{"id":35847,"date":"2013-04-18T06:02:02","date_gmt":"2013-04-18T11:02:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=35847"},"modified":"2013-04-18T06:14:32","modified_gmt":"2013-04-18T11:14:32","slug":"crisis-wasted-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=35847","title":{"rendered":"Crisis Wasted"},"content":{"rendered":"

President Obama’s effort to jam down a gun grab died yesterday in the Democrat-controlled Senate.<\/p>\n

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). \u00a0 Only 4% of the American people consider controlling guns a vital issue<\/a>.<\/p>\n

But that didn’t stop The One from trying.<\/p>\n

Krauthammer put it well; the entire push was emotional blackmail (emphasis added):<\/p>\n

\u201cIf you\u2019re going to make all of these emotional appeals,\u201d he said, \u201cyou\u2019ve gotta show that if this had been law, it would have stopped Newtown. It would not have. It\u2019s irrelevant<\/strong>. I wouldn\u2019t have objected, I might\u2019ve gone the way of McCain or Toomey on this, but it\u2019s emotional blackmail to say \u2018You have to do it for the children.\u2019 Not if there\u2019s no logic in this<\/strong>, and that I think is what\u2019s wrong with the demagoguery that we\u2019ve heard out of the president on this issue.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And in defeat, the emotional badgering only got worse. \u00a0From the President’s Rose Garden speech immediately after the vote (emphasis added):<\/p>\n

\u201cThe gun lobby and its allies willfully lied about the bill,\u201d Mr. Obama said in the White House rose garden about 90 minutes after the vote. \u201cIt came down to politics.\u201d \u2026<\/p>\n

\u201cThis pattern of spreading untruths \u2026 served a purpose. A minority in the U.S. Senate decided it wasn\u2019t worth it. They blocked common-sense gun reforms, even while these families looked on from the Senate gallery. It\u2019s not going to happen because 90 percent of Republicans just voted against that idea.<\/strong>\u201d \u2026<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And, as always, he accused Republicans of\u00a0politicizing the issue.<\/em><\/p>\n

<\/em>Remember Berg’s Seventh Law<\/a>: \u00a0“When a Liberal issues a group defamation or assault on conservatives\u2019 ethics, character or respect for liberty or the truth, they are at best projecting, and at worst drawing attention away from their own misdeeds.” \u00a0 When President Obama accuses Republicans of “politicizing the issue”, he’s saying he’s angry because they politicized it better than he did.<\/p>\n

The gun legislation was never about controlling guns, and it was never “about the children”.<\/p>\n

John Hinderaker at\u00a0Power Line\u00a0<\/em>spelled it out clearly (emphasis added):<\/p>\n

As we have noted more than once, pretty much everything Obama does is intended to stir up the Democratic Party\u2019s base to drive turnout in 2014. Obama knows he can\u2019t do much of anything as long as the GOP holds the House<\/strong>, 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\u2013any gun control measure!\u2013could 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<\/strong>. Obama could have raised countless millions <\/strong>from his fervently anti-gun base to go after the more vulnerable such Republicans. Now, the issue won\u2019t even come up in the House, and Obama and the Democrats will have to find something else.<\/span><\/p>\n

That, I think, is the best explanation for the profound disappointment that Obama showed today.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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. \u00a0 They’d have been of no more use to him than, say, the people killed in Benghazi.<\/p>\n

And the media would have let it fade into tragic history three months ago. \u00a0Like Benghazi.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[64,22],"tags":[243],"class_list":["post-35847","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-president-obama","category-victim-disarmament","tag-bergs-7th-law"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35847","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=35847"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35847\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":35853,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35847\/revisions\/35853"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=35847"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=35847"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=35847"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}