Barack Obama has a well-documented history of subtly and passive-aggressively stoking racial division, especially when it comes to police encounters with black Americans. He’s rarely brash and overt, but he’s always in the middle of it. From his assertion that police were “acting stupidly” to announcing that “if I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon [Martin],” Obama has fed the narrative of systemic racism and oppression. In so doing, he has fomented a deadly war on cops.

Obviously, every American should take Obama’s remarks about the current race riots with a truckload of salt.

Yesterday, Obama weighed in to denounce the rioting. “Let’s not excuse violence, or rationalize it, or participate in it,” he wrote via Medium. “If we want our criminal justice system, and American society at large, to operate on a higher ethical code, then we have to model that code ourselves.”

Wise and welcome words from a black leader, you might say. That would be true if Obama hadn’t spent the rest of the article excusing “justifiable anger” over the “ongoing problem of unequal justice” and “racial bias in our criminal justice system,” and opining about “a genuine and legitimate frustration over a decades-long failure to reform police practices and the broader criminal justice system in the United States.”

He asserts, “The overwhelming majority of participants have been peaceful, courageous, responsible, and inspiring. They deserve our respect and support, not condemnation.” And then he even concludes that the “heightened activism of young people … makes me hopeful.”

Doesn’t sound much like a strong denunciation of rioting and looting.

Almost laughably, Obama even reminds readers of something true while utterly skirting the implications: The levels of government that most impact criminal justice are state and local. Don’t get so focused on the presidency and Congress, he says, that you forget that “the elected officials who matter most in reforming police departments and the criminal justice system work at the state and local levels” [italics his]. He then complains about low voter turnout in races for mayor, county executive, police chiefs, district attorneys, and so on.

Yet he deliberately neglects to mention that, in the biggest cities affected by rioting, most of these officials are Democrats — and they often have been for decades. Chicago, which just had its deadliest weekend of the year, hasn’t had a Republican mayor since 1931. St. Louis, where four police officers were shot yesterday, hasn’t elected a Republican mayor since 1945. We could go on and on and on, but Democrats run the urban poverty plantations rioters are now burning to the ground in the name of “justice.”

That brings us to Obama’s old (emphasis on old) wingman, Joe Biden, who cowrote the 1994 crime bill that is now roundly blamed for the number of incarcerated blacks. The reasons for that disparity are complicated, but to many, it represents the very “racial bias in our criminal justice system,” Obama decried.

What has Biden said about the riots? “Protesting such brutality is right and necessary. It’s an utterly American response,” he said. “But burning down communities and needless destruction is not. Violence that endangers lives is not. Violence that guts and shutters businesses that serve the community is not.”

Perhaps someone should tell Biden’s campaign staff since they’ve been putting up bail money for rioters.

These two jokers have spent their entire careers fomenting racial division, yet they have the gall to lecture America about “systemic racism” and to tell black voters “you ain’t black” if you don’t vote Democrat. That’s the systemic problem that needs to change.