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Obama’s Kiddie Human Shields. The president trots out children to deflect legitimate criticism.
National Review ^ | 01/16/2013 | Michelle Malkin

Posted on 01/16/2013 7:21:39 AM PST by SeekAndFind

The president of the United States will release a binder full of new gun-control executive orders on Wednesday. Instead of standing alone, bearing full responsibility for the imperial actions he is about to take, President Obama will surround himself with an audience of kids who wrote to him after the Newtown, Conn., school massacre. This is the most cynical in Beltway theatrical staging — a feckless attempt to invoke immunity by intoning “it’s for the children” and hiding behind them.

What has happened to the deliberative process in this country? Public debate in Washington has deteriorated into Sesame Street sing-alongs. We are already inundated with logical fallacies: argumentum ad populum (it’s popular, therefore it’s true); argumentum ad nauseam (if you repeat it often enough, it will become truth); argumentum ad hominem (sabotage the person to sabotage the truth); and argumentum ad verecundiam (if my favorite authority says it’s true, it’s true).

To that list we can now add argumentum ad filios: If politicians appeal to the children, it’s unassailably good and true. The Obama White House has shamelessly employed this kiddie human-shield strategy at every turn to blunt substantive criticism and dissent.

During the legislative battle that rammed the federal health-care takeover through Capitol Hill and down our throats, President Obama and the Democrats piled up youth props around them like bunker sandbags. Nancy Pelosi wore babies as if they were Wonder Woman bracelets, one on each arm, to deflect troublesome questions about costs and constitutional concerns.

Obamacare stage managers paraded eleven-year-old Marcelas Owens of Washington State in front of the cameras to make the case for the half-trillion-dollar tax-hike plan. The boy’s “qualifications”? Owens’s mother, Tiffany, had died of pulmonary hypertension at the age of 27. A single mother of three, she lost her job as a fast-food manager and lost her insurance. She received emergency care and treatment throughout her illness, but died in 2007.

As I noted at the time, Washington State already offered a plethora of existing government-assistance programs to laid-off and unemployed workers such as Owens’s mom. For some reason, unexplained by the family or its zealous exploiters, she didn’t enroll. Moreover, she died nine months after she reportedly lost her health insurance. By the time she lost her employer-provided coverage, she was apparently already in dire straits health-wise. It’s not clear that additional doctor visits in the subsequent months would have prevented her death. Nor did Obamacare do anything to address the very real flaws with our employer-sponsored health-care system.

Young Marcelas Owens admitted he didn’t understand health-insurance reform and didn’t think it was “anyone’s fault” that his mom died. No matter. When it comes to big-government-by-anecdote, the anecdotes don’t need to be true and the solutions don’t need to actually solve our problems.

The intellectual infantilization of politics and public policy is nothing new, of course. The Clintons engaged in one of the most notorious examples of poster-child abuse when they made a spectacle of an ailing seven-year-old girl named Jennifer Bush. Her mother, Kathleen, wrote to the White House about the agonizing decision to “choose between purchasing groceries for the week to feed your family or buying needed medications for your chronically ill child.” The girl’s gall bladder, appendix, and fragments of her intestines had been removed in a desperate attempt to diagnose her mystery sickness.

Coached by her overbearing mother, Jennifer gave the Clintons a lucky silver dollar to bring them “good luck so everyone can have good insurance.” She dutifully told the press: “I pray every night that I can get better — and that everyone can have insurance.” Hillary trotted the family all over Capitol Hill for photo ops and press conferences on behalf of her health-insurance-mandate proposals.

Two hundred hospital visits and $2 million in medical bills later, and two years after Hillary propped her up, doctors discovered that the only thing wrong with little Jennifer was that her mother had been starving and exploiting her while splurging on trips, motorcycles, and home remodeling. Mrs. Bush was sentenced to five years in prison on two counts of aggravated child abuse and welfare fraud.

From health care to gun control, the Left has perfected this fallacious art of prop-a-palooza — the well-being of the children and the national discourse be damned. Political vultures in Washington refuse to do the one thing that might actually benefit the children they recklessly use and abuse as fodder: Grow up.

— Michelle Malkin is the author of Culture of Corruption: Obama and His Team of Tax Cheats, Crooks, and Cronies


TOPICS: Constitution/Conservatism; Culture/Society; Front Page News; Government; News/Current Events
KEYWORDS: banglist; childprops; children; guncontrol; guns; hitlerchildren; humanshields; malkin; michellemalkin; obama; obamaguncontrol; obamagunpresser; secondamendment
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1 posted on 01/16/2013 7:21:56 AM PST by SeekAndFind
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To: SeekAndFind

January 10, 2013
FLASHBACK: Anti-Gun Politician Shoots Intruder

Read more: http://nation.foxnews.com/gun-control/2013/01/10/flashback-anti-gun-politician-shoots-intruder#ixzz2I9TocD2m


2 posted on 01/16/2013 7:22:37 AM PST by KeyLargo
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To: SeekAndFind
Didn’t work for Saddam. Might not work for this Hussein either.
3 posted on 01/16/2013 7:25:23 AM PST by ricmc2175
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To: SeekAndFind

Utterly Shameless: Obama Admin Releases Letters From Little Kids Pleading For Gun Control…

Don’t forget, Obama also plans to surround himself with kids when he announces his anti-gun proposals later today.

