“The passenger can be seen mouthing, “Somebody help me,” “

When no one steps up to deal with violence and insanity

JOHN SEXTON May 28, 2022 at HotAir:

We’re all still wondering why police in Uvalde, Texas didn’t storm the classroom and kill the gunman given that active-shooter training indicates that’s what should happen. Also this week there’s a video circulating on Twitter which has me wondering almost the same thing. Why did no one act?

A viral video on social media shows a woman being assaulted on a New York City subway train as bystanders keep a safe distance away from the scene.

The video shows an individual acting out on the subway. As other passengers move away, the individual pulls one passenger down onto a seat by her hair.

The passenger can be seen mouthing, “Somebody help me,” as the individual continues holding on to her hair while they are seated. None of the other passengers assist her as the individual holds on to her hair and, eventually, lifts her from the seat.

Here’s the clip [some NSFW langauge]

https://platform.twitter.com/embed/Tweet.html?dnt=true&embedId=twitter-widget-0&features=eyJ0ZndfZXhwZXJpbWVudHNfY29va2llX2V4cGlyYXRpb24iOnsiYnVja2V0IjoxMjA5NjAwLCJ2ZXJzaW9uIjpudWxsfSwidGZ3X3NlbnNpdGl2ZV9tZWRpYV9pbnRlcnN0aXRpYWxfMTM5NjMiOnsiYnVja2V0IjoiaW50ZXJzdGl0aWFsIiwidmVyc2lvbiI6bnVsbH0sInRmd190d2VldF9yZXN1bHRfbWlncmF0aW9uXzEzOTc5Ijp7ImJ1Y2tldCI6InR3ZWV0X3Jlc3VsdCIsInZlcnNpb24iOm51bGx9fQ%3D%3D&frame=false&hideCard=false&hideThread=false&id=1529522031376613376&lang=en&origin=https%3A%2F%2Fhotair.com%2Fjohn-s-2%2F2022%2F05%2F28%2Fwhen-no-one-steps-up-to-deal-with-violence-and-insanity-n472685&sessionId=fe938b71e328d43fe4f09d671432660bfb8d98ae&siteScreenName=hotairblog&theme=light&widgetsVersion=c8fe9736dd6fb%3A1649830956492&width=550px

On the scale of New York City disturbances, this one was so minor that it seems no one reported it. So far as anyone knows, there’s no police report. No local news outlet covered it. Fox News wrote about the video because it was trending online but even they don’t seem to know when or where it was shot. The guy filming is clearly visible in the middle of the clip but you can’t hear what he’s saying and I don’t think he’s been identified. Neither has the the crazy man who is the focus of the video. He’s still out there I guess.

Except for the video itself, this entire incident was considered beneath notice. And yet, this is obviously dangerous. This man is clearly on drugs and is out of his mind. He’s behaving violently and erratically. He grabs one woman by the hair and he verbally threatens people and tries to smash the window with his feet. He’s a real danger to everyone.

And no one does anything. No one tells him to let go of the poor woman who is clearly terrified. No one wants to become the focus of his attention, which is understandable. And yet I found myself wishing one of the large men on the train would step up and face the danger rather than letting a small woman face it alone.

The video appeared the day after the Uvalde shooting and before we knew that police had waited outside the room where the shooter had locked himself inside. But I can’t help think there’s a similar calculation going on in both cases. As one DPS spokesman said, police didn’t want to get shot. Better to “contain” the gunman in a room with his innocent victims until the proper team and the proper equipment had arrived. And if that took 75 minutes, well, better safe than sorry. That was the thinking at the time. And we’re hearing today that other cops on the scene were unhappy about it but none of them did anything until the BORTAC agents finally got sick of waiting and went in and killed Ramos.

The scene on the train isn’t the same but the mood is similar. You have a deranged and violent person in a small area with a bunch of potential victims and everyone decides not to engage. He didn’t have a rifle but he may have had a knife. Even if he didn’t, in his deranged state he might be able to seriously hurt someone with just his hands and feet. Why risk it? Better to just wait and see what happens. And I guess in this particular case it worked. No one was seriously hurt. But it could easily have gone differently. At what point would the men on the train have decided they’d seen enough and pin him to the floor? Maybe if he threw a punch?

