He jumped to conclusions as was often the case, often in situations involving the police. He also did this with some of the shooting that occurred. I still remember where I was when he went on a gun tirade within an hour or two after an Oregon school shooting, prior to many family members even being notified if their loved ones were injured, and prior to even knowing who the shooter was, whether he had the gun legally, etc... Yet with all his focus on gun control, he rarely if ever made an attempt to acknowledge and try to address the horrific gun violence in Chicago. That is his home town and state and gun laws there are stronger than many cities, and he chose to ignore the black on black crime as it did not fit the narrative he was trying to push.
A couple niggles:
The conclusions Obama "jumped to" were typically correct.
He "attacked" the cops in Cambridge for arresting Henry Louis Gates trying to get into his own home, the officers apparently having trouble believing a Harvard Professor was black. Here's what Obama actually said when the press asked America's new first black president about the incident: "I don't know, not having been there and not seeing all the facts, what role race played in that. But I think it's fair to say, number one, any of us would be pretty angry; number two, that the Cambridge police acted stupidly in arresting somebody when there was already proof that they were in their own home, and, number three, what I think we know separate and apart from this incident is that there's a long history in this country of African Americans and Latinos being stopped by law enforcement disproportionately."
Nothing untrue here. And something we really did need to talk about. How you could find this more divisive than the current President defending the Confederacy just blows my mind. When Obama took heat for the "acted stupidly" comment, he invited all parties to the White House for a beer, where it was agreed that all parties could have handled the situation better.
Nobody was killed in that case. And the cases got much, much worse. Not because there was an increase in bad cop behavior, but because cell phone cameras were now capturing the horrific incidents blacks have been enduring for years.
Obama often addressed the issue of gun violence in Chicago. Many black leaders addressed gun violence in Chicago. Many continue to do so. Black on Black violence fits directly into the Black Lives Matter narrative, given that young black men do not value their own lives, figuring they will be dead or in jail regardless, a hopelessness not without statistical evidence. Whenever commentators want to deflect from a large and undeniable discrepancy in how blacks are treated under the same laws, they bring up "Chicago." It's a buzzword and it's bulls#!t.
And again, if you're clutching your pearls about how Barack Obama jumped to conclusions, how can you possibly defend the all-hours Tweets and unfounded bleatings of the constant embarrassment you helped put in the White House?
