Speaking at a rally in Wisconsin on Tuesday, former President Barack Obama disingenuously said he could not understand why America got so “toxic and just so divided and so bitter.”
“I don’t understand how we got so toxic and just so divided and so bitter,” he mused. “I get why sometimes people just don’t want to pay attention to it. And we all have friends like that; we have family members who are just like, “Ahh, y’know, it’s all a circus out there.”
Yet Obama’s own rhetoric and that of other Democrat leaders has fanned the flames of division before and during the time he was president. As a July 2016 Rasmussen poll taken six months before Obama left office noted, 60% of Americans felt race relations had gotten worse since Obama’s election.
In 2016, campaigning for president, Democrat Hillary Clinton offered her deathless remark, “You could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the ‘basket of deplorables.’ Right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic—you name it.”
In April 2008, when he was running for president, Obama infamously said,“They get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”
More Obama:
2008: “I want you to talk to them whether they are independent or whether they are Republican. I want you to argue with them and get in their face.”
2009: “I don’t want to quell anger. I think people are right to be angry. I’m angry.”
2010, in an excerpt from Jonathan Alter’s book, “The Promise: President Obama, Year One,” Alter quoted Obama referring to members of the conservative Tea Party group as “teabaggers,” a vulgar slang term explained here.
2010, on the prospect of the GOP taking back the House of Representatives: “They see an opportunity to take back the House, maybe take back the Senate. If they’re successful in doing that, they’ve already said they’re going to go back to the same policies that were in place during the Bush administration. That means that we are going to have just hand-to-hand combat up here on Capitol Hill.”
Just prior to the 2010 election: “If Latinos sit out the election instead of saying, ‘We’re gonna punish our enemies, and we’re gonna reward our friends who stand with us on issues that are important to us’ — if they don’t see that kind of upsurge in voting in this election — then I think it’s going to be harder.”
2014: Obama said racism was “deeply rooted” in America, stating, “This is something that’s deeply rooted in our society, deeply rooted in our history.”
In 2016, at a memorial service for five Dallas police officers ambushed and gunned down by a man who said, according to Dallas police chief David Brown, that he “wanted to kill white people, especially white officers,” Obama declared:
America, we know that bias remains. We know it. Whether you are black or white or Hispanic or Asian or Native American or of Middle Eastern descent, we have all seen this bigotry in our own lives at some point. We’ve heard it at times in our own homes. If we’re honest, perhaps we’ve heard prejudice in our own heads and felt it in our own hearts. We know that. And while some suffer far more under racism’s burden, some feel to a far greater extent discrimination’s sting. Although most of us do our best to guard against it and teach our children better, none of us is entirely innocent. No institution is entirely immune. And that includes our police departments. We know this.
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