Fools Rush in

Disclosure: This blog is not about racial issues, per se, though there are references to such within. This is a blog about our president and his actions with regard to the promises he has made and the promises he has broken. If you construe every criticism of our current president as racially based, you probably don’t want to read what I have to say.

“You know, if I had a son, he would look like Trayvon.” — Barack Obama, March 23, 2012

Is anyone reading this blog that is not familiar with the context of the above comment? Let me preface by referring to a similar intrusion on somebody else’s business made by our illustrious law-enforcement officer-in-chief. In early summer 2009, Mr. Obama took it upon himself to interject himself into a local law-enforcement matter that transpired in the Cambridge section of Boston, MA. By his own admission, Mr. Obama did “not know all the facts” and “might be a little biased.” The law-enforcement matter concerned an arrest of a friend of Mr. Obama and, unfortunately, even though the president admitted he might be biased and did not know all the facts that did not stop him from commenting on the situation anyway. It has been said that only “fools rush in where wise men never go.” I’ll let you decide how that applies here.

So President Obama made the pronouncement that the Cambridge law-enforcement officials acted “stupidly” in the arrest of his friend even though Mr. Obama did not know all the facts surrounding the arrest. Mr. Obama went on to make other inane comments as if it was within his jurisdiction to inform the Boson Police how to conduct business in their town, as well. In the end, the president finally backtracked a few steps and then, in an attempt to smooth everything over, he held what became known as the “Beer Summit” and invited both the arresting officer and the arrestee for a beer hoping for a “teachable moment” and the possibility that a love-fest would break out and everyone could go home happy. Nuff said! Oh, as if all that wasn’t enough, Joe Biden, everybody’s working-man’s hero, got in an invite as well.

Allow me to add a little more data about the Cambridge snafu. In a justification of his comments, Mr. Obama said, “…it doesn't make sense…that the situation escalated to the point that Gates was arrested,” and with all that’s going on in the country with health care, the economy, and wars abroad, “it doesn't make sense to arrest a guy in his own home if he's not causing a serious disturbance."

It is important to point out that it is expressly the job of the police to conduct law enforcement within its jurisdiction. It is definitely not the task of a police officer to concern himself with trying to fix health care in America, boost the economy in a down market in America, or prosecute a war in a foreign country. In fact, those tasks are the job of the president whose job description does not include worrying about local law enforcement. There are people selected within individual communities who have been given jurisdiction over those things.

This brings me to the president’s comment about Trayvon Martin which seems again to place him out of his realm of jurisdiction and ultimately served only to further fuel racial hatred in America. One could wish that the president would take his own advice and concern himself with giving America a workable health plan, fixing the economy or, at least, getting out of the way of the free market, and work for resolution of our difficulties overseas. Given all that, it would seem that he would not really have the time to interject himself into the middle of a local law-enforcement matter in Sanford, FL.

Most of us know something about what happened in Sanford, FL, on Feb. 26, 2012, but none of us really knows all the details because we were not there. Nor were Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, Spike Lee, or President Obama there to know all the facts of the case. Just as the president asks us to trust him in guiding the ship of state that is the United States of America, could he not trust the Sanford Police Department and the good citizens of Sanford to work out their own law-enforcement matters?

Have you ever heard the name Matthew Owens? Approximately two months after the Trayvon Martin shooting, Matthew Owens, a 40-year-old white man in Mobile, AL, is in critical condition from a beating in an incident that involved a crowd of possibly 20 people wielding chairs, brass knuckles, pipes and paint cans. There is some dispute over whether someone in the mob was overheard saying, “Now that’s justice for Trayvon.” Whatever the case, it is clear that two months after the Trayvon Martin shooting the repercussions of the racial overtones raised in Sanford are still being felt and one wonders how the president’s comments about Trayvon are helping the situation especially in light of his promise to bring Americans together.

The mayor of Mobile is urging the public not to jump to conclusions but to wait for the police to “explore a racial motive if the evidence supports it.” Allow me to point out that Obama’s mother was white and that the victim of this Mobile, AL, beating could look like Obama’s cousin if he had one. Mr. Obama did not feel motivated, however, in what evidently was a racially motivated crime to reveal that information to us. Yet we have Mr. Obama, Mr. Sharpton, Rev. Jackson, and movie director Spike Lee all wading into the George Zimmerman/Trayvon Martin case without the facts with the latter three insisting it was a racial hate crime. Mr. Zimmerman is Hispanic, but the media, in an attempt to make the contrast in race more evident between the black Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman, referred to Zimmerman as a “white Hispanic.” I am positive that I have never seen that phrase before. I have seen people referred to as “white” and others referred to as "Hispanic," but never have I seen the “white Hispanic” reference.

As Mr. Obama himself said, there is already enough going on in this country, aka, a health-care plan about to be put in place that will bankrupt us all; an economy that is in the tank with people dropping off the “unemployed but still looking” list daily because they’ve given up (yet they are not figured into our unemployment numbers anymore to make it seem like things are getting better); and we have a war going on with the potential of others breaking out all over. Isn’t all of that enough to keep our president occupied and out of the business of local law enforcement? Isn’t local law enforcement a states' rights issue? Did we really need the president to jump in and inflame the racial tensions that were already at a fever pitch in Florida?

No, Mr. Obama, you do not have a son and you know nothing about either Trayvon Martin or George Zimmerman, nor did you apparently care to find out about Matthew Owens in Mobile, AL, because it evidently did not serve your purposes.

Someone questioned me about a statement I made and asked me for evidence that President Obama had done more than any other recent president to separate Americans and pit us one against the other. The truth is that the evidence is legion and the above is only one small part of what Obama has done to drive a wedge between the citizens of this, already hurting, country.