I really would like to put the recent riot in my rearview mirror, but Obama and the clucks running Baltimore won’t let me.

For instance, what Obama took away from the creeps running wild was that urban police should not be allowed to use the best equipment available to protect themselves or their cities from the barbarians. Instead of dropping the hammer on those who riot, Obama has decided that cops should be deprived of riot gear.

For her part, Marilyn Mosby, the prosecutor who assured the mob that she would deliver justice on their behalf, has urged a judge to place a gag order on the six cops she indicted and their lawyers. In the meantime, she constantly attacks the defendants in the media. Unless the entire state wishes to see itself humiliated, Ms. Mosby must be called on the carpet by the Maryland Bar Association for displaying such obvious contempt of the First Amendment.

It is a strange world in which states, cities and major corporations, condemn Indiana for passing a law guaranteeing the religious rights of business owners, but absolutely nobody suggests boycotting Baltimore, whose mayor essentially rolled out the red carpet for vandals and arsonists, and then essentially begged the mob for forgiveness.

Mayor Rawlings-Blake even went so far as to invite Loretta Lynch’s Justice Department to investigate the Baltimore P.D. for institutional racism. Keep in mind that Baltimore is just possibly the blackest major city in America. Its population is 68% black, as is its police force. Its fire department is 58% black, its school district 86% black and its city council is 90% black. Its Mayor is black, as is its Chief of Police and its congressional representative, Elijah Cummings.

But with all that, 54% of its population is on welfare, and the blame for that is naturally directed at white conservatives.

Liberals, as well as some bottom-feeding Republicans, blame black poverty on all sorts of things, but rarely mention fatherless homes and a 71% rate of illegitimate births. We all know that black kids seeking an education are often taunted for “acting white.” I wonder if black men who are married to the mothers of their children and who help support their families are also demeaned for “acting white.”

We are all very aware of the exceptional blacks — people like Thomas Sowell, Condoleezza Rice, Walter Williams, Larry Elder, Shelby Steele and Milwaukee Sheriff David Clarke, Jr. – but what constantly confounds me are the hard-working, responsible blacks who get an education, learn a trade, stay off drugs and raise their children, but who still vote for the same sleazy plantation owners as those sucking up welfare as if it’s their birth right.

Another staple of black apologists is to blame the staggering incarceration rate of black men on a racist legal system. But a fair number of blacks being sent to jail are judged by black juries, sentenced by black judges and defended by black lawyers. So it is rather difficult to blame white society for all the black criminals serving time.

To begin with, there are 320,000,000 Americans. Of the 320 million, whites number 206 million; Hispanics, 54 million; blacks, 38 million; Asian, 18 million, American Indian and Alaskan natives, four million. But when you study the prison population, the numbers are so out of whack, that you either have to accept that ours is an even more corrupt legal system than the one run by the Nazis, or that certain groups of people simply commit a disproportional percentage of crimes.

Whites constitute roughly 65% of the population at large, but constitute only 24% of those in jail; Hispanics are 17% of the population, but 35% of those behind bars; blacks are 13% of the population, but an astonishing 37.5% of those in the cooler. Although they represent 5.3% of the population, Asians are clearly underachievers in this one particular area, representing a meager 1.5% of America’s prison population.

Only a liberal would look at those numbers and blame the system. And only Obama would move to decriminalize drug dealing as a way to make those numbers look better. But as the Wall Street Journal’s black editorial writer, Jason Riley, has pointed out, even if we stopped jailing drug dealers, the black prison percentage would only drop from 37.5% to 37%.

As bad as liberal policies are for America, they are even worse around the world. Because Obama is so adamant about having what only he regards as a major foreign policy achievement on his resume, he is leaving Israel and the Gulf nations to swing in the breeze while he offers Iran the entire Middle East in exchange for a signature on a nuclear deal.

If he had a single ounce of red blood in his veins, Obama would have sent our military over there months ago to wipe out ISIS before they burned, beheaded or crucified any more people. Instead, Obama and his stooges defend his inaction by insisting that Americans are war-weary. I beg to differ. What we’re sick of is engaging in wars we have no desire to win unconditionally.

If an American president ever pledged himself to wipe out those in the Middle East and North Africa who target Christians for extermination, who kidnap young girls and turn them into sex slaves and who exhort their pea-brained followers in the U.S. and Britain to execute soldiers, cops and civilians, I feel reasonably confident that his approval rate would hover well above 80%.

Speaking of the shame of a nation, a reader recently let me know that he agrees with those who compare Obama to the totalitarian tyrants of the 20th century. I replied that I had no doubt that he shared the instincts of Stalin, Hitler, Franco, Mao, Castro and Mussolini, but, fortunately, he lacks their power to kill dissidents or even have them exiled to Siberian gulags. The most he can do is sic the IRS on them, which is contemptible, but not fatal.

My reader then wrote back to say that, unlike the way things were even in the 80s and 90s, thanks to current technology and mass education, we now have a lot of people who have amassed huge amounts of information, but only a few who have enough sense to put a washer on a bolt before assembling something and wrenching a nut on it.

In response, I wrote: “Going back even further, we had a bunch of guys named Washington, Jefferson, Madison and Adams, who even knew how to put a washer on a new nation they’d just invented. But now everything is coming undone because of one loose nut in the Oval Office.”