There is a limited amount of time remaining for conservative to blame all of the world's problems on Obama so there appears to be a rush to fire their hottest, dangerously wrong, racist takes out the door.
Enter Fox News talking head Bill O'Reilly who says President Obama made black kids think it's cool to do heroin.
O’REILLY: Here's the deal. President Obama has made it a cause to go out and try to convince Americans that number one selling heroin’s not a violent crime. That's insane to me. Because I have seen what heroin does to people. All right? And number two, he does this because he believes that the justice system is unfair to black heroin dealers, see? Because more of them are arrested. The black heroin dealers and the crack dealers who are out on the streets, who are actually pedaling on the streets and are easier to arrest. He sees this as a racial thing. So he has tied the racial thing in to his permissive attitude about narcotics and what do we have? An explosion, an explosion of heroin use. Kids wanting to try it thinking it's cool. And that comes from the top. The leadership of this country so it is his fault.
The disproportionate application of law enforcement in America is so well documented that even O'Reilly acknowledges it, but that's not necessarily what I want to focus on here.
The amount of funding available for drug treatment programs increased under Obamacare and Congress just recently passed a bill that significantly increases funding for similar and related programs.
Why would our majority white, notoriously cheap, anti-nanny state Republican-controlled Congress do that?
Because heroin abuse has increased significantly in recent years, but not on city streets filled with roaming crack dealers that Bill O'Reilly saw in a movie staring Ice T and Wesley Snipes. The new epidemic is in predominately white and rural Midwestern and northeastern states where abuse has skyrocketed. In other words, Republicans quietly passed a sweeping drug treatment bill because it's hitting home in their own backyards.
It's unlikely that anyone could definitively point toward one specific reason why white people in the Rust Belt are killing themselves with drugs, but there's one thing we know for sure: they are, in fact, white.
To take a predominately white problem and ascribe it to black drug dealers who've supposedly been encouraged by President Obama is pure, distilled racism.
Of course, this is far from an original thought. It's a very old thought, one that in recent months has been widely shared by Maine Governor Paul LePage who said black drug dealers are traveling from New York to Maine where they impregnate white women and sell drugs. LePage more recently said these imaginary "people of color" are the "enemy" and need to be shot.
Governor LePage never was able to produce his binder full of black and Latino drug dealers because it doesn't exist. The overwhelming majority of people arrested for drug offenses in Maine are white.