subsidized benefits for the poor and infirmed that are delivered responsibly with clear guidelines; also, protections in the workplace against companies that would violate labor laws and exploit powerless employees. That's the heart of what the government owes us and social engineering is not part of it, nor is free education, nor free health care, nor a free income if you choose to lay about. Workers pay taxes to support the government, as well as for personal social security in old age, which the feds have mismanaged in the extreme. We deserve honesty and responsible spending, not wasteful programs designed to secure votes. Last week I spoke with Donald Trump about his promise to return jobs from overseas. Mr. Trump, Senator Sanders and Secretary Clinton all say they will punish American companies who move jobs abroad. A president could certainly make life very difficult for corporations that ship jobs out, but the truth is that many of the lost jobs pay little and even if they do come back it's a marginal play. The big problem is that millions of Americans are so poorly educated and personally irresponsible they simply cannot compete in the free marketplace. So what are the power-seekers going to do about that?   Blank stares. Now the race hustlers, who apparently have not walked the streets of poor neighborhoods lately, immediately accused me of racism. And that is why the acute problem of cultural deprivation among underclass children of all colors is never addressed.  The smear merchants hammer anyone who does so. It is beyond disgraceful that powerful people look away from the real problem. Mr. Trump is noble in his intent to create jobs and train Americans to do them. But that will require much more than trade deals and rhetoric. It will require a cultural change in many working class and poor precincts.  If you reject the conventional road to success -- education and hard work -- you will fail in our capitalistic system … no matter what kind of outlandish promises Bernie Sanders makes. It is all about personal responsibility and motivation, and who is preaching that message?   Who? The truth is that individual motivation is being destroyed by phony politicians seeking power by promising an endless series of entitlements to a population that is moving away from achievement and into the gimme zone … gimme, gimme, gimme. Until that deep cultural flaw is exposed, until the phonies, race hustlers and corporate greed heads are called out, we will continue to see big lies spouted by deceivers and enabled by a gutless media. God help America. And that's the memo.

Barack Obama and America

"The danger to America is not Barack Obama, but a citizenry capable of entrusting a man like him with the Presidency.  It will be far easier to limit and undo the follies of an Obama presidency than to restore the necessary common sense and good judgment to a depraved electorate willing to have such a man for their president. The problem is much deeper and far more serious than Mr. Obama, who is a mere symptom of what ails America.  Blaming the prince of fools should not blind anyone to the vast confederacy of fools that made him their prince.  The Republic can survive a Barack Obama, who is, after all, merely a fool.  It is less likely to survive a multitude of fools, such as those who made him their President."

Attribution Unknown

DONALD TRUMP: ‘They Will Kill Him Before They Let Him Be President’

EDITOR’S NOTE: The following is attributed to William J. Bennett, host of Bill Bennett’s Morning in America Show.  It is yet to be determined, however, if the following is, in fact, Bennett’s work. Regardless, the message is a must-read.

They will kill him before they let him be president. It could be a Republican or a Democrat that instigates the shutting up of Trump.

Don’t be surprised if Trump has an accident. Some people are getting very nervous: Barack Obama, Valerie Jarrett, Eric Holder, Hillary Clinton and Jon Corzine, to name just a few.

It’s about the unholy dynamics between big government, big business, and big media. They all benefit by the billions of dollars from this partnership, and it’s in all of their interests to protect one another. It’s one for all and all for one.

It’s a heck of a filthy relationship that makes everyone filthy rich, everyone except the American people. We get ripped off. We’re the patsies. But for once, the powerful socialist cabal and the corrupt crony capitalists are scared. The over-the-top reaction to Trump by politicians of both parties, the media, and the biggest corporations of America has been so swift and insanely angry that it suggests they are all threatened and frightened.

Donald Trump can self-fund. No matter how much they say to the contrary, the media, business, and political elite understand that Trump is no joke. He could actually win and upset their nice cozy apple cart.