I guess what I take away from this is that the fear of focusing the danger on yourself is always there whether you’re an armed police officer or just a person on a train. Of course I say this not knowing for certain if I could do any better. Dealing with other people’s violent insanity at the risk of your own safety is a lot to ask of anyone. But this week it’s impossible not to conclude we’d be better off if more people were willing to step up.

Percentage of Thugs in USA at 30%?….MORE?

BLM is silent on the top killer of black kids

By  Heather Mac Donald at the New York Post:

May 26, 2022 10:15pm 

The leading cause of death in children caused by guns, particularly gang violence, a fact Black Lives Matter seems to ignore.Stacey Wescott/Chicago Tribune/Tribune News Service via Getty Images

Guns are the leading cause of death among children, new CDC statistics show. But while the horrific massacre in a Texas elementary school rightly outrages the nation, such mass shootings are not the primary reason for that grim statistic.

Most young people killed by guns are shot in gang violence or other crime — which has only gotten worse since the George Floyd race riots and their long anarchic aftermath.

Homicides of youth between the ages of 10 and 17 rose 47% in 2020. That 47% increase far outpaced the record-breaking 29% spike in post-Floyd homicides across all age groups in 2020.

Black youth between the ages of 10 and 17 were killed at 11 times the rate of white youth in 2020. Virtually none of those black deaths was protested by Black Lives Matter activists, since the victims were killed overwhelmingly not by the police and not by whites but by other blacks — and thus did nothing to advance the narrative about lethal white supremacy. Blacks between the ages of 14 and 17 commit gun homicide at more than 10 times the rate of white and Hispanic teenagers combined.

Children under the age of 10 were also mowed down in barbaric drive-by shootings. Examples of the youth carnage in 2020 include:

• A 9-year-old girl killed Oct. 3 during a family gathering in a park in Sacramento, Calif.
• A 3-year-old boy in Orlando fatally shot in the head while playing in his living room Sept. 22, when a passing car sprayed bullets at the front door and windows of the home.
• A 1-year-old boy in Kansas City, Mo., killed Sept. 21 when someone walked up to the car in which he was riding and riddled it with bullets. The victim, Tyron Patton, was among the 13 children who had been killed in shootings through late September in Kansas City.
• A 7-year-old girl killed Aug. 29 while at a family birthday party in South Bend, Ind.; the assailants shot from a passing car.
• A 14-year-old boy who opened the door of his mother’s apartment in St. Louis Sept. 21 in response to a knock and who was fatally shot in the head.
• An 11-year-old girl shot in the head in an SUV in Madison, Wis., on the morning of Aug. 11; two days later, her family took her off of life support.
• A 7-year-old boy shot in the head while sitting on his family’s front porch in West Philadelphia on the morning of Aug. 11. The boy died two days later.
• A 9-year-old fatally gunned down on the near North Side of Chicago while playing with friends Aug. 1. As of that date, the number of shooting victims 10 or younger in Chicago was three times that of 2019, according to the Chicago Tribune.
• 1-year-old Ace Lucas killed in his bed in Canton, Ohio, Aug. 1; his twin brother sleeping next to him was wounded.
• 9-year-old Devonte Bryant killed with a shot to his head in New Orleans July 14.
• A 1-year-old boy in a stroller killed by a shot to the stomach at a cookout in Bedford Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, July 12;
• At least eight children killed in drive-bys nationally over the 2020 Fourth of July weekend, including 8-year-old Secoriea Turner, who was in a car with her mother in Atlanta trying to inch past a barricade illegally erected by Black Lives Matter protesters.
• This carnage is out of sight, out of mind for most of the country. If these children had been white, there would have been a national revolution. The media ignore the routine killings of black children just as assiduously as the race activists do and for the same reason: They were not mowed down by alleged lethal white hate. In fact, the lethal-white-hate narrative that has entranced Democratic politicians and the press for the last two weeks is false: Blacks commit hate crimes nationally at more than twice the rate of whites. In New York City, blacks commit hate crimes at 2.43 times the rate of whites.

The killing will not stop until the family and cultural breakdown that drives it is confronted head on. As then-candidate Barack Obama observed in 2008, too many black fathers are ignoring their children and abandoning their responsibilities. Boys grow up without learning impulse control and respect for authority. The intact, biological family is the best form of crime prevention because it is the best way to socialize children.

