To: President Barack Obama
\nFrom: Mitch Berg, Uppity Peasant
\nRe: \u00a0Optics<\/p>\n
President Obama,<\/p>\n
You made a big show of flying the “Newtown Parents” – white, upper-middle-class suburban Americans all – to the White House on Air Force One.<\/p>\n
I have nothing but sympathy for the parents of Newtown. \u00a0Losing a kid is the worst thing I can imagine. \u00a0And God willing, imagining is all I have to do so far. \u00a0Knock wood.<\/p>\n
But I’m wondering – were there any bereaved parents from Chicago on the plane? \u00a0 Any standing with you in the Rose Garden yesterday?<\/p>\n
No, Mr. President. \u00a0You surrounded yourself with bereaved parents who looked like NPR producers and CNN reporters, rather than residents of projects and parents of “working families”. \u00a0Why was that?<\/p>\n
Because it looks to me like you’re trying less to make America – including the parts of it where black people are being gunned down daily – safer, and more like you’re trying to get white, upper-middle-class people to dig deeeeeep for the next Congressional election.<\/p>\n
That is all.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
To: President Barack Obama From: Mitch Berg, Uppity Peasant Re: \u00a0Optics President Obama, You made a big show of flying the “Newtown Parents” – white, upper-middle-class suburban Americans all – to the White House on Air Force One. I have nothing but sympathy for the parents of Newtown. \u00a0Losing a kid is the worst thing […]<\/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":[249],"class_list":["post-35857","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-president-obama","category-victim-disarmament","tag-open-letters"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35857","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=35857"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35857\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":35859,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35857\/revisions\/35859"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=35857"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=35857"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=35857"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}