It’s no coincidence that everyone has gotten together to destroy The Donald. It’s because most of the other politicians are part of the a good old boys club. They talk big, but they won’t change a thing. They are all beholden to big-money donors. They are all owned by lobbyists, unions, lawyers, gigantic environmental organizations, and multinational corporations – like Big Pharmacy or Big Oil. Or they are owned lock, stock, and barrel by foreigners like George Soros owns Obama or foreign governments own Hillary and their Clinton Foundation donations.

These run-of-the-mill establishment politicians are all puppets owned by big money. But there’s one man who isn’t beholden to anyone. There’s one man who doesn’t need foreigners, or foreign governments, or George Soros, or the United Auto Workers, or the teacher’s union, or the Service Employees International Union, or the Bar Association to fund his campaign.

Billionaire tycoon and maverick Donald Trump doesn’t need anyone’s help. That means he doesn’t care what the media says. He doesn’t care what the corporate elites think. That makes him very dangerous to the entrenched interests. That makes Trump a huge threat to those people. Trump can ruin everything for the bribed politicians and their spoiled slave masters.

Don’t you ever wonder why the GOP has never tried to impeach Obama? Don’t you wonder why John Boehner and Mitch McConnell talk a big game, but never actually try to stop Obama? Don’t you wonder why Congress holds the purse strings, yet has never tried to de-fund Obamacare or Obama’s clearly illegal executive action on amnesty for illegal aliens? Bizarre, right? It defies logic, right?

First, I’d guess many key Republicans are being bribed. Secondly, I believe many key Republicans are being blackmailed. Whether they are having affairs, or secretly gay, or stealing taxpayer money, the National Security Agency knows everything.

Ask former House Speaker Dennis Hastert about that. The government even knew he was withdrawing large sums of his own money from his own bank account. The NSA, the SEC, the IRS, and all the other three-letter government agencies are watching every Republican political leader. They surveil everything. Thirdly, many Republicans are petrified of being called racists, so they are scared to ever criticize Obama or call out his crimes, let alone demand his impeachment. Fourth, why rock the boat?  After defeat or retirement, if you’re a good old boy, you’ve got a $5 million-per-year lobbying job waiting. The big-money interests have the system gamed. Win or lose, they win.

But Trump doesn’t play by any of these rules. Trump breaks up this nice, cozy relationship between big government, big media, and big business. All the rules are out the window if Trump wins the Presidency. The other politicians will protect Obama and his aides but not Trump. Remember: Trump is the guy who publicly questioned Obama’s birth certificate. He questioned Obama’s college records and how a mediocre student got into an Ivy League university.

Now, he’s doing something no Republican has the chutzpah to do. He’s questioning our relationship with Mexico; he’s questioning why the border is wide open; he’s questioning why no wall has been built across the border; he’s questioning if allowing millions of illegal aliens into America is in our best interests; he’s questioning why so many illegal aliens commit violent crimes, yet are not deported; and he’s questioning why our trade deals with Mexico, Russia and China are so bad.

Trump has the audacity to ask out loud why American workers always get the short end of the stick. Good question! I’m certain Trump will question what happened to the almost billion dollars given in a rigged no-bid contract to college friends of Michelle Obama at foreign companies to build the defective Obamacare website. By the way, that tab is now up to $5 billion. Trump will ask if Obamacare’s architects can be charged with fraud for selling it by lying. Trump will investigate Obama’s widespread IRS conspiracy, not to mention Obama’s college records. Trump will prosecute Clinton and Obama for fraud committed to cover up Benghazi before the election. How about the fraud committed by employees of the Labor Department when they made up dramatic job numbers in the last jobs report before the 2012 election?

Obama, the multinational corporations, and the media need to stop Trump. They recognize this could get out of control. If left unchecked, telling the raw truth and asking questions everyone else is afraid to ask, Trump could wake a sleeping giant. Trump’s election would be a nightmare. Obama has committed many crimes. No one else but Trump would dare to prosecute. He will not hesitate. Once Trump gets in and gets a look at the cooked books and Obama’s records, the game is over. The jig is up. The goose is cooked. Holder could wind up in prison. Jarrett could wind up in prison. Obama bundler Corzine could wind up in prison for losing $1.5 billion of customer money. Clinton could wind up in jail for deleting 32,000 emails or for accepting bribes from foreign governments while Secretary of State, or for misplacing $6 billion as the head of the State Department, or for lying about Benghazi. The entire upper level management of the IRS could wind up in prison.