That fact breaks a number of taboos, however, and so forms no part of our cultural discourse. Until the inner-city family is restored, policing is the second-best solution for saving black lives. Too bad President Joe Biden again regurgitated the fiction this week that law-abiding black Americans are at daily risk of their lives from the police, a fiction that will only cost more black lives. 

The Biden Memory Stirs?

Did Lyin’ Biden do it again? Story told to Naval Academy grads stuns reporters

KAREN TOWNSEND May 28, 2022 11:31 AM ET

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AP Photo/Luis M. Alvarez

On Friday, Joe Biden delivered the commencement speech to graduating midshipmen at the Naval Academy. There are questions about a story he told about himself. Did Joe Biden add another story to the long list of fabricated tales he tells from his own life story?

Biden told the midshipmen that he applied to the Naval Academy in 1965. He told a tale of applying to the Academy with a letter from then-Delaware Senator J. Caleb Boggs. However, in 1965, Biden graduated from the University of Delaware. He wouldn’t have been applying for graduate courses at the Naval Academy because there were none. The tale was an odd one, mixing his dream of playing football with his interest in the Naval Academy.

“I was told the Class of ’72 is here. I was appointed to the academy in 1965 by a senator who I was running against in 1972 — never planned it that way. I wasn’t old enough to be sworn in. I was only 29 years old when I was running,” Biden said.

“He was a fine man. His name is J. Caleb Boggs,” the president went on. “I didn’t come to the academy because I wanted to be a football star. And you had a guy named [Roger] Staubach and [Joe] Bellino here. So I went to Delaware.”

“But all kidding aside,” Biden continued on Friday, “the best line of the debate was after it’s all over, the announcer, the questioner — who was a good guy, but supported my opponent, who was a good man as well, I might add — and he said, ‘Sen. Boggs, is there anything else you want to say?’ And he said, ‘Yes, just one thing.’ And he took the microphone. He said, ‘You know, Joe, if you accepted my commission to the — my appointment to the academy,’ he said, ‘you’d still have one year and three months’ active duty and I’d have no problems right now.’”

The New York Post reports that this story is a new one. Political journalists covering Biden’s speech were caught by surprise at this new addition to Biden rhetorical repertoire. Biden is fond of storytelling, especially if he is the star of the story. He has been called out many times for making up stories to pad his resume or bring empathy from an audience. It looks like narcissistic personality disorder. There was no mention of applying to the Naval Academy in his 2008 autobiography “Promises to Keep”. By all appearances, this is a new story he pulled out of his hat, perhaps to bond with the midshipmen, to have them think he’s one of them. Who knows?

Biden likes to talk about his dream of being a football star in his college days. Staubach and Bellino are the only two Navy football players to win the Heisman Trophy. Biden likes to say he wanted to be a “star” football player. Perhaps so but he received five student draft deferments during his college years citing childhood asthma.

The US military was heavily involved in the Vietnam War by the mid-1960s and had Biden attended the academy, he would have had to serve in the Navy upon graduation.

Biden received five student draft deferments during his four years at the University of Delaware and subsequent three years at Syracuse University College of Law.

After Biden graduated law school in 1968, he reportedly was deemed unfit for military service by citing childhood asthma. His memoir doesn’t mention the condition while describing his football exploits or his work as a lifeguard. A report released in November by his doctor also doesn’t mention asthma.

There’s just a whole lot of fishiness around Biden’s autobiographical details. He seems to insert himself and his life stories into whatever the occasion is, whether it is an academic graduation or even tragedies, like when he claimed to have spent time at Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh after a mass murder happened at the synagogue. That story was not true. As happens, his staff had to clean up Biden’s remarks and say that memory was of a phone call to the rabbi of the synagogue. It is just unseemly that Biden keeps propping himself up, especially since he’s been a public figure for 50 years and his statements can be verified.

One account of Biden’s speech doesn’t even mention the unusual claim that he applied to the Naval Academy. The press is happy to cover for Biden at every turn. It did report on Biden’s boast of how well he’s handling Putin’s invasion into Ukraine.

Delivering a commencement address to more than 1,000 newly commissioned ensigns and second lieutenants at Navy-Marine Corps Memorial Stadium, Biden said the Western response to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s “brutal” war in Ukraine shows the world is aligning not on geography, “but in terms of values.”

He called the invasion “a direct assault on the fundamental tenets of rules-based international order,” adding, “that’s the world you’re graduating into.”

