WaPO Seizes on Navy Yard Shooting to Run Political Cover for Obama’s Imploding Second-Term Agenda Kyle Becker | On 17, Sep 2013 The Washington Post seized upon the Navy Shipyard shooting that left 13 people dead to run cover for Obama’s struggling second-term political agenda. Blaming his inability to push through major legislation on a series of random tragedies — from Newtown to Navy Yard, as staff writer David Nakamura put it — the piece is yet another glimpse at how the president’s vestiges of public approval hinge on his ability to escape all accountability. Writing as if President Obama were the first president to deal with multiple crises as well as negotiating with Congress over major pieces of legislation, Nakamura wrote: Obama’s second term has been buffeted from the start by unpredictable calamities that have helped scuttle his priorities. In December, a mass shooting at an elementary school in Newtown, Conn., that left 26 people dead, including 20 children, prompted the newly reelected president to focus on an unsuccessful attempt to pass gun-control legislation ahead of other priorities. The Navy Shipyard shooting was briefly and sensitively touched upon by President Obama as the news broke, just prior to him launching into a manifesto against Republicans at a prescheduled speech. But perhaps it is this second aspect of his presidency — not the tragedy, but rather his taunting – that has stymied his agenda in a GOP-led House he has repeatedly vilified. “Are some of these folks so beholden to some extremists in their party that they’re willing to tank the entire economy … [and] to hurt people just to score political points?” he rhetorically asked, after offering his condolences for the recently slain men and women. The president’s ability to emotionally pivot from commiserating over the ‘unpredictable calamity’ to blasting his political opposition belies another falsity of the Washington Post piece: the president evidently approaches ‘tragedies’ more as ‘crisis-opportunities’ than affairs for idle hand-wringing. The Newtown shooting left 26 people dead, and horrifically, 20 of them children; but it was scarcely two days before it became a foray for Obama to push a long-standing aspect of his agenda: tighter gun control for all Americans, criminal and law-abiding alike. The same opportunism could be said of the Gabby Giffords shooting and the Aurora theater shooting, and the act of terrorism at Fort Hood by a confessed jihadist yelling “Allahu Akbar!” as he gunned down dozens of disarmed military personnel, murdering 14 (a pregnant woman with child included) and wounding 30 others. If you noted that all of these shootings took place in “gun-free zones,” you have pieced together a pattern that reflexive gun control advocates, who call for such irrelevant measures every time a tragic shooting takes place in a nation of three hundred million citizens, apparently have missed. Their standard is not an imperfect world with trade-offs and accepted realities like the existence of guns; but an idyllic paradise in a far-off future where mankind lives in peace and harmony. Such true believers make easy marks for accomplished demagogues of Mr. Obama’s master class. The BP oil spill is perhaps the most glaring example of his presidency dawdling on a crisis. While decrying the environmental catastrophe, the president blocked clean-up aid from national partners under the Jones Act, and then later seized BP assets without due process to disburse to the victims. It is not that these sufferers from the coastal industry-damaging event didn’t deserve swift compensation — they certainly did; but it is that the president took charge of the situation too late, and yet disposed of a company’s funds as if the federal government should have been in charge all along. All the exercise of power, and yet none of the accountability. The biggest victim in nearly every mainstream news media narrative appears to be, perversely enough, the president himself. On every major national challenge — from unemployment to unending wars — the president is held up as a tragic figure in a passion play; he is typecast as heroically attempting to control unpredictable and powerful forces; and thus, this presumably well-intentioned soul only needs more power; for government, for himself – nay, “for the people.” As long as there is an imperfect world, this running gambit, moving from tragedy to tragedy, or as the political media complex would have it, from crisis to crisis, can continue. The arguments by anecdote, such as for socialized medicine that promises to cover thirty million more people while lowering the deficit, but only results in a few million more covered with trillions added to the debt, and numerous other examples, can be endlessly repeated. And the American people, absorbed by the imminence of it all, distracted by their own petty entertainment, bedazzled by a president who moves seamlessly and rapidly from crisis to crisis, while leaving nothing to focus on and mobilize against, will one day find their country lost to voracious government and their children stripped of opportunities — and all for a mere man.
Posted on: Fri, 20 Sep 2013 04:38:15 +0000
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