Via Weekly Standard:

http://weaselzippers.us/


4 posted on 01/16/2013 7:25:44 AM PST by KeyLargo
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To: SeekAndFind
Obama will surround himself with an audience of kids who wrote to him after the Newtown, Conn., school massacre

"Now class - today we're going to write a letter to our revered President.
Up here on the board is what I want you to write in your best handwriting, and then sign your name and pass them to the front."

5 posted on 01/16/2013 7:28:29 AM PST by grobdriver (Sic semper tyrannis!)
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To: SeekAndFind

The Georgia mother who protected her five kids from an intruder in her home needs to be trotted out, pronto.

Fight fire with fire.


6 posted on 01/16/2013 7:28:38 AM PST by Arm_Bears (Ted Kennedy's Oldsmobile has killed more people than my guns.)
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To: SeekAndFind

If thirty eight years olds say the government needs to take away bad bad guns, who are we to disagree?


7 posted on 01/16/2013 7:30:57 AM PST by ryan71 (Water, food and ammo.)
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To: SeekAndFind

“It might come in handy to have these super locks,” Obama joked at Master Lock in Wisconsin, noting that he will soon have two teenage daughters. “For now, I’m just counting on the fact that when they go to school there are men with guns with them.”


8 posted on 01/16/2013 7:32:00 AM PST by TornadoAlley3 (Obama is everything Oklahoma is not.)
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To: SeekAndFind
Wednesday, January 16, 2013

Waving the Bloody Shirt

By Nancy Thorner

Today at 11:45 a.m., President Obama will stand before television cameras, attended by Mayors Against Illegal Guns and members of Congress active in efforts to impose new restrictions on guns, to offer his "comprehensive" proposal for unilateral action to combat gun violence? Obama will be surrounded by children used as pawns who supposedly wrote letters decrying gun violence (at the urging of their teachers?), perhaps symbolic of the bloody shirts of the last century, in order to make the point. http://www.bgreithart.com/Big-Journalism/2013/01/15/Obbama-to-announce-gun-ban-surrounded-by-children

What was done at Sandy Hook School is history. Now it's time to weep for the Republic, and for the Constitution on which it was built. For if our leaders continue to dismantle the foundation of our Republic, who needs to worry about enemies from abroad? http://illinoisreview.typepad.com/illinoisreview/2013/01/waving-the-bloody-shirt.html#more

9 posted on 01/16/2013 7:32:24 AM PST by KeyLargo
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To: grobdriver
"Up here on the board is what I want you to write in your best handwriting, and then sign your name and pass them to the front.""

Exactly, I have grave suspicions that many of these letters were written by leftist Obama shock troops.

10 posted on 01/16/2013 7:33:47 AM PST by Truth29
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To: SeekAndFind

Actually it depends on how you look at this: As far as I’m concerned he is trotting out the kids to show he wants more of them killed by disarming more law abiding people who could have saved them.


11 posted on 01/16/2013 7:38:31 AM PST by GrandJediMasterYoda (Someday our schools we will teach the difference between "lose" and "loose")
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To: All

so we counter with “[NAME] would be alive if Mommy was armed.”


12 posted on 01/16/2013 7:39:09 AM PST by longtermmemmory (VOTE! http://www.senate.gov and http://www.house.gov)
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To: SeekAndFind

Good gosh, why doesn’t he just stand on the graves of those dead children and pound his chest? How much more deplorable can a person be? I guess I have another 4 years to find out.


13 posted on 01/16/2013 7:41:25 AM PST by paulcissa (The first requirement of Liberalism is to stand on your head and tell the world they're upside down)
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To: SeekAndFind

Leftists never argue the facts and logic of the issue,
because reality is never on their side.


14 posted on 01/16/2013 7:41:39 AM PST by MrB (The difference between a Humanist and a Satanist - the latter admits whom he's working for)
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To: SeekAndFind

..Young Pioneers...


15 posted on 01/16/2013 7:43:25 AM PST by WalterSkinner ( In Memory of My Father--WWII Vet and Patriot 1926-2007)
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To: WalterSkinner

Obummer is not the first dictator to use children to achieve his goals:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_z_pHUKajc


16 posted on 01/16/2013 7:47:35 AM PST by 9422WMR (Life is not fair, just deal with it)
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To: SeekAndFind
Reminds me of a movie quite a while ago...
obama is simply a bit more subtle...


17 posted on 01/16/2013 7:49:56 AM PST by SparkyBass
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To: SeekAndFind
Obama would not want his daughter "punished with a baby"
18 posted on 01/16/2013 7:51:21 AM PST by concerned about politics ("Get thee behind me, Liberal")
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To: SeekAndFind

Maybe since he will have all the kids in one place it will be a great opportunity for Hussein to explain to them that they are sixteen trillion in debt .... and counting.


19 posted on 01/16/2013 7:51:33 AM PST by layman (Card Carrying Infidel)
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To: GrandJediMasterYoda

does not matter.

The MSM will play to the low information voter.

It will be “gun VIOLENCE” not “control”.

You will see the photos with the obama halo in int image frame. IT WILL copy lenin, stalin, hitler etc., because low information voters are too stupid to see it and useful idiots like scarborough and mika and even blonds on FNF will not “get it.”

Remember the MSM is DUMBER than the low information voters.


20 posted on 01/16/2013 7:54:19 AM PST by longtermmemmory (VOTE! http://www.senate.gov and http://www.house.gov)
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