Conservative Donnybrook

President Obama famously stated during his campaign for the office he now holds that he wanted Americans to be able to frankly and openly discuss matters of race in America. Okay.

Last night, as I watched the President’s press conference, I watched in mild shock as Lynn Sweet (from Obama’s adopted hometown newspaper, the Chicago Sun-Times) unabashedly toadied up to the privileged, elitist president by lobbing a (likely pre-screened) softball question having nothing to do with so-called healthcare reform. Calling the President’s attention to the brouhaha surrounding his “friend” Henry L. “Skip” Gates’ arrest by Cambridge, MA police, the President, a former Constitutional Law professor, said “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 is a long history in this country of African-Americans and Latinos being stopped by law enforcement disproportionately, and that’s just a fact.”

So, to recap, the President of the United States of America — after admitting he did not have a command of the facts — made some serious leaps in a nationally televised press conference.

I would not be “pretty angry” if police officers investigating a possible burglary at my house asked me to identify myself, nor would I be “pretty angry” if they detained me if I were stupid enough to yell at them and refuse to provide such identification. In fact, neither would just about any other sane member of society not bent on attacking police officers. But there’s more to it, of course. Just as I suspected when I heard of the incident, “Professor” Gates, who makes his living — a handsome living among the privileged elite of Northeastern academia in Harvard — immediately began to play the race card, and I feel confident in speculating that he did so with a view toward future racemongering, as is his wont. Read the police reports for yourself. You be the judge. 

But let’s frankly and openly discuss another thing that’s “just a fact,” Mr. President: African-Americans and Latinos “disproportionately” commit the crimes in this land of ours. Not so in many other places; but here in the good ol’ U.S. of A., even with a Republican-authored and pushed Civil Rights Bill, the facts are plain. Janet Reno’s Department of Justice confirmed it, even. Federal UCR stats continually confirm it. Blacks and Latinos, and specifically, young black and Mexican, Dominican, and Puerto Rican men, disproportionately commit crimes of almost all classifications. Steve Sailer had a detailed and irrefutable piece on the matter in 2005 on VDare.com. Please take the time to read it and pay close attention to the data he lists and the sources he cites.

That has quite a lot to do with the “long history” of some minorities being “disproportionately” stopped: it’s called criminal profiling, and it is entirely different from simple racial profiling. Guess what? A white guy in a BMW circling the block in a crappy lower-income black neighborhood — as anyone who has ever watched COPS could tell you — is just as likely to be stopped (moreso, probably) as a black guy in the same area, because, chances are, he’s up to no good. Looking for blow, a hooker, whatever. Same thing applies to the ones cops know by experience commit other types of crime. Except those other types of crime turn out to be the ones society deems most serious: murders, aggravated assaults, robberies, burglaries, thefts, and so on. If blacks comprise about 13% of the population, give or take of the country as a whole, and if that 13% is “disproportionately” crammed into urban areas, we still should raise an eyebrow when the crimes in those areas with higher concentrations of blacks and Puero Ricans, for example, still show a disproportionately large number of those minorities committing those crimes. Not just getting arrested for them, mind you, because noone yet is insinuating (against evidence or common sense) that whites are committing them at higher rates, they just aren’t being arrested for them. Yet. I’ll bet someone, perhaps “Professor” Gates, will surprise me.

So, Mr. President, we’ve laid some other facts out there. Let’s discuss them. How about you start by loudly, vociferously, and continuously demanding that certain slivers of certain minority groups stop acting the way they do? You know, before you go accusing the diversity instructor and universally recognized nonracist good guy cop of acting stupidly before you know anything about the incident (apart from what your racist friend Skip told you, that is).

It’s as low as ever, and PJM’s Roger Kimball explains (bold by me)

“People keep telling me how wildly popular Obama himself is, even if support for virtually all his major initiatives is eroding. Not true–the first bit, I mean. David Brooks had an interesting piece in our former paper of record today about the “Liberal Suicide March.” I think he’s right about the direction of the march. But why, apart from the sentiments of his colleagues at that fast-sinking newspaper, does he believe that “Most Americans love Barack Obama personally.” Every poll I’ve seen suggests the opposite. Nota bene: Obama did not “win by a landslide,” as the good people from Acorn, MoveOn.org, CNN, and The New York Times like to imply. He won by a margin of about 52-46–respectable these days but not hardly a landslide. And since being elected, Obama has, despite a moment of euphoria among the left, sunk steadily in the public’s estimation. In fact, he ranks 10th out of the 12 post-war presidents at this point in his tenure. Politico reports that “the number of Americans who say they trust the president has fallen from 66 percent to 54 percent. At the same time, the percentage of those who say they do not trust the president has jumped from 31 to 42.” Could it be worse? Sure. And it probably will be soon.

 There is a larger question about Obama. Back when he was campaigning, some commentators assured us that, despite his hard-left associates, pronouncements, and instincts, Obama really was a “pragmatist” who who govern from the center. Any evidence of that yet? I think Bill McGurn is right that, so-far, Obama has been anything but “post-partisan.” But as the rats desert the ship and his poll numbers plummet, one wonders whether Obama will muster the political canniness that saved Bill Clinton.

Wake me up when he fires Rahm Emmanuel and David Axelrod. No, I’m not holding my breath