Three Fingers of Politics » Blog Archive » To Obama, Justice is for the Dogs

To Obama, Justice is for the Dogs

Having served his time for the torture and murder of innocent dogs, Michael Vick deserves a second chance on a level playing field.

Yep, President Obama gave a fine speech at the Tucson Massacre Memorial Hootenanny & Jamboree. Nope, it wasn’t his fault organizers and attendees thought an event marking horrendous tragedy should come off as a cross between an Amway sales rally and the Jerry Springer Show.

No, not his responsibility that someone decided it proper to begin the event with an unsubtle lesson in Arizona identity politics, in which one Carlos Gonzales drew the requisite whoops of appreciation formentioning the accident of where and to whom he was born. And could Obama have known Gonzales would follow it with a “Native American” invocation of airport-souvenir shop spirituality?

It’s not his fault everybody got a tee-shirt and a program, and maybe an official scorecard. Plus it was “Sheriff Dupnik Bobble Head Night” for the first 10,000 through the gate. Rumor has it Oprah wanted to give a Prius to everyone in the audience, but organizers’ rigid sense of decorum wouldn’t allow it.

No, Obama did just fine. He managed to speak for over 30 minutes without substantially talking about himself – which must have required a Herculean effort from the Barack “L’tat c’est moi” Obama. There were times, to be sure, when he seemed to get swept up in the enthusiasm of the crowd, when his cadence, tone and volume took on the old messiah-in-front-of-Styrofoam-Greek-columns magic. But mostly he tried to match the dignity of the occasion.

The president made it a point to address the charges that the vitriolic political discourse was responsible for the massacre. He rightfully and responsibly rejected the claim, without calling out his political allies for initiating the calumny.

Having been accused of inciting violence without a shred of evidence, Sarah Palin deserves, well, bad things, man.

That’s fine I suppose. To have taken his supporters to task for smearing with – yes blood – Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and anyone else opposing his policies would have struck a clanging false note. He’d watched in silence for days at that point, enjoying the political windfall while trying to appear above it all.

Let’s not forget, as president, as leader of his party, and as the standard bearer of the American left, he could have spoken out before. As early as Saturday night, the left’s “blame conservatives” narrative was fully developed. He could have stepped on it then – the professor of Constitutional Law (as he likes to remind us) admonishing his troops that evidence is required before leveling any charge, let alone one involving murder. It would have been an act of presidential leadership that won him great credit from the right, and actually done something concrete to cleanse the political atmosphere like he’s always maintained he wanted to. But he waited.

But, just a couple of weeks ago, apropos of nothing, the President of the United States reached out to the Philadelphia Eagles to commend them for signing Michael Vick upon his release from prison for torturing and killing dogs for fun and profit. A spokesman explained that Obama feels “it’s never a level playing field for prisoners when they get out of jail. And he was happy that we did something on such a national stage that showed our faith in giving someone a second chance after such a major downfall.”

Football isn’t really within Obama’s sphere of concern. Nobody asked for his thoughts on Vick. We weren’t all crying out for presidential leadership over dog fighting or the balance of power in the NFC East. But he boldly waded in.

Under a month later, with six dead and a grievously wounded congresswoman, the nation reeling in horror, and his own supporters cynically shoehorning the incident into their pre-fab narrative about the violent right, he was silent.

We’d do well to remember that. As he gets his post-memorial bump in the polls and enjoys his second honeymoon with the press (NBC’s Chuck Todd said he got chills during the Tucson speech; no word if Chris Matthews achieved climax) remember the silence, and remember that, while he championed a confessed and convicted felon, he was silent while the innocent were falsely accused.