“The actions taken by Putin were an attempt, to use my phrase, to Finland-ize all of Europe, to make it all neutral,” Biden said. “Instead, he NATO-ized all of Europe.”

Ugh. For a guy who used deferments to get out of serving during the Vietnam war, he sure likes to fancy himself a military and foreign policy expert. Joe Biden has been consistently historically wrong on every foreign policy decision he’s made throughout his 50 years in elected office. The same holds true now. He had to be dragged into responding to Putin’s invasion into Ukraine. He did so long after others, like Macron, actively worked to try to stop Putin’s plans. Biden even suggested it would be acceptable if Putin took some of Ukraine’s land. Nothing big, mind you, but something small. Good Lord.

I’ll end with this. Creepy Whispering Joe made an appearance. He whispered to the midshipmen that he’s their commander-in-chief. Did he think they weren’t aware of that?

Biden Whispers to Naval Academy Graduates: ‘I Am Your Commander-in-Chief’ Biden: “You’ve all got so much to be proud of. You really do. By the way, once you’re commissioned, remember, (whispers) I’m your commander-in-chief. So don’t ask me too tough a question, okay?”

The American Family HAS DISAPPEARED!?

“There was almost a mutiny”: Uvalde cop says force is furious that they were held back

ALLAHPUNDIT May 28, 2022 at HotAir:

Townhall Media/Julio Rosas

The key word here is “almost.” Why wasn’t there a mutiny?

The Border Patrol didn’t let the wishes of the police chief stop them from going in — after they waited half an hour.

Judge for yourself whether People magazine’s source is telling the truth or whether this is self-serving spin to deflect blame now that the Uvalde PD has become a national laughingstock.

“There was almost a mutiny,” the officer tells PEOPLE. “We were like, ‘There’s a f—ing gunman in the school, we hear gunshots, and we’re just going to stand here with our thumbs up our asses?’ We wanted to go in and save lives. It was the most frustrating situation of my entire career.”

“We felt like cowards,” the officer continues. “It felt cowardly to stand off and let this punk, this kid, this 18-year-old asshole just go in and do whatever he wanted to do. There was a lot of arguing, a lot of cussing, a lot of people who were saying that we should just say f— it and go in, but then what? We needed to have a plan, and the commander didn’t have a plan.”…

“Even if he had barricaded himself in, he had already shot at people,” the officer says, “so why weren’t we in there doing what we should’ve done? I remember thinking ‘this is wrong.’ But there was nothing I could do.”

A plan would have been nice. But cops are trained nowadays to confront a shooter immediately, without a plan, even if back-up hasn’t arrived yet. “The first responding officer — I don’t care if it’s the Deputy Dawg cartoon guy — he goes in and stops the shooter. That’s just part of the job,” said one expert on active shooters to WaPo. “You’ve got a ballistic vest. You know what the kids have? Crayons. You are duty-bound to do something. If someone is telling you to stay outside, you disobey that order.”

It’s true that the protocol changes once a shooter stops firing and barricades himself in a room. But the cops knew from the 911 calls that some children were still alive in there with him. Opting not to force a confrontation in that scenario, after he’s already presumably murdered multiple kids, amounts to trusting him to have suddenly lost the urge to kill.

Besides, there should have been a plan considering that the Uvalde school district’s police force had trained for an active shooter situation as recently as March of this year. As it is, according to one father whose daughter was murdered inside the school, the police didn’t even have the proper equipment: It took 15 to 20 minutes for protective tactical shields to arrive at the scene. God only knows how long the shooter would have remained alive inside the school if the Border Patrol’s tactical team hadn’t showed up.

I don’t know how this town and its police force will ever again coexist happily.

“While those babies were in there dying, they stood there with their thumbs in their asses trying to figure out what to do,” said Roger Garza, a friend of the family of teacher Irma Garcia, who was killed by the gunman as she tried to shield her fourth-grade students…

Equally baffling to families is why Chief Arradondo wasn’t able to use some sort of master key to open the door of the classroom after discovering that it had been locked. McCraw told reporters on Friday that Border Patrol Agents had to secure a key from a janitor before being able to access the classrooms.

“I feel like they are setting this up to have law enforcement walk away like heroes and some of them are,” said Garza. “But the rest who didn’t do anything are nothing more than cowards. The parents were braver than that and they at least had an idea of what to do.”

