Even a very conservative newspaper like the NY Daily News has had enough. This is their front page from Thursday.
Electoral Vote points out that virtually all the Republican candidates reacted on Twitter with “prayers”, but none of them specified even approximately what they are asking God to do:
Usually when you pray you have one or more requests you would like God to fulfill. Do they want Him to directly intervene and prevent crazy people from getting guns, so Congress doesn’t have to? Not one of the Republicans offered anything concrete other than urging people to pray but not saying what for.
Their insincerity knows no bounds.
7 Comments
Given how Conservative the Post is, growing up reading the papers in NYC I never considered the News to be conservative.
The Daily News is not ‘a very conservative newspapers ‘ like the Post. Although Daily News supported Romney in 2012, it supported Obama in 2008. It has been fighting the NRA for years and labeled LaPierre as ‘Wacko Wayne’ in 2012. The NY Daily News is not conservative, liberal or even moderate. I don’t know what the hell it is but, like you, I appreciate its rational yet exuberant exhortations on the politics of gun violence.
Oops, sorry! I took “very conservative” from Electoral Vote, who are usually very careful about what they say.
I know that certain groups are gung ho to talk about guns being the problem (and they are), because it conveniently distracts from the bigger problem. There are bad people who want to kill people they don’t like. Whether its with guns, knives, setting them on fire, or blowing them up. They will attempt it. But, there are even badder people like those who attacked in SB and Paris, who hate us and will not stop until one side or the other is wiped out.
While Bush may have opened the door and let the monster out, we, (Obama) have utterly failed in our attempt to contain it.
Here’s my analogy: An idiot (Bush) sets a fire in the woods. It does a lot of damage and consumes many acres of good wood. But, the fire is somewhat contained and doesn’t pose any immediate risk to the towns that are 5-10 or 100 miles away. So, the new fire marshal (Obama) who replaces him says he has a strategy to make sure the fire doesn’t get going again. He then reduces the number of firemen assigned to watch for smoldering embers and pats himself on the back for the great job.
Time goes by, and the winds pick up and small fires begin to pop up here and there. No problem says the fire chief they’re just baby (JV) fires. Everybody says great, cause we don’t want to pay for any more firemen then we have to. One particular fire starts to grow (ISIS) and everybody says we should do something. The chief says lets fly some planes and drop some water, and the fire looks contained because that’s what we all want to believe.
Problem is that the fire has actually spread well beyond the bounds of the original site of the fire and is taking root in many places (Libya, Somalia, Nigeria, Kenya, Mali, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Afghanistan, Egypt, France, England, USA, Germany). All these fires are smoldering simultaneously and flaring up here and there, while the limited firemen run from one to the other trying to keep it under control because they don’t have the resources to put it out completely.
We are losing the middle east, we are losing North Africa, we are beginning to lose Central Africa, we have fire starters in more countries then I can name. Its time to get serious about a very real problem.
I have a better analogy. We keep going around trying to put out the fire, but what we (stupidly) don’t realize is that what we think is water to put out the fire is really gasoline. And we keep blaming the problem on the fire.
You say it is time to “get serious”. This is what serious looks like. Stop throwing fuel on the fire. Don’t elect anyone who (illegally and unconstitutionally) wants to hate and punish innocent Muslims because of a terrorist incident (especially when we make excuses when similar incidents are committed by Christians). Throw anyone who commits large scale war crimes against anyone (including Muslims) in jail and throw away the key. Start with Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld.
You say that “There are bad people who want to kill people they don’t like”. Have you ever considered the fact that (against Muslims) we have killed more people than they have, and we display more hatred than they do?
You can’t make someone like you by bombing the crap out of them. And human beings do not behave like emotionless entities like fire. When you act like a thug and a bully, know that human beings will react against you.
Yeah its a real problem, I just don’t think you understand what your dealing with. And I don’t think we can do both and I don’t think the extremists will stop because we’re nice to them. I also don’t think they will stop even if we completely withdraw to our borders and promise not to bomb anything for the next 100 years. Because we’re not dealing with a rational or usual enemy.
And you are exactly right, our gov’t continues to make stupid assumptions and policies. We saw what happened when we removed Hussein. Yet we encouraged it in Egypt, Libya and Syria. Apparently the only way to control, contain or eliminate extremists is if slightly more appealing extremists are in charge.
How did all those dictators maintain control for the last 40 years? Utter brutality against any opposition, that’s how. Torture, killing the families of anyone opposed and creating a climate of controlled terror. We didn’t like it, but turned a blind eye, because those dictators knew to keep things under control or we’d remove them. How does Iran or Saudi Arabia keep control?
Nobody wants to punish innocent Muslims. Well I take that back, I’m sure there are a few extremist who do.
“When you act like a thug and a bully, know that human beings will react against you.”
So the extremists have an excuse, but the friends, family and neighbors of those they kill do not?
Sounds hypocritical to me.
So we get to the question of where does it end, and how. It looks just like gang violence, they killed one of ours so we kill one of theirs and so on and so on…Where does it end and how. We can’t get the thugs and bullies in our country to do it. And they’re gentlemanly compared to the groups after us.
Don’t make excuses for their behavior, because its wrong to.
Back to the topic of Guns, I ran across this “thinking outside the box” article that seems to make a lot of sense in different areas and perhaps a 21st century approach utilizing data mining to actually solve a problem (vs putting more ads on your blog).
http://www.cnn.com/2015/12/06/opinions/potarazu-zuckerberg-big-data-gun-violence/index.html