Today, president Obama spoke at the graduation ceremonies at the University of Michigan. The big news item out of the address was Obama's statement that political discourse in the requires an underlying civility. Obama supposedly wants things toned down as we move forward. Strangely, I think he means this even though he is one of the biggest offenders of this policy.
For example, just earlier this week Obama announced that the new law in Arizona would result in police stopping and checking the papers of a Hispanic man taking his daugther out for ice cream on a Sunday. Obama is a highly trained lawyer, indeed a law professor. He knows that the law in Arizona allows for no such thing. The police would require a valid reason other than the ethnicity of the suspect before they could stop that Hispanic man. Random race-based stops by the police are expressly forbidden. But Obama, knowing the truth, still went ahead with the lie. When the President of the United States announces the effect of a statute, most people do not go and check the text of the statute to make sure he got it correct; they take it as a given that he got it correct. So Obama knowingly spreads race baiting lies for his own political ends. That doesn't sound like a civil discourse to me. Oh, he said it all with a smile on his face, but that does not change the clear effect of what he is doing. Obama is trying to demonize the officials in Arizona and thereby energize Hispanice voters for the fall. If race relations in the country are set back for decades, if race based violence in the country surges, Obama does not care.
It would be nice if, for once, Obama listened to his rhetoric and actually practiced what he preaches.
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