Do #BlackLivesMatter, that deeply, to Dear Leader?

Obama at a presidential town hall on (racism and?) police and (black?) lives.
Rex/Shutterstock via The Guardian.

Both Cornel West and a Black Lives Matter leader, Patrice Cullors, have called out out Compromiser-in-Chief, Barack Obama, for not seeming to truly care about black lives taken by police.

Of the two, Cullors' is the more important read. While West technically gets all correct, most of it is old news, and old news filtered through the sour grapes of being dumb enough to endorse Obama in 2008 when Cynthia McKinney was there just waiting for such endorsements, and it was already clear Dear Leader was everything West belatedly recognizes.

Cullors is all fresh content and all entirely about Obama's town hall.

Well, West does have the fresh content that Obama didn't stop in Minneapolis, or Baton Rouge, La., cities of recent fatal shootings of blacks by police. That said, he doesn't know how right he is. Obama had no town hall after Dylann Roof killed more blacks in Charleston than Micah Johnson did police officers in Dallas.

Cullors, who was at the town hall last week?

A shorter version is that it was an extended video/photo op. Shock me.

I would disagree a bit with one "shot" by Cullors. Rather than call ABC the instigator and Obama a collaborator on this, I'd call both of them co-instigators. Obama could start to prove me wrong by getting federal law enforcement agencies to stop dumping gas on flames.

And whether it's more an inability to deal with conflict, people pleasing from a mother's multiple failed relationships along with his navigating multiple cultural worlds, or what, I don't know. But, contra Cornel West, this isn't close to new. Post-2004 Democratic National Convention, Democratic leaders in the Illinois State Senate teed up pro-police and "tough on crime" bills for Obama to sponsor.

That said, if Harvard's Roland G. Fryer Jr. is right (and I think he's more right than wrong), the shootings themselves aren't the issue, because there's actually, apparently, no racial discrepancy (allowing for racially different police stop rates). It's everything else, starting with the different stop rates, that needs addressing.

Update: No, sadly, Obama has NOT called for a Black Lives Matter memorial. Snopes debunks this.