Crisis Wasted

President Obama’s effort to jam down a gun grab died yesterday in the Democrat-controlled Senate.

The effort was politically dodgy from the beginning; even with the saturation media coverage of the Newtown massacre, most Americans weren’t fooled; the facts remain that mass shootings are at low historical rates and violent crime overall is dropping (outside Chicago).   Only 4% of the American people consider controlling guns a vital issue.

But that didn’t stop The One from trying.

Krauthammer put it well; the entire push was emotional blackmail (emphasis added):

“If you’re going to make all of these emotional appeals,” he said, “you’ve gotta show that if this had been law, it would have stopped Newtown. It would not have. It’s irrelevant. I wouldn’t have objected, I might’ve gone the way of McCain or Toomey on this, but it’s emotional blackmail to say ‘You have to do it for the children.’ Not if there’s no logic in this, and that I think is what’s wrong with the demagoguery that we’ve heard out of the president on this issue.”

And in defeat, the emotional badgering only got worse.  From the President’s Rose Garden speech immediately after the vote (emphasis added):

“The gun lobby and its allies willfully lied about the bill,” Mr. Obama said in the White House rose garden about 90 minutes after the vote. “It came down to politics.” …

“This pattern of spreading untruths … served a purpose. A minority in the U.S. Senate decided it wasn’t worth it. They blocked common-sense gun reforms, even while these families looked on from the Senate gallery. It’s not going to happen because 90 percent of Republicans just voted against that idea.” …

And, as always, he accused Republicans of politicizing the issue.

Remember Berg’s Seventh Law:  “When a Liberal issues a group defamation or assault on conservatives’ ethics, character or respect for liberty or the truth, they are at best projecting, and at worst drawing attention away from their own misdeeds.”   When President Obama accuses Republicans of “politicizing the issue”, he’s saying he’s angry because they politicized it better than he did.

The gun legislation was never about controlling guns, and it was never “about the children”.

John Hinderaker at Power Line spelled it out clearly (emphasis added):

As we have noted more than once, pretty much everything Obama does is intended to stir up the Democratic Party’s base to drive turnout in 2014. Obama knows he can’t do much of anything as long as the GOP holds the House, so his primary goal is to stoke outrage on the left, in hopes that 2014 will look like 2008 and 2012, and not like 2010. So no doubt he hoped that some gun control measure–any gun control measure!–could get through the Senate, so that pressure, probably irresistible, could be brought to force a vote on the same proposal in the House. Not so that it might pass, but so that House Republicans would be on record voting against gun control. Obama could have raised countless millions from his fervently anti-gun base to go after the more vulnerable such Republicans. Now, the issue won’t even come up in the House, and Obama and the Democrats will have to find something else.

That, I think, is the best explanation for the profound disappointment that Obama showed today.

If those children hadn’t promised Obama a way to save the second half of his term, Obama would have never attached his political future to it.   They’d have been of no more use to him than, say, the people killed in Benghazi.

And the media would have let it fade into tragic history three months ago.  Like Benghazi.

8 thoughts on “Crisis Wasted

  1. Childish, petty, and classless. And now even former Obamacare supporters are admitting it is a train wreck coming down the tracks.

    Oh well, maybe now he can pivot to the economy. Again.

  2. Did Obama fly to Philadelphia last week to pay his respects to the hundreds of that were children brutally murdered by Kermit Gosnell & his crew…with a fucking pair of scissors? Maybe I missed it…

    No of course he didn’t. Barry Sotero wants Kermit Gosnell to go away, and go quickly. Gosnell played by the rules laid out by the prochoice crowd, but he was careless; he got caught. Now he’s endangering the solidity of every lie Democrats have told for the last 40 years. And Barry has no choice but to ignore it.

    Leftists would pitch babies in the air and catch them on spears if it served to keep them in power.

  3. Great role model there, Barack…acting like a petulant child and sore loser when you don’t get your way. Of course it would NEVER occur to you that you are simply wrong.

    And shame on the Senate too…not for failing to expand federal gun restrictions, but for engaging in the political posturing in the first place and not even attempting to perform a basic primary function and passing a budget for four years…and counting.

  4. Perhaps I’m whistling past the graveyard since President Obama will no doubt be back with a vengeance since he heard the one word he is rarely told: “no.” I believe that many of us feel that the murders are less outrageous to him than is the defying of his best effort. Four people were killed and 20-something were criminally injured in Chicago last weekend. No attempt to deal with that; business as usual. So obviously death doesn’t outrage him.

    I believe he went wrong with his tactics. Even the most ardent Obama supporter must have started to cringe whenever the president was shown with the heartbreaking (but irrelevent to the issue) Newtown parents. At least after the first few times.

    Second error was his attitude towards the issue and towards those he viewed as being on the wrong side of it. He went full-out hateful. No middle ground. Even the most dedicated soccer mom is probably close to, or knows, one of those whom President Obama demanded they despise; grandpa the duck hunter, his target shooter sister, or even her husband who buys the occasional issue of Outdoor Life.

    Hence the push back. Had he came in diplomatically, treated the opposition as equals who might be misinformed, asked them for their help, and appealed to them, he may have fared better; just because vilification well worked against smokers doesn’t mean it will always work.

    He came across as a petulant, self-centered, hateful little man who was willing to use anything ( grieving parents, kids, and irrelevant celebrities) to further HIS goals and win HIS vendetta.

    I really think that “nice” is important. It got the lying cheater Bill Clinton (re) elected and the arrogant John Kerry the boot. No one should argue that the late Senator Wellstone was nice. Even Rod Grams. That is what I think really worked against the president and that he will likely not change. That would be like being told “no.”

  5. He came across as a petulant, self-centered, hateful little man who was willing to use anything ( grieving parents, kids, and irrelevant celebrities) to further HIS goals and win HIS vendetta.

    He came across as that, because that’s what he is. The left elected someone with the emotional maturity of a kindergartner to the presidency.

    But that’s what narcissists do, ya know?

  6. Now Joe, there couldn’t possibly have been four murders in Chicago last weekend. It’s a gun-free zone, donchaknow?

    Seriously, having grown up in NW Indiana and having been through the “projects” of the South Side a number of times (going to Comiskey, along Stony Island to the museums and Rush Hospital, detour off 294 on the way to O’Hare), it baffles me that Obama couldn’t connect the plight of those who live there with the policies followed by Chicago Democrats for the past 40 years.

    Of course, if he doesn’t really care about anything but his own power, then that would make sense, wouldn’t it?

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