Arradondo, who reportedly gave the order for officers to hang back, is nowhere to be found this week. Parents are considering their legal options but they probably don’t have any, experts say. Despite the tremendous power police enjoy, they don’t owe anyone a duty of protection in a dangerous situation. And even if their behavior is negligent, our legal system goes out of its way to hold them harmless. Only if the Uvalde police department had a formally articulated policy of not intervening during a mass shooting would they potentially be liable. A horrible spur-of-the-moment decision by the chief doesn’t cut it.

The negligence is bad enough, but some of the other police behavior at the scene is inexplicable. One father waiting outside was told by an evacuated student that his daughter had been shot; when he moved towards the school to get to her, he was reportedly … handcuffed. Residents are so angry that the Uvalde PD has quietly reached out to other law enforcement agencies in Texas about providing protection for the force’s own officers.

The police failure will be the focus of public attention for the foreseeable future but don’t let it distract you from the mounting evidence that the shooter did display some very red flags before he acted. That’ll be important to the coming debate over red-flag laws, assuming Congress and Texas muster the will to consider any. This CNN piece describes how the shooter told several girls on the social media platform Yubo that he’d rape them; another claimed that “he threatened to shoot up her school and rape and kill her and her mother during one livestream session.” Things turned more ominous when he sent one user an image of a receipt showing that he’d just bought guns. Another user says a gun was visible on his bed during one livestream.

All of these threats were reported to Yubo, the girls say, but apart from a temporary ban no action was apparently taken.

I’ll leave you with this clip, which has gone viral. If you know what “the Macdonald triad” is, you know why the revelation at the end here would be considered a significant red flag by cops and psychologists. This lunatic obviously shouldn’t have been allowed to buy a gun.

https://platform.twitter.com/embed/Tweet.html?dnt=true&embedId=twitter-widget-0&features=eyJ0ZndfZXhwZXJpbWVudHNfY29va2llX2V4cGlyYXRpb24iOnsiYnVja2V0IjoxMjA5NjAwLCJ2ZXJzaW9uIjpudWxsfSwidGZ3X3NlbnNpdGl2ZV9tZWRpYV9pbnRlcnN0aXRpYWxfMTM5NjMiOnsiYnVja2V0IjoiaW50ZXJzdGl0aWFsIiwidmVyc2lvbiI6bnVsbH0sInRmd190d2VldF9yZXN1bHRfbWlncmF0aW9uXzEzOTc5Ijp7ImJ1Y2tldCI6InR3ZWV0X3Jlc3VsdCIsInZlcnNpb24iOm51bGx9fQ%3D%3D&frame=false&hideCard=false&hideThread=false&id=1529850898251493377&lang=en&origin=https%3A%2F%2Fhotair.com%2Fallahpundit%2F2022%2F05%2F28%2Fthere-was-almost-a-mutiny-uvalde-cop-says-force-is-furious-that-they-were-held-back-n472654&sessionId=855c00af3fc4bb07a66d944e5df658248ba39a5a&siteScreenName=hotairblog&theme=light&widgetsVersion=c8fe9736dd6fb%3A1649830956492&width=550px

THE DISAPPEARANCE OF THE AMERICAN MOTHER!!!

May 28, 2022

School Shootings: If It Was Simple, We’d Have Done It

By Steve Feinstein at American Thinker:

There are no easy answers for school shootings. If there were, we’d have done it by now. But that doesn’t mean there are none at all. There are, but they’re neither simple nor easy and they’re exceedingly difficult to hear and acknowledge, especially for the stubbornly unintellectual.

There are several broad categories of American societal norms that have changed dramatically in recent times that exacerbate the aberrant tendencies in emotionally conflicted young people. These have occurred mainly since the 1960s, for the last few generations, from Baby Boomers to Gen Xers to Millennials.

1. There is a markedly lessened sense of absolute right and wrong

This has come about primarily from lower religious participation than was normal several decades ago. This is merely an observation, not a promotion of any specific religion. However, what the presence of religion in everyday American life did was cement the notion of absolute right and wrong, especially in the minds of children.  The parents in a household conveyed the tenets of correct behavior to their children (even as the kids squirmed and fussed when sitting in church or synagogue), and in the back of their young minds, every nine-year-old grew up knowing what was and wasn’t acceptable conduct.

