President Obama and his top spokesman are mostly avoiding responding to harsh criticism from some GOP critics that the president played a role in instigating the shooting of the Dallas police officers by linking the killings of two black men by police this week to “racial disparities.”
“I’m intentionally making an effort not to spend a lot of time responding to those comments,” White House spokesman Josh Earnest told reporters traveling with the president in Poland Friday. “The focus of our attention, as the president pointed out earlier, today should be on the families who are grieving.”
“We can also have a discussion about what values we have in common and how that might inform some of our efforts to solve these problems,” he said. “But I’ll let those who are using that kind of rhetoric and casting those kinds of aspersions explain their rationale.”
As the reports came in about the sniper attacks on police in Dallas Thursday night, former Rep. Joe Walsh, R-Ill., called for Obama to “watch out” in a Twitter post, declaring that “this is now war.”
“3 Dallas Cops killed, 7 wounded.”
“This is now war. Watch out Obama. Watch out black lives matter punks. Real America is coming after you,” he wrote in a tweet that has since been deleted.
Walsh and others were responding to the Dallas attack and comments Obama made Thursday night about the white police officer shootings of two black men in Minnesota and Baton Rouge over the previous 48 hours. Obama said all Americans should be concerned about the police killing of the black men, which he said were “symptomatic” of “racial disparities” in the U.S. criminal justice system.
“We are better than this,” Obama said.
Asked directly about Walsh’s tweets, Earnest said he wouldn’t respond “not even in an oblique” way.
At first, reporters believed Walsh had deleted the tweet in question, but later Friday he said Twitter took down the tweet.
In tweets early the next morning he referred to the shooter or shooters as “uneducated black thugs” and placed the blame on Obama and Black Lives Matter for the officers’ deaths.
Still, he said, he wasn’t calling for violence against Obama “or anyone.”
“Obama’s words and BLM’s deeds have gotten cops killed,” he tweeted.
Later Friday Rep. Roger Williams, R-Texas, also accused the president and other politicians of instigating the shooting of the Dallas police.
