President Obama Chats with David Simon About Drugs, The Wire & Omar

Back in 2012, Pres­i­dent Oba­ma, already on record as being a fan of The Wire, was asked by ESPN to name his favorite char­ac­ter on the show, to which he replied “It’s got to be Omar, right? I mean, that guy is unbe­liev­able, right?” Fast for­ward to 2015, and we find Mr. Oba­ma host­ing David Simon (the cre­ator of The Wire) at the White House, and hav­ing a frank con­ver­sa­tion about the TV show and the war on drugs, and what lessons we’ve learned along the way. Of course, the con­ver­sa­tion does­n’t end with­out Omar get­ting a men­tion … or with­out us get­ting to see Oba­ma as TV host. A sign of what’s to come after 2016?

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  • Hanoch says:

    It is fine to dis­cuss adjust­ments to drug enforce­ment pol­i­cy in the US, but it would be bet­ter to dis­cuss the fac­tors that lead to the crim­i­nal cul­ture in the first place. For one thing, Oba­ma and his col­leagues on the left ignore the unbe­liev­able decline on vir­tu­al­ly every sta­tis­ti­cal mea­sure in the black com­mu­ni­ty after the so-called “War on Pover­ty” began in the 1960s. In 1965, three quar­ters of black chil­dren were born to a mar­ried moth­er; the exact oppo­site is true now. And while Oba­ma sends his own chil­dren to pri­vate schools, he dooms oth­er minor­i­ty chil­dren to lan­guish in poor­ly per­form­ing pub­lic schools, rather than upset a core Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty con­stituen­cy (the teach­ers’ unions) and pro­vide these chil­dren with sim­i­lar edu­ca­tion­al choic­es. I find it very dif­fi­cult to take this man’s self-pro­fessed com­pas­sion seri­ous­ly.

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