Religion also served to illustrate the existence of a chain of unquestioned authority and it further demonstrated that there were unpleasant consequences for violating the decorum of socially acceptable practices. Note that in past decades, these concepts of absolute right and wrong and a chain of authority permeated throughout American culture amongst all the inhabitants, not merely among faithful religious attendees. In the 1960s, the awareness of ideas like the Golden Rule, the Ten Commandments, respect for law enforcement, fear of the principal’s office, etc. were part and parcel of American thought.

These thoughts diminished considerably as the 1960s turned into the 1980s and 1990s. Religious participation went down, with a lower and lower percentage of the American public attending services on a regular basis. This has led to a corresponding reduction in the highly beneficial societal effects that come from the religious teachings of moral correctness and respect for authority. Again, to reiterate the point: Religious attendance didn’t need to be at the 100% level for these concepts to be widely accepted as “normal.” Religious participation just needed to achieve so-called critical mass and having done so, all of American society benefitted accordingly. Today, America has slipped well below critical mass.

2. Since the 1990s, young people have been increasingly indulged and made to feel entitled.

American culture has dramatically lowered the expectations and standards of achievement for our youth. Sometime in the 1990s, ideas like “participation trophies” and organized sports games with no winners or losers took hold. Nonaccountability became the norm. “It’s never your fault” has now become the accepted way.

Our adult daughter lives in Europe. In her country, the scores of kids’ games matter, and there are winners and losers, at all ages. Children are accountable, not coddled. The scores count, their grades count, there are no automatic do-overs, and the goal isn’t to protect children from any negative feelings whatsoever. The term “self-esteem” may not even exist there. On the contrary, in her country, children learn to deal with personal disappointment, grow from the experience and move on.

3. Digital equipment distractions enable young people to withdraw into an isolated, self-centered world

This is fairly obvious, but it’s an important factor nonetheless. Inappropriate, violent video games, social media sites that promote personal anonymity, and internet chat rooms that let users create totally fake personalities, all contribute to an easy way that confused, insecure young people can fabricate a world structured to bring them the maximum amount of personal affirmation and gratification. But when those carefully constructed alternate realities fall short in “likes” or “cares,” the resulting emotional crash is often more than that person can handle.

The idea that they’ve been wronged or that they were entitled to a better circumstance or a better specific outcome is certainly one likely common thread among school shooters. In their minds, they’ve been unfairly targeted or bullied or rejected or disrespected and nothing in their upbringing or socialization has prepared them in the slightest to handle their life’s disappointments.

It’s an additive situation, an accumulation of changing cultural practices, lowered standards, and evolving expectations. Where American society taught teenage boys in 1968 to earn Boy Scout patches or to sweat it out in the blistering summer heat of Hell Week trying to make their high school football team, our current inward-looking, social-media-obsessed culture reinforces the belief among today’s youth that they are the center of their existence, and that the indulgence to their own whims is what matters most, not service and compassion for others. This is the self-image they take into adulthood, and its destructive effects are seen in the risibly inflated sense of self-importance and entitlement and astonishing lack of patience and life perspective displayed by Millennials as they enter the workforce or look for their first house.

There are no easy answers. The needless isolation surely added to the negative social conditions, but mass shootings happened numerous times before the pandemic. COVID is a peripheral causal factor, not a fundamental one.

So, if the real reasons behind the violent actions of disaffected young male agitators are a systemic, decades-long devolution in moral teachings, the precipitous decline of high behavioral expectations in regard to selflessness and personal generosity, an increasingly derisive presentation by the popular culture for the legitimacy of authority, and the rise of self-indulgent social media, then what can be done to reverse this trend?

It’s not easy. Eliminate participation trophies? Re-establish the concept of a meritocracy and personal accountability over self-centered entitlement? How can that be done? Who will do it? There has to be a recognition — an honest admission — that the reasons in the preceding paragraph are the driving causal factors behind this kind of behavior. There has to be a unanimous willingness on the part of politicians and prominent public figures to embark on a uniform national conversation advocating the vital importance of personal responsibility and totally disavowing as socially reprehensible the idea of individual inward-focused self-indulgence. The chances of a unified national effort like this taking place are slim, unfortunately, when there are easy, cheap political points just waiting to be scored.

One thing this is not, however: These violent occurrences are not the fault of guns or the “gun lobby.” Restricting the rights of lawful gun owners is exactly like holding Ford responsible for drunken driving deaths and then making it more difficult for perfectly qualified, responsible drivers to obtain a driver’s license just because another person drinks and crashes their car.