Obamacare will be de-funded and dismantled. Obama himself could wind up ruined, his legacy in tatters. Trump will investigate. Trump will prosecute. Trump will go after everyone involved. That’s why the dogs of hell have been unleashed on Donald Trump.

Yes, it’s become open season on Donald Trump. The left and the right are determined to attack his policies, harm his businesses, and, if possible, even keep him out of the coming debates. But they can’t silence him.  And they sure can’t intimidate him. The more they try, the more the public will realize that he’s the one telling the truth.

Race Relations and Law Enforcement

Race Relations and Law Enforcement

Jason L. Riley
2015 January
Editorial Board Member, Wall Street Journal

Jason L. Riley is an editorial board member and a senior editorial page writer at the Wall Street Journal, where he writes on politics, economics, education, immigration, and race. He is also a FOX News contributor and appears regularly on Special Report with Bret Baier. Previously, he worked for USA Today and the Buffalo News. He earned a bachelor’s degree in English from the State University of New York at Buffalo. He is the author of Please Stop Helping Us: How Liberals Make It Harder for Blacks to Succeed.

Thomas Sowell once said that some books you write for pleasure, and others you write out of a sense of duty, because there are things to be said—and other people have better sense than to say them. My new book, Please Stop Helping Us, falls into that latter category. When I started out as a journalist 20 years ago, I had no expectation of focusing on race-related topics. People like Sowell and Shelby Steele and Walter Williams and a few other independent black thinkers, to my mind at least, had already said what needed to be said, had been saying it for decades, and had been saying it more eloquently than I ever could. But over the years, and with some prodding from those guys, it occurred to me that not enough younger blacks were following in their footsteps. It also occurred to me that many public policies aimed at the black underclass were just as wrongheaded as ever. The fight wasn’t over. A new generation of black thinkers needed to explain what’s working and what isn’t, and why, to a new generation of readers. And the result is this book, which I hope will help to bring more light than heat to the discussion of race.

The book is not an autobiography or a memoir, but I do tell a few stories about growing up black and male in the inner city. And one of the stories involves a trip back home to Buffalo, New York, where I was born and raised. I was visiting my older sister shortly after I had begun working at the Wall Street Journal, and I was chatting with her daughter, my niece, who was maybe in the second grade at the time. I was asking her about school, her favorite subjects, that sort of thing, when she stopped me and said, “Uncle Jason, why you talk white?” Then she turned to her little friend who was there and said, “Don’t my uncle sound white? Why he tryin’ to sound so smart?”

She was just teasing, of course. I smiled and they enjoyed a little chuckle at my expense. But what she said stayed with me. I couldn’t help thinking: Here were two young black girls, seven or eight years old, already linking speech patterns to race and intelligence. They already had a rather sophisticated awareness that, as blacks, white-sounding speech was not only to be avoided in their own speech but mocked in the speech of others.

I shouldn’t have been too surprised by this, and I wasn’t. My siblings, along with countless other black friends and relatives, teased me the same way when I was growing up. And other black professionals have told similar stories. What I had forgotten is just how early these attitudes take hold—how soon this counterproductive thinking and behavior begins.

New York City has the largest school system in America. Eighty percent of black kids in New York public schools are performing below grade level. And a big part of the problem is a black subculture that rejects attitudes and behaviors that are conducive to academic success. Black kids read half as many books and watch twice as much television as their white counterparts, for example. In other words, a big part of the problem is a culture that produces little black girls and boys who are already worried about acting and sounding white by the time they are in second grade.

