THE SEAN HANNITY SHOW

Failure of Leadership It's been months since the death of Michael Brown, yet Ferguson remains in the news for all the wrong reasons. Two police officers were shot this week and a manhunt for the shooter(s) is still underway. It's clear that the conversation surrounding race is far from healed. In fact, it is getting worse. According to a recent CNN/ORC poll, “Thirty-nine percent believe relations between blacks and whites have worsened since Mr. Obama took office, while 15 percent say race relations have improved and 45 percent say they have stayed the same.” Newt Gingrich recently called this a “tragic failure” that we have an African-American president and attorney general and yet race relations feel further apart than when Obama took office. Do those tensions exist purely between members of the African-American community and law enforcement or is it pervasive amongst us all? No matter the case, people in positions of power only seem to be exacerbating the problem. It was Eric Holder who once said that America was “a nation of cowards” when it came to the discussion of race. But is there perhaps a better way to discuss race than we've seen in the fallout of Ferguson, NYC and other recent examples? It seems as though politicians, administration officials and activists have been so quick to jump to conclusions on issues dealing with race, rather than waiting for the facts to emerge. They'd rather seize the opportunity to create their own narrative and divide us, rather than wait for the facts and quell the anxiety. This is exactly what President Obama has done on multiple occasions, whether it was the Cambridge police acting stupidly or in the case of Michael Brown. Rather than waiting for the Department of Justice to investigate and conclude that “Hands up, don't shoot” was a complete fallacy, this narrative was perpetuated before the facts were presented. Therefore, even though it turns out to be false, the narrative continues nonetheless. This does the discussion of race relations a disservice. There is no excuse for the behaviors outlined in the DOJ's report on the Ferguson police department. I want to make that very clear. There is no excuse for the violation of anyone's civil rights. But there is also no excuse for using fiction to advance a cause. The fact is that “hands up, don't shoot” never happened and officer Darren Wilson was exonerated of any civil rights violations. I am not saying that Obama or Holder or others are responsible for the shooting this week, nor that they are happy about what happened. But we cannot deny their rush to judgement, which only added to the charged nature of racial tensions in a negative way rather than a productive way. In that sense, they could have been more responsible and measured. They helped perpetuate an atmosphere of suspicion, and when the facts ultimately didn't shake out, it's no wonder that people were upset. I can only assume this was unintentional, but actions and words carry a lot of weight when they are coming from figures like the president and attorney general. They failed to lead and to heal, and we are worse off because of it. Political Correctness Run Amok Radical Islamic barbarians are terrorizing and threatening the world. Yet the Obama administration and the Department of Homeland Security are more concerned about domestic right-wing terrorists. CNN got ahold of a yet-to-be-released intelligence assessment and concluded that, "Some federal and local law enforcement groups view the domestic terror threat from [right-wing sovereign citizen extremists] as equal to -- and in some cases greater than -- the threat from foreign Islamic terror groups, such as ISIS, that garner more public attention." CAIR has come out to praise the DHS report on right-wing extremists. This also coincides with the conclusion of the White House conference on "violent extremism," which failed to adequately address radical Islamic extremism. It's amazing the lengths they will go to for the sake of political correctness.