Obama’s ‘Over-The-Top-Extremism’ Sets Drug Dealers Free … Some Gun Owners He Can Accept
It's a "glaring inconsistency" all right.
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The pen and phone president strikes again – this time with another prison break for the only kind of gun owners he apparently will accept.
The mainstream media are gushing over President Obama’s decision this week to commute the sentences of 98 convicted felons, thumbing his nose at the American justice system once again to provide literal “get out of jail free” cards mainly to drug dealers doing serious time.
But the men and women who actually enforce the country’s laws aren’t joining in the “hosannas” at all.
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If this story sounds familiar, it is. In his nearly eight years as president, Obama has cut legal prison sentences for 872 criminals, with almost 700 of them in this year alone, according to a White House News release.
That’s more than the total commutations of every president in the post-war era — combined — and the White House openly admits to a political motive behind the seeming acts of mercy.
The President’s clemency authority is a powerful tool being used to powerful effect, but the individualized nature of the relief granted today also highlights the urgent need for bipartisan criminal justice reform legislation. Only Congress can achieve the broader reforms needed to ensure our federal sentencing system operates more fairly and effectively in the service of public safety.
OK, about that public safety business.
The news release out of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. doesn’t mention it, but the administration’s list of the offenders getting a pass, published by the Washington Post, makes it quite clear that every one of the sentences Obama commuted this week was imposed for serious drug dealing.
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And anyone who thinks the high-level illegal drug trade doesn’t include violence hasn’t been watching television, reading newspapers, or noticing popular culture since the Prohibition days.
They are “the very people you would think you’d most want to keep off the streets in the middle of a violent crime wave,” Steve Cook, president of the National Association of Assistant U.S. Attorneys told LifeZette.
It’s also worth noting that fully 20 percent of the felons Obama favored with early freedom were also convicted of firearms possession in the course of committing their drug crimes. So apparently the most anti-gun president in American history has a soft spot for one kind of American who bears arms – actual criminals who use them to break actual laws.
It’s a safe bet that a drug dealer carrying a gun isn’t practicing his skeet shooting.
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“It does seem inconsistent to say there should be limitations — and significant limitations — placed on good and honest citizens who are protecting themselves and give leniency to drug dealers who are arming themselves to commit violence,” Cook told LifeZette.
“The inconsistency could not be more glaring.”
But the actual crime is irrelevant to Obama’s real motive for cutting criminals loose.
During a speech to the NAACP last year, Obama criticized drug sentencing that was introduced to fight the crack epidemic in America of the 1980s – an epidemic that was particularly devastating in the nation’s black communities.
“Mass incarceration makes our country worse off, and we need to do something about it,” the president told the group in Philadelphia.
The problem with the president’s logic here is that it confuses the American justice system — which considers individual cases, trials and sentences — with the kind of “mass” system that sent Indians to reservations in the 19th century.
It’s the kind of deliberate shoddiness of language liberals delight in, but is still fundamentally wrong.
William Otis, adjunct law professor at Georgetown University and a counselor to the Drug Enforcement Administration under George W. Bush, told LifeZette that past presidents have used the power of pardon and commutation to remedy individual injustices resulting from flaws in the justice system.
But that’s not what Obama is doing. This president — who has consistently demonstrated his fondness for a United Nations that wants the U.S. to pay reparations to African-Americans for the long-dead institution of slavery — is taking actions in spite of the laws enacted by a Congress elected by American citizens. In other words, he’s flouting the spirit of democracy…again.
“There’s no reasonable way to think of that other than over-the-top extremism,” Otis told LIfeZette.
For Obama, extremism in the defense of armed drug dealers is no vice.
They’re the only kind of gun owners he likes.
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