Another big part of the problem is a reluctance to speak honestly about these cultural shortcomings. Many whites fear being called racists. And many black leaders have a vested interest in blaming black problems primarily on white racism, so that is the narrative they push regardless of the reality. Racism has become an all-purpose explanation for bad black outcomes, be they social or economic. If you disagree and are white, you’re a bigot. If you disagree and are black, you’re a sell-out.

The shooting death of a young black man by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, last year touched off a national discussion about everything except the aberrant behavior of so many young black men that results in such frequent encounters with police. We talked about racial prejudice, poverty, unemployment, profiling, the tensions between law enforcement and poor black communities, and so forth. Rarely did we hear any discussion of black crime rates.

Homicide is the leading cause of death for young black men in the U.S., and around 90 percent of the perpetrators are also black. Yet for months we’ve had protesters nationwide pretending that our morgues are full of young black men because cops are shooting them. Around 98 percent of black shooting deaths do not involve police. In fact, a cop is six times more likely to be shot by someone black than the opposite. The protestors are pushing a false anti-cop narrative, and everyone from the president on down has played along.

Any candid debate on race and criminal justice in this country would have to start with the fact that blacks commit an astoundingly disproportionate number of crimes. Blacks constitute about 13 percent of the population, yet between 1976 and 2005 they committed more than half of all murders in the U.S. The black arrest rate for most offenses—including robbery, aggravated assault, and property crimes—is typically two to three times their representation in the population. So long as blacks are committing such an outsized amount of crime, young black men will be viewed suspiciously and tensions between police and crime-ridden communities will persist. The U.S. criminal justice system, currently headed by a black attorney general who reports to a black president, is a reflection of this reality, not its cause. If we want to change negative perceptions of young black men, we must change the behavior that is driving those perceptions. But pointing this out has become almost taboo. How can we even begin to address problems if we won’t discuss them honestly?

“High rates of black violence in the late twentieth century are a matter of historical fact, not bigoted imagination,” wrote the late Harvard Law professor William Stuntz. “The trends reached their peak not in the land of Jim Crow but in the more civilized North, and not in the age of segregation but in the decades that saw the rise of civil rights for African Americans—and of African American control of city governments.”

The Left wants to blame these outcomes on racial animus and poverty, but back in the 1940s and ’50s, when racial discrimination was legal and black poverty was much higher than today, the black crime rate was lower. The Left wants to blame these outcomes on “the system,” but blacks have long been part of running that system. Black crime and incarceration rates spiked in the 1970s and ’80s in cities such as Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago, and Philadelphia under black mayors and black police chiefs. Some of the most violent cities in the U.S. today are run by blacks.

Some insist that our jails and prisons are teeming with young black men due primarily to racist drug laws, but the reality is that the drug laws are neither racist nor driving the black incarceration rate. It’s worth remembering that the harsher penalties for crack cocaine offenses that were passed in the 1980s were supported by most of the Congressional Black Caucus, including Rep. Charles Rangel of Harlem, who at the time headed the House Select Committee on Narcotics Abuse and Control. Crack was destroying black communities and many black political leaders wanted dealers to face longer sentences. In other words, black legislators in Washington led the effort to impose tougher drug laws, a fact often forgotten by critics today.

When these laws passed, even their opponents didn’t claim that they were racist. Those charges came later, as the racially disparate impact of the laws became apparent. What’s been lost in the discussion is whether these laws leave law-abiding blacks better off. Do you make life in the ghetto harder or easier by sending thugs home sooner rather than later? Liberal elites would have us deny what black ghetto residents know to be the truth. These communities aren’t dangerous because of racist cops or judges or sentencing guidelines. They’re dangerous mainly due to black criminals preying on black victims.

Nor is the racial disparity in prison inmates explained by the enforcement of drug laws. Blacks are about 37.5 percent of the population in state prisons, which house nearly 90 percent of the nation’s inmates. Remove drug offenders from that population and the percentage of black prisoners only drops to 37 percent. What drives black incarceration rates are violent offenses, not drug offenses. Blacks commit violent crimes at seven to ten times the rate that whites do. The fact that their victims tend to be of the same race suggests that young black men in the ghetto live in danger of being shot by each other, not cops. Nor is this a function of blacks being picked on by cops who are “over-policing” certain neighborhoods. Research has long shown that the rate at which blacks are arrested is nearly identical to the rate at which crime victims identify blacks as their assailants. The police are in these communities because that’s where the 911 calls originate.

