Katie Pavlich: The audacity of Al Sharpton

When Barack Obama was elected to be the 44th president of the United States, there were high hopes for what he could accomplish. A nation that had made its way past slavery, through a Civil War and beyond segregation was finally going to fully heal as Americans elected their first black president. Sadly, that promise and those dreams never came true. In fact, the opposite has happened. America’s race scars have been cut wide open, and the healing has been replaced with unnecessary and deceitful division. How? Obama’s decision to build a partnership with and lend credibility to one particular person is partially to blame.
 
{mosads}MSNBC host, tax evader and proclaimed “Reverend” Al Sharpton is a top adviser to President Obama and has been since day one in the Oval Office. In fact, with more than 60 visits to the White House during Obama’s tenure, you could say Sharpton is one of the top advisers outside of paid staff. Heck, he’s even vacationed with the president on Martha’s Vineyard and has a close relationship with senior White House adviser Valerie Jarrett. He’s also played a key role in advising Obama about nominations to powerful positions inside the federal government, including a replacement for Attorney General Eric Holder as the nation’s top law enforcement officer.
 
It was just recently that President Obama spoke at Sharpton’s April 2014 National Action Network conference, where he praised and glorified him as a leader.
 
“I want to say, first of all, thank you to your leader, Reverend Al Sharpton. Give him a big round of applause,” Obama said, giving him even more legitimacy. Attorney General Eric Holder said similar things during a speech at the conference, going out of his way to repeatedly thank him for his friendship and longtime partnership.
 
Considering Al Sharpton has taught his followers and young men in the black community to judge and hate those born with a different skin color, it’s alarming how much access he’s had to the most powerful offices in the country. Sharpton is a liar, conman and professional manipulator. Throughout his years on the public stage, which have been many, the majority on the left have embraced his ideas and upheld him as a go-to source on problems plaguing the black community. Sharpton has been performing this act for years, and he’s finally made it to the A-list on the White House visitor’s log.
 
When “peaceful” protesters took to the streets of New York City for Al Sharpton’s Million Marchers earlier this month, many of them chanted, “What do we want? Dead cops! When do want them? Now!”
 
Did Sharpton rightly condemn them? No. Instead, he offered soft rhetoric and tried to distance himself from his own supporters in order to evade responsibility for their actions. When NYPD officers Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu were executed, Sharpton had the audacity to turn himself into the victim and tried to gain sympathy from the press by playing an alleged death threat voicemail.
 
“Hey [n-word], stop killing innocent people. I’m going to get you!” the voicemail Sharpton played said. Is it legitimate? With Sharpton’s track record, who knows.
 
“I’ve had several like this. … We are now under intense threat from those that are misguided, by those that are trying to blame everyone from civil rights leaders to the mayor rather than deal with an ugly spirit that all of us need to fight,” Sharpton lamented. “The blame game will only lead to further kinds of venom and further division.”
 
How rich. The man who has made a living and a career spewing racial venom and inciting a false blame game for decades now wants everyone else to avoid … the blame game.
 
This isn’t the first time Sharpton has been on the side of the wrong “victim.” Cowards like Sharpton stoke bogus racial flames with gasoline and then run away crying politics or “blame” when real consequences happen, whether it’s the lives of young men being ruined by people like Tawana Brawley, or the families of NYPD officers Ramos and Liu who will never see them again.
 
If Al Sharpton and his ilk really worked to solve problems and true racial disparities in America, they’d work their way out of a job, out of money and, most importantly, out of power, which is why Sharpton has been championing the same causes for decades with little results to show for it.
 
Will President Obama ever condemn Sharpton? Will Holder? No, and it’s because they truly agree with his ideas and believe in his positions, regardless of whether those ideas and positions are based in fact or help the country move forward.
 
Like the brave police officers of the New York City Police Department have turned their backs on Mayor Bill de Blasio, it’s about time the same be done to Sharpton.
 
Pavlich is the news editor for Townhall.com and a Fox News contributor.