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President Obama on Tuesday inadvertently blamed George W. Bush for a startling drop in U.S. crime in the first half of 2009.
According to the FBI, murder and manslaughter fell by 10 percent, all violent crimes were off 4.4 percent, rape was down 3.3 percent and property crimes declined 6.1 percent, continuing trends begun in 2008.
Crime rates haven’t been so low since the 1960s, and when a reporter unexpectedly pointed this out during a presidential news conference, Obama initially bristled.
“Well, of course, a lot of key indicators were dropping when we took office,” Obama said. “I inherited these anemic crime statistics, and turning them around has been job one since the day I took office.”
As his aides frantically attempted to get his attention, the president continued to fault the Bush administration for “the failure of these numbers to recover more quickly.”
“Thanks to the efforts of my administration, the economy is on the rebound,” Obama said, “but employment and crime tend to lag behind other economic indicators, which is why so many folks are still jobless, apparently too idle and despondent to even slay or pillage.”
As the president began a more detailed explanation of his predecessor’s shortcomings, White House staffers managed to get his attention via a nearby teleprompter, and he quickly changed topics.
White House press secretary Robert Gibbs later clarified the president’s statement and said that “if crime had increased, it would have been Bush’s fault, so President Obama was correct that there is a connection between George W. Bush and crime.”
Examiner Columnist Scott Ott is editor in chief of ScrappleFace.com, the world’s leading family-friendly news satire source.