If liberals want to help reverse these crime trends, they would do better to focus less on supposed racial animus and more on ghetto attitudes towards school, work, marriage, and child-rearing. As recently as the early 1960s, two out of three black children were raised in two-parent households. Today, more than 70 percent are not, and the number can reach as high as 80 or 90 percent in our inner cities. For decades, studies have shown that the likelihood of teen pregnancy, drug abuse, dropping out of school and other bad social outcomes increases dramatically when fathers aren’t around. One of the most comprehensive studies ever undertaken in this regard concluded that black boys without a father are 68 percent more likely to be incarcerated than those with a father—that overall, the most critical factor affecting the prospect of young males encountering the criminal justice system is the presence of a father in the home. All other factors, including family income, are much less important.

As political scientist James Q. Wilson said, if crime is to a significant degree caused by weak character, if weak character is more likely among children of unmarried mothers, if there are no fathers who will help raise their children, acquire jobs, and protect their neighborhoods, if boys become young men with no preparation for work, if school achievement is regarded as a sign of having sold out—if all these things are true, then the chances of reducing the crime rate among low income blacks anytime soon is slim.

Many on the Left sincerely want to help the black underclass. The problem is that liberals believe bigger government is the best way to help. But having looked at the track record of government policies aimed at helping the black underclass, I’m skeptical.

This year marks the 50th anniversary of President Lyndon Johnson’s commencement speech at Howard University. Johnson had signed the Civil Rights Act a year earlier and would sign the Voting Rights Act two months later. And he used the speech to talk about what the government should do next on behalf of blacks. These two laws marked merely the end of the beginning, he said:

That beginning is freedom; and the barriers to that freedom are tumbling down. Freedom is the right to share, share fully and equally, in American society—to vote, to hold a job, to enter a public place, to go to school. . . . But freedom is not enough. . . . You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, “you are free to compete with all the others,” and still justly believe that you have been completely fair. . . . The next and the more profound stage of the battle for civil rights [is] . . . not just equality as a right and a theory but equality as a fact and equality as a result.

But what if Johnson was mistaken? What if there are limits to what government can do beyond removing barriers to freedom? What if the best that we can hope for from our elected officials are policies that promote equal opportunity? What if public policy makers risk creating more problems and barriers to progress when the goal is equal outcomes?

The civil rights struggles of the mid-20th century exemplified liberalism at its best. The 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act outlawed racial discrimination in employment and education and ensured the ability of blacks to register and vote. All Americans can be proud of these accomplishments. But what about the social policy and thinking that arose from the ruins of Jim Crow? Good intentions aside, which efforts have facilitated black advancement, and which efforts have impeded it?

In 1988, right around the 25th anniversary of the Great Society, Harvard sociologist Nathan Glazer published a book called the The Limits of Social Policy. Glazer analyzed Great Society programs from the perspective of someone who believed that government action was the best way to improve the lot of blacks. But his assessment humbled him. He concluded that in many ways, the Great Society programs were causing just as many problems as they were solving—that good intentions aren’t enough.

Unlike Nathan Glazer, many policy makers today are still riding high on good intentions. They don’t seem particularly interested in reconsidering what has been tried, even though 50 years into the war on poverty the result isn’t pretty. While gains have been made, significant racial disparities remain in some areas and black retrogression has occurred in others. The black-white poverty gap has widened over the past decade and the black poverty rate is no longer falling. The black-white disparity in incarceration rates today is larger than it was in 1960. And the black unemployment rate has, on average, been double the white rate for five decades.

Confronted with these statistics, liberals continue to push for more of the same solutions. Last year, President Obama announced yet another federal initiative aimed at helping blacks—an increase in preschool education, even though studies (including those released by his own administration) have shown no significant impacts in education from such programs. He said that he wants to increase reading proficiency and graduation rates for minority students, yet he opposes school voucher programs that are doing both. He continues to call for job-training programs of the sort that study after study has shown to be ineffective.

