In his syndicated column today, Pat Buchanan decries President Obama for supposedly “stoking the fires of racial resentment” with his remarks on the ongoing controversy surrounding the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri.
Citing dubious reports that Brown “smashed” officer Darren Wilson’s eye socket, Buchanan criticized the notion that Brown’s death had anything to do with race, warning that if “a St. Louis officer is wounded or killed in revenge for Brown, President Obama will deserve a full share of the moral responsibility.”
What, other than its racial aspect, can explain why Obama is so hung up on Ferguson? At the Congressional Black Caucus dinner Saturday, he was back stoking the embers.
“Too many young men of color feel targeted by law enforcement, guilty of walking while black or driving while black – judged by stereotypes that fuel fear and resentment and hopelessness.”
Obama is here implying that Michael Brown was profiled, judged “guilty of walking while black,” when shot and killed.
But that is false, and Barack Obama knows it is false.
Brown had just knocked over a convenience store after collaring the clerk and was walking in the middle of the main street in Ferguson, blocking traffic, when Officer Darren Wilson confronted him.
Did Wilson shoot Brown in a racist rage? Or did Wilson, face battered and eye socket smashed in a fight with the 290-pound, 6-foot-4-inch Brown, empty his gun in self-defense? We do not know. And neither does Barack Obama.
For weeks, a grand jury in St. Louis County has been hearing testimony, trying to sort it out. But by implying the shooting was done for racial reasons, that Brown may have been “targeted” for “walking while black,” Obama is stoking the fires of racial resentment.
Why is he parroting a party line about America that he knows is more myth than truth? White cops are not the great lurking danger, nor the leading cause of violent death, of black teenagers and men.
That role is fulfilled by other black teenagers and other black men. And the statistics on the ugliest forms of racial violence in America – interracial assaults, rapes, murders – reveal that such crimes are overwhelmingly black-on-white.
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Saturday night, a Ferguson cop was shot in an incident unrelated to August. But Chief Jackson and State Highway Patrol Capt. Ron Johnson have told the Washington Post their officers have been repeatedly threatened and, since August, have come under gunfire.
If a St. Louis officer is wounded or killed in revenge for Brown, President Obama will deserve a full share of the moral responsibility.
It is time he started acting like a president of all the people and dropped this role of outside agitator.
