Obama hijacked the funeral service for the murdered Dallas policemen on Tuesday, turning a memorial service into a political event for his own gain. It was vintage Obama, self-centered, preaching to the country and the world, never ceasing to edge his politics and ideology into the mix.

As he started out, he was Obama at his best, the Obama that persuaded a majority of Americans to elect and re-elect him president. The slight nod of the head, the well-turned phrase, the pause between sentences, the quote from the Book of John and reference to the slain officers’ children. He was actually quite eloquent, and until he got into his politics said many of the things he should have said.

After the Dallas officers were shot at a Black Lives Matter rally, Obama’s political strategists realized that he needed to dampen the pace of divisive race relations and ever-growing anti-police sentiment in the black community – divisiveness largely instituted by Obama himself. They knew that Democrats could not weather a repeat of their 1968 convention in Chicago, nor could they weather the 1960s race riots in Watts, Detroit, Newark and Washington. Four months before a national election, where Obama’s legacy largely depends on who is elected as his successor, it was not helpful to have five officers shot to death at a Black Lives Matter rally. So what a golden opportunity it was of Obama to get himself invited to speak at the interfaith memorial service – a service he knew would draw national attention and be watched by millions of impressionable voters.

Tuesday’s Dallas speech was not the first time Obama at hijacked an event for his own benefit. Not by a long shot. When he appeared on national television in 2014 to respond to the decision of a grand jury not to indict Officer Darren Wilson for the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson Missouri, after uncomfortably telling his audience how important the rule of law is, he lectured the country on racism, bias against blacks on the part of the police and the criminal justice system, and mass incarceration

If there is, in fact, a war on the police, Obama is the instigator, the man who used every opportunity to stir it up, and the man who has done everything in his considerable power to keep it going. Starting with the arrest of Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates, when the president accused the police of acting stupidly before he had any idea what the facts were, to remarks that blacks were justified in believing that the criminal justice system was biased against them after the grand jury refused to indict Ferguson, MO police officer Darren Wilson for shooting Michael Brown. Again after the Baltimore riots, Obama spoke repeatedly of young blacks being treated differently by law enforcement officers “in stops and arrests, and in charges and incarcerations.” The statistics, he said, were clear: the criminal justice system is biased against African-Americans from one end to the other.

Of course, the statistics are not clear at all, at least to prove Obama’s point. If anything, from the results of one study after another, the statistics are clear that the system is not biased, but that the disparities in the criminal justice system are entirely the result of a significantly higher incidence of violent crime by blacks over whites. Despite the best efforts of the left to prove their point, they are unable to do, and instead simply ignore the facts.

To Obama, everything is about politics, even a memorial service for five murdered police officers. He will never let the opportunity pass to slip his ideology into the tribute to those being honored. He reminds us that democracy depends on adherence to the rule of law and in the next sentence refers to Al Sharpton’s chant that where there is no justice there is no peace. While saying he was “reminded of a passage in John’s Gospel” (more likely it was his speech writers who were reminded) he referred to centuries of racial discrimination, to slavery and to Jim Crow, as if any of it had anything at all to do with the murdered police officers. And of course no Obama speech would be complete without a mention of too many guns, of the need for criminal justice “reform,” of centuries of racial discrimination.

As if hijacking the memorial service were not enough, Obama then held hostage those in the audience, the families and friends of the murdered policemen, and law enforcement officers across the country and their millions of supporters with his interminable rant repeating the platitudes we have heard so often before.

Such a dishonor for those five brave officers, and for their brothers who mourned for them.