Fred Siegel, an expert on urban public policy, has written extensively about the liberal flight from evidence and empiricism that began in the 1960s. The Left, wracked by guilt over America’s diabolical treatment of blacks, decided to hold them to different standards of behavior. Blacks, Siegel writes, were invited to enter the larger society on their own terms. Schools, which had helped poor whites, ceased incorporating poor blacks from the South into the mainstream culture. Discipline as a prerequisite for adult success was displaced by the authentic self-expression of the ill-educated. Blacks were not culturally deprived but simply differently-abled—more spontaneous and expressive and so forth. Liberals tried to improve conditions for blacks without passing judgment on antisocial black culture. And this sort of thinking continues to this day. Walter Williams once wrote that he’s glad he grew up in the 1940s and ’50s, before it became fashionable for white people to like black people. He received a more honest assessment of his strengths and weaknesses, he says, than black kids today are likely to receive from white teachers and employers who are more interested in being politically correct.

After George Zimmerman was acquitted in the shooting death of Trayvon Martin, President Obama explained the black response to the verdict this way. Blacks understand, he said, that some of the violence that takes place in poor black neighborhoods is born out of a very violent past in this country, and that the poverty and dysfunction that we see in those communities can be traced to that history. In other words, Obama was doing exactly what the Left has been conditioning blacks to do since the 1960s, which is to blame black pathology on the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow.

This is a dodge. That legacy is not holding down blacks half as much as the legacy of efforts to help. Underprivileged blacks have become playthings for intellectuals and politicians who care more about revelling in their good intentions or winning votes than advocating behaviors and attitudes that have allowed other groups to get ahead. Meanwhile, the civil rights movement has become an industry that does little more than monetize white guilt. Martin Luther King and his contemporaries demanded black self-improvement despite the abundant and overt racism of their day. King’s self-styled successors, living in an era when public policy bends over backwards to accommodate blacks, insist that blacks cannot be held responsible for their plight so long as someone, somewhere in white America, is still prejudiced.

The more fundamental problem with these well-meaning liberal efforts is that they have succeeded, tragically, in convincing blacks to see themselves first and foremost as victims. Today there is no greater impediment to black advancement than the self-pitying mindset that permeates black culture. White liberals think they are helping blacks by romanticizing bad behavior. And black liberals are all too happy to hustle guilty whites.

Blacks ultimately must help themselves. They must develop the same attitudes and behaviors and habits that other groups had to develop to rise in America. And to the extent that a social policy, however well-intentioned, interferes with this self-development, it does more harm than good.

This concept of self-help and self-development is something that black leaders once understood quite well, and at a time when blacks faced infinitely more obstacles than they face today. Asked by whites in 1865 what to do for freed blacks, Frederick Douglass responded: “I have had but one answer from the beginning. Do nothing with us! . . . If the apples will not remain on the tree of their own strength . . . let them fall! . . . And if the Negro cannot stand on his own legs, let him fall also. All I ask is, give him a chance to stand on his own legs!” Douglass was essentially saying, give blacks equal opportunity and then leave them alone.

Booker T. Washington, another late 19th century black leader who had been born a slave, once said that it is important and right that all privileges of the law be granted to blacks, but it is vastly more important that they be prepared for the exercise of these privileges.

Douglass and Washington didn’t play down the need for the government to secure equal rights for blacks, and both were optimistic that blacks would get equal rights eventually, although neither man lived to see that day. But both men also understood the limits of government benevolence. Blacks would have to ready themselves to meet the challenge of being in a position to take advantage of opportunities once equal rights had been secured. The history of 1960s liberal social policies is largely a history of ignoring this wisdom.

Obama is a Racist in a Liberal's Clothing

On the 2014 December 6  “Justice,” Judge Jeanine Pirro blasted President Obama for taking sides based on color, not facts, and stoking the flames "racial hatred, resentment and divisiveness."

