The technique of stage magic is misdirection. And Obama is a master of it. Example: the Tucson speech. A speech in which he said that political rhetoric was not the cause of the murders, but then spent the rest of the speech talking about political rhetoric.
Reading about parts of Obama’s speech, I was puzzled by the accolades it got from the Right. He gave them three words: “It did not,” (and they were not even in the written version of his speech) and they were ecstatic. Without those words, the entire speech could be read as an indictment of Conservative political rhetoric as the root cause of the rampage. After being pummeled by the Left for generations, the Stockholm Syndrome is alive and well among Conservative pundits. They need …they want … they desperately desire validation from the Left, and Obama is Leftist in Chief.
Byron York has an excellent analysis of this in the Washington Examiner. After stating that political rhetoric was not responsible for the shooting ...
...the president couldn't very well use the shootings as the premise for a national conversation about the tone of political debate, could he? Yes, he could. It might seem like a stretch -- even to a calculating Democratic strategist -- for Obama to portray Jared Loughner's insanity as the proper starting point for a national debate about civility in politics. Yet that is what he did.
And employing a tactic that in a less sentimental atmosphere would have been seen as breathtakingly cynical, Obama enlisted Christina Taylor Green, the nine year-old girl killed in the shootings, to support his cause. "She saw [politics] through the eyes of a child, undimmed by the cynicism or vitriol that we adults all too often take just for granted," Obama said. "I want to live up to her expectations. I want our democracy to be as good as she imagined it. All of us -- we should do everything we can to make sure this country lives up to our children's expectations."
How can America live up to Christina's expectations? According to Obama, by making sure that her death "helps usher in more civility in our public discourse…because only a more civil and honest public discourse can help us face up to the challenges of our nation in a way that would make [the victims] proud." In other words: Christina would have wanted us to tone down the rhetoric. The calculating Democratic strategist would have been very, very happy.
According to the Left, the shootings should not spur a national debate over the detection and treatment of the mentally ill, internet gaming, the conspiracy movie Zeitgeist or books by Hitler or Marx – all of which have ties to Loughner. No, the debate should be about shutting down the voices on the Right, voices that he never heard, not even through the fillings in his teeth.
That’s a pretty good trick.
UPDATE: It turns out that one of the people Loughner shot is also a violent Leftist nut.
2 comments:
According to the Left, the shootings should not spur a national debate over the detection and treatment of the mentally ill, internet gaming, the conspiracy movie Zeitgeist or books by Hitler or Marx – all of which have ties to Loughner. No, the debate should be about shutting down the voices on the Right, voices that he never heard, not even through the fillings in his teeth.
Speaking of hearing voices, did you talk to "the Left" before or after the CIA secretly fluoridated your water?
Why no, anon. All I have to do is read the NY Times and watch CNN and the alphabet networks to learn that the shooting should set off a nation debate over something that had nothing to do with the shooting. It’s the sort of logic that makes sense to someone who apparently believes that the CIA is fluoridating my water. It also makes sense to people who never want to let a crisis go to waste.
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