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March 28th, 2024

Insight

Lesson for an administration: You don't help by hurting

Jay Ambrose

By Jay Ambrose

Published April 14, 2016

We’re here to help you, says the Obama administration as it often sacrifices one group to help another group that gets sacrificed, too. In these cases, which are scarcely hard to find, it sometimes acts autocratically and just about always relies less on common sense than on a bundle of progressive pretensions.

Take, for instance, the bureaucratic effrontery of telling public high schools they must let certain anatomical guys into girls’ locker rooms and showers or lose federal funding. The purpose, justified by a fantastical misreading of Title IX of the Civil Rights Act, is to soothe the feelings of these fellows who think of themselves as girls while simultaneously disregarding the feelings of girls who fear embarrassment.

Yes, let’s have empathy for transgender people, treating them with sensitivity as many schools do, but let’s have empathy for these equally important girls, too. When you throw out ages-old privacy norms, girls can easily come to see transgender teens more as menaces than anything else, no favor to them, and wonder what their own rights may be. What we have here is political correctness that is glaringly incorrect.

Even more serious lately is the way President Barack Obama has embraced Black Lives Matter, a group that marches around with fury on its lips and T-shirts saying such things as “Murderous Cops.” He seems in close agreement with the thesis that racist cops are out there killing innocent blacks but fairly few whites.

With reference to extensive research by The Washington Post and others, Heather Mac Donald of Manhattan Institute points to some pertinent information. Blacks kill cops at more than twice the rate that cops kill blacks. Even the unarmed blacks who get killed are mostly attacking cops. Blacks also kill other blacks in numbers exceeding the total number of homicides of whites and Hispanics. While 26 percent of police killings are blacks constituting just 13 percent of the population, blacks also commit a disproportionate number of violent crimes, making cop confrontations more likely.

None of this means that indefensible police shootings have never happened or that the vast majority of blacks are bad citizens never faced with demeaning racial attitudes. But policing has been made more difficult and less proactive in some neighborhoods because of the anger stirred up initially by misrepresentation of the Ferguson, Mo., shooting and all those cheering on Black Lives Matter. And, says Mac Donald, that in turn has helped propel a two-digit, one-year upsurge of homicides in our largest cities. In other words, many black people are getting killed in part because of this movement divisively encouraged by the president.

Then we get to the president’s gun control efforts, which have gun manufacturers down on their knees saying thank you, thank you, thank you. Let him give a speech on the subject, and people fearful this just might be their last chance rush out to make purchases. Because of his futile pursuit of laws that would likely have been futile themselves, the gun sales during his time in office have been the highest in history, something like 100 million as of calculations last year.

One last topic: The Obama administration is getting tougher on companies that pay some of the highest taxes in the world on their operations in this country and then set up headquarters overseas so their operations there will not be so heavily taxed, too. Most European countries, despite their overblown welfare states, keep their domestic corporate taxes down and wisely do not tax anything made and taxed elsewhere, thus making their companies more competitive. Our president apparently thinks getting our economy growing more and creating more jobs is cheating, and stands firmly against this last step.

Let’s concede some good moves by this administration, but let’s agree as well that one way of summing up the legacy will be the word “perverse.”

Jay Ambrose
(TNS)

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Jay Ambrose, formerly Washington director of editorial policy for Scripps Howard newspapers and the editor of dailies in El Paso, Texas, and Denver, is a columnist living in Colorado.

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