"Every young American who loses his life should be the concern of the man in the White House. But why is it that we only hear from him when death involves a person of color?" Judge Jeanine asked.

She pointed out that Obama wasn't elected by just one group, but all Americans, Republican and Democrat, black and white.

"Why don't you act like you're the president of all of us?"  Judge Jeanine expands:

Tonight, Americans, once hopeful that after electing the first African American president, the issue of race would be a thing of the past, are left with Barack Obama, who stokes the flames of racial hatred, resentment and divisiveness.

A man who instead of healing our nation, instead of overcoming any racial divide prefers to take sides, based not on facts but on color, to prejudge situations based not on sworn testimony and evidence but on conjecture and a one size fits all resentment, to peddle the narrative of a national problem between law enforcement and young people of color.

Every young American who loses his life should be the concern of the man in the White House. But why is it that we only hear from him when death involves a person of color?

But James Foley, an American who never committed a crime and was beheaded, is nothing more than a blip in the president's golf game.

Mr. President, why do you send White House officials to Brown's funeral but no one to James Foley’s memorial service?

I don't remember you injecting yourself in the death of a young white American or sending in the attorney general on a local crime before the justice system can act - as you did with Eric Holder, sending him to Ferguson?

Why not speak about young African Americans killed by other African Americans? Black-on-black crime? The kind of crime for which your home town of Chicago is so infamous?

Instead, you see racism everywhere.

Mr. President, you say we need trust between police and the African American community, police need to be sensitive to minority concerns.

How about you teach respect for those who put their lives on the line every day, for those who protect us, for those who are the one line of defense against an otherwise barbaric and chaotic society?

How about you teach that when a police officer says "move along" or "put your hands behind your back,” you do it!

And teach that you don't call cops derogatory names or reach into a police cruiser to grab a cop's gun.

But then again, you're the one who thinks cops are stupid.

Mr. President, you demand respect. Why not demand respect for police. When they issue an order, it's not a suggestion, an invitation, a mediation or a request.

As anarchy reigned and protesters looted stores and burned buildings of hard-working Americans - many African American - where were you?

Or do you believe that those crimes are justification for a perceived injustice? Simple collateral damage - like Occupy Wall Street. That tax paying Americans need to just suffer through and then pay for?

But no, you fan the flames of resentment, trumpeting your own investigation that you could have completed by now, only prolonging the anger. Suggesting, yes, folks, this is yet another white injustice, and I’m going to reverse it with a federal civil rights investigation, when you know there isn't a smidgeon - your word - of evidence to support the claim.

Weren't you going to reverse the Trayvon Martin-George Zimmerman case with a federal investigation? What happened? Nothing! Absolutely nothing!

Have you no respect for the law? For our system of justice?  If you don't like the law, change it. Hell, you do it all the time without Congress!

And you bring in the greatest charlatan of them all, a man who makes a living inciting racial hatred, a tax cheat and a liar, who claimed an African American girl was raped by a white man - stirring the pot of racial hatred that resulted in a defamation judgment against him - to sit with you at the citadel of power in the White House to discuss how law enforcement should be more sensitive.

Now, there are times when injustices occur, but the system also works.

I know. According to that same Al Sharpton , as DA, I convicted the first white cop of shooting an African American in the history of New York.

That jury, not affected by centuries of racism - but the facts, pure and simple.

Mr. President, if you're so concerned about racism, why don't you do something about it?

It is no secret black crime is disproportionately high. Why not focus on poverty, on lack of education, on drugs, on guns, on broken families

Bill Clinton moved Americans from welfare to "workfare." You turn back the hands of time.

With you as president, things aren't so great for African Americans. The poverty rate among African Americans has gone up since you took office. Fewer African Americans own homes. The number of African Americans on food stamps rose from 6 million to almost 11 million since you took office.

Mr. President, you seem to forget, you weren't just elected by one group. You were elected by all of us: Republicans and Democrats, blacks and whites.

Why don't you act like you're the president of all of us?

WELL SAID!