Texas Lt. Governor Dan Patrick took his fever dream that President Obama is somehow anti-police directly to Washington recently when he attempted to make it appear that the president wasn’t really supportive. President Barack Obama handed him his proverbial ass.
Patrick appeared on ABC News’ The President and the People and confronted Obama directly:
I’m concerned that police officers across the country — they know you support law enforcement of course, but do they really in their heart feel like you’re doing everything you can to protect their lives? Words matter, your words matter much more than mine. Everything you say matters. And I would ask you to consider being careful when there is an incident of not being too quick to condemn the police without due process and until the facts are known.
It is remarkable that the kind of man that would belittle CIVILIANS from running away from bullets because they happened to be at a protest has the spine to actually say that the president isn’t supportive of American citizens because they happen to wear blue uniforms. But of course the Texas GOP seems to turn out some of the most disgusting examples of hypocrisy in the country, so it isn’t that surprising.
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Of course, any reasonable person knows that Obama’s support for our men and women in blue, those in the military, those in our hospitals, schools, and shopping malls all have his support, “regardless of their political party.” This was a blatant attempt to politicize an issue for personal political gain.
However, Obama not only didn’t take the bait, he slammed Patrick with a stiff dose of truth and a very polite verbal smack down that should send him into his happy place seeking a yes man. Someone who will agree with him no matter what so that he can blame the current state of affairs on the mean president and not his failure to recognize reality.
Obama opens with:
First of all, I would say that I have been unequivocal at condemning any rhetoric directed at police officers.
So I think, lieutenant governor, you’d have to find any message that did not include a very strong support for law enforcement in all my utterances dating back to Ferguson. Because I rely on law enforcement to protect me and my family just like everybody else does. I appreciate the sentiment. I think it’s already been expressed. But I’ll be happy to send it to you in case you missed it.”
The president shut down Patrick’s weaseling and continued spanking the man. Obama took apart Patrick’s partisan rhetoric point by point and left the lieutenant governor, and the nation, with a very clear picture: the police deserve due process, just like all Americans, but we can not ignore that black Americans are not being treated the same as other races.
I think the one thing that all us need to do, you and me, is to make sure that we don’t pretend as if there aren’t potential problems in how police and certain communities interact.
This isn’t a matter of us versus them but a matter of all of us working to solve this problem.
Obama then drove home the fact that this problem is a community one. We all need police. and “we need the police to be embraced by the community. We need good, solid relationships with the police and that can’t happen if we ignore the problems. Also, police can’t shoulder the burden of creating such relationships alone; and they shouldn’t.
It’s also got to be on the communities, civic leaders, churches, elected officials, to try to create these kinds of conversations before crises happen. Because so often we wait until something happen happens and then we react.
So I would ask the question to Dan Patrick: Do the protestors, peace seekers, civic leaders and black Americans in Texas know you have their backs? Because it seems that if you are only concerned about defending cops - regardless of context - you are part of the problem, not the president.
Watch this epic smackdown below:
Featured image via screen capture
