Obama Displays Chip on His Shoulder Yet Again, Says Nobody Cared About Drug Abuse When It Was Minorities

Wednesday - March 30, 2016

RUSH: Man, oh, man, there's some stuff happening out there above and beyond the campaign that I would be remiss, I would go home today feeling profound guilt if I did not address some of these things. 

In no particular order.  I don't know how many of you saw it, but President Obama went to Atlanta to join this National Rx Drug Abuse & Heroin Summit.  It was yesterday afternoon.  They discussed drug addiction, the importance of treating it as a disease instead of a character flaw, but also as a treatment challenge rather than as a crime.  But as usual, Obama could not talk about this in an unattached way.  He couldn't just deal with the problem as it is; he had to attach his own biases and prejudices to it, which transferred bitterness to the discussion. 

And his basic point was (paraphrasing), "Yeah, hey, you know what?  It's all good, it's all wonderful that we're down here talking about prescription drug abuse and the heroin problem, but isn't it interesting that nobody cared when it was only African-Americans and Hispanics and minorities that had the problem?"  And I looked at this, and I said, "Can you drop your resentment?"  And he can't. 

He is incapable of dropping his resentment.  He is incapable of walking around without that giant chip on his shoulder about this country.  I don't care, I remain more convinced than ever that this guy has a giant problem with this country, that is institutional that dates all the way back to the founding.  It is rooted in what he thinks is something that was institutionally incorporated in the founding, and that is racism and discrimination and bigotry and white supremacy and all of this. 

He's running around, and his wife, too, constantly embittered, unable to get past it no matter what progress has been made, no matter what punishments have been meted out to people that he thinks are guilty over the course of our nation's history. No matter what changes have been made for the better, it's as though they never happened.  And it's as though the changes, even though they've happened, were made despite people wanting them to happen. 

Now, the prescription drug abuse problem and the heroin problem is what it is.  It's been around for a while.  It's been debated as either a demand-side problem or a supply problem.  But there's nothing new about it.  The focus now is on how do you deal with it, but I mean the size of the problem, it fluctuates and different drugs.  One year, two-year period it's cocaine, crack cocaine, go back to heroin, other than opiates, but it's there.  There's maybe an increasing percentage.  But of all things, for the president of the United States (paraphrasing), "Yeah, the drug problem was ignored when it was hurting the minority community."  It was not.  The drug problem has been on the minds of public servants and in people's heads and hearts for years. 

My whole life I'm aware of all kinds of efforts to deal with the drug problem, to properly define it, to come up with ways to treat it. I mean, Nancy Reagan was mocked.  She had a slogan back in the 1980s, "Just say no."  And everybody mocked it and made fun of it just like the same people mocked and made fun of the idea of abstinence as a way of avoiding teen pregnancy and abortion as contraception.  Anybody that came up and said, "Hey, be bigger than it and say no to it." 

"It's easy for you to say."  It was rejected.  But the point is all kinds of people have cared about it for a long time, and here's the president with this mocking, resentful tone (paraphrasing), "The drug problem was ignored when it was hurting minority communities."  The thing to learn from this is that he's still walking around with this giant chip on his shoulder and it's why he goes to places like Cuba and Argentina and everywhere else in the world, and when leaders of those countries start complaining about the United States, why, he agrees with them.  And it's why he further says we've got no moral authority over anybody.  We can't tell anybody the right or wrong way. We can't impose whatever it is we do on people, cause our past is nothing to write home about, either. 

And the dangerous part about this is that all the people, the Democrats and the leftists in this country that support the guy, applaud this kind of thing.  And it feeds this really unhealthy notion that there's nothing special about the United States, when there clearly is.  It feeds, it grows this belief on the part of millions of people in this country that there's no such thing as American exceptionalism.  This is not leadership; it's not inspirational; this is carrying grudges around.  And presidents are supposed to be bigger than that.