“Back To Obama!”

May 28, 2022

It’s Obama’s fault

By Mark C. Ross at American Thinker:

Our current period of political turmoil can be considered to have begun with the presidential election of 2008.  The meteoric rise of a virtual unknown from the Illinois state Senate to the White House is fairly unprecedented.  Though he lacked any depth of understanding of why things are the way they are, Mr. Obama was gifted with a commanding stage presence.  After all, superficial appeal invariably trumps substance among the political activist community.

Obama was certainly helped when the Republican establishment decided that 2008 was a time to lose.  Thus, the Republicans rewarded one of their own, John McCain, by giving him a place in the sun…much like what they did for Bob Dole in 1996.  They also took the opportunity to put a major babe on the ticket in the form of the governor of Alaska.  See, Republicans really don’t hate women.

Then came the midterm elections of 2010.  The vast public resentment for the Affordable Care Act (AKA “Obamacare”) led to a “shellacking” of epic proportions, causing Dan Balz of the Washington Post to declare that the Democrats no longer had a “bench” from which new political talent could rise.

When Obama was termed out going into the election of 2016, the Democrat establishment reached down into the bottom of the barrel and pulled out Hillary Clinton.  She, along with the eminently forgettable Tim Kaine, lost to a total political novice who made little, if any, effort to control his public utterances.

Mr. Trump, however, knew very well why things were the way they were.  He also was an experienced problem-solver and resource-organizer.  Thus began an extended hair-on-fire period for the minions of the progressive left, whom Obama brought into positions of power within his government.

In order to defeat Trump, the next time around, the progressive establishment had to further scrape out what was left of the barrel to acquire the archetypical empty suit.  In order to protect Joe Biden from the 25th Amendment, they put an accomplished babbling fool on the ticket as well.

Doubts remain as to the authenticity of the election that put Biden and Harris in charge of the federal government.  But rather than directly defend the mechanics of the balloting process or justify the slanted news coverage that suppressed anti-Biden information, Biden’s defenders continue with a strenuous effort to impose official censorship of those who publicly challenge Biden’s legitimacy.  What cannot be censored is that, in the same election that put Biden and Harris in office, the Republicans picked up fourteen seats in the House of Representatives.  Go figure.

Meanwhile, the wheels are really falling off the modern Democrat establishment.  The baby formula shortage represents a problem that just shouldn’t have ever happened.  The ensuing response leaves much to be desired.  It’s hard to say if Putin actually timed his invasion of Ukraine to coincide with Biden’s presidency, but it’s pretty easy to speculate as such, considering the obvious ineptitude at the top of the command structure.  Early on, the debacle of the much-advertised withdrawal from Afghanistan kind of set the stage for a continuous string of epic bungles.  But that’s old news.

The greatest damage done to our homeland has resulted from Biden and his handlers going along with the once politically sexy Green New Deal.  Motor vehicles and their carbon-based fuel have long been a target, but no one ever included synthetic fertilizer (the lifeblood of modern farming) in the mix, even though it is mostly made from natural gas.  Also, the misguided push for putting more demand on the electrical grid ignores the inconvenient fact that 60% of domestic electrical generation is done with fossil fuels, plus another 20% being derived from nuclear fission.  The remaining 20% comes from a mix of hydroelectric, geothermal, wind, and solar.

Back to Obama.  It wasn’t just he who opened the door for the radical leftists to flood into the government; it was also his milieu.  He wasn’t working alone; ask Bernie Sanders and Liz Warren.  But Obama was the obvious choice for the point position.  He’s at least partially non-white at a time when it matters more what you are than who.

But there was something larger.  A short while after the collapse of the Soviet Union, socialism was no longer a dirty word.  True, North Korea remains a glaring example of the squalor imposed by a command-and-control economy.  And the devolution of Venezuela from resource-rich prosperity to people having to hunt stray dogs and cats for dinner sends an indelible message.  But the polarity of the Cold War imposed a certain kind of discipline on American politics that no longer exists.

How else could clowns such as Beto O’Rourke and AOC ever be taken seriously?  We are waiting on the threshold of another “shellacking” as happened in 2010.  But wild swings in politics are not really a good thing.  Stability is good.  Businesses like predictability, rather than surprises, as do the rest of us.