Posted on 01/22/2014 9:09:49 AM PST by kristinn
David Remnick, author of the new nearly 17,000 word profile of President Barack Obama in the New Yorker, revealed in a podcast interview this week that a dispirited Obama told him that he misread the “moment in political history” and was shocked he could not get gun control measures passed in the wake of the December 2012 Newtown, Ct., Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in which a lone gunman killed twenty children and six adults.
Remnick left this revelation out of his 18 page article which was based on numerous in depth interviews with Obama. Remnick did not devote anything of substance in the article to Obama’s gun control failure except to note he couldn’t get it done. This is curious because the way Remnick describes it, this was an enormous political failure that took a toll on Obama . Remnick should have explored this further and reported on it.
Remnick spoke about Obama’s reaction to his failure on gun control in a New Yorker podcast interview about the article with Executive Editor Dorothy Wickenden and Washington correspondent Ryan Lizza that was taped on Monday.
In describing Obama’s reaction, Remnick sounds just as shocked as he says Obama is about the failure to pass gun control after Newtown. Remnick made his comments while speaking about Obama’s ambitious second term agenda, including gun control, that he laid out in his Inaugural address one year ago this month.
Remnick: “Well look at gun control. You had the ruthless slaughter of school children played out in front of the American public in Connecticut. If ever there was a moment emotionally and politically that serious gun control would take hold of Congress it was then. Eighty-three percent of the public was for at least some minimal gun control. The NRA was a mockery in a lot of quarters and who won? The NRA and the right.
“I think this sh.., I know this shocked Obama. He said along this trip that I followed him on that one moment in political history where he really misread what would happen was on gun control. It was a terrible failure. And I think really dispiriting.”
Obama made an angry speech in the Rose Garden after he was defeated in the Senate last April. He called it a “shameful day for Washington.”
Given the impact he says this political miscalculation had on Obama, it is curious Remnick chose not to include it in his profile but instead buried it in a podcast.
It’s not urban warfare just because it happens in a building. Is an armed robbery of a 7/11 urban warfare? Is domestic violence in a single family home urban warfare? The answer is no in both cases, and also no in the case of a school shooting.
You might be able to argue there are some similarities to some aspects of urban warfare, but they are not the same thing. Trying to equate them, so that you can say the victims of a school shooting should have behaved in a way different from how they did, is just reaching.
“That’s the thing. They aren’t all powerful. Their only real power derives from the terminal gullibility and chronic naivete of the public.”
Well, then you can’t argue there is no increased risk to them if they staged a shooting, rather than just waiting for another one to happen. It’s especially silly to argue that the media covering for them would eliminate the risk, since we are all here on FR helping erode the power of that media every day, and have been for years. If the public was so gullible and easily manipulated by the media, then newspapers and network television would be swimming in profits, instead of lurching towards bankruptcy while we all circumvent them to get our news.
Like the 1,655,280,207th “gun control” law would work.
People aren't going to wake up all at once and the Corporate Media isn't going to lose all its credibility all at once. Its a process. Even on FR.
Years ago if one were to say that the US government funds and arms Al Qaeda to kill Christians then they'd probably get banned. Now its all out in the open and accepted as fact - because it is.
I've said nothing regarding how the victims should react; I've said that the victims would react the same way in urban warfare, as well in no-knock raids, as well as a school shooting like this. Precisely because all of these are employing a rapid-dominance strategy (on the part of the soldier, the police, and the shooter; respectively).
Is that reaching?
Yes, it’s reaching, because you are using a false equivalence to make an untenable connection.
“People aren’t going to wake up all at once and the Corporate Media isn’t going to lose all its credibility all at once. Its a process. Even on FR.”
So what? They’ve already lost plenty of credibility. So to suggest that they are so powerful that they can shield politicians from any repercussions of criminal acts is just laughable. They don’t have enough power to save Anthony Weiner from a guy running a website, but they have enough to save people from getting busted for mass murder? I don’t think so.
How?
How is it an untenable connection to say that all of these* use the rapid-dominance doctrine?
* School-shooters, police no-knock raids, urban warfare soldiers.
Because, as I said, you can’t compare children cowering in closets and bathrooms in terror to urban warfare, and then draw these contrived conclusions based on your misguided connection. It’s not the same thing, and it doesn’t matter how many times you keep repeating “rapid dominance doctrine”.
That's because you're an idiot who refuses to listen: let me put it to you in a way my 13 year old little sister would understand:
So then; how are they not in the same category?
You can keep repeating the same nonsense over and over, but you’re not accomplishing anything. We know how the victims reacted in Newton, so it’s a simple fact that your conclusions about how they should have reacted just don’t hold up. The reason is simple: you are drawing conclusions based on an imagined scenario that obviously isn’t in line with the reality of how things happened.
You’re obsessing, trying to get me to admit that there is some valid basis to some component of your imaginary scenario, when the entire thing is easily seen to be faulty, if you are not emotionally devoted to believing in it in the first place.
You obviously have never fired a weapon at a moving target.
The reason is simple: you are drawing conclusions based on an imagined scenario that obviously isn’t in line with the reality of how things happened.
I'm not drawing conclusions on what really happened: I'm saying it's damn strange.
Things don't add up.
And this whole line of argument came from my considering a greater-than 90% hit-rate bizarre, even in a school-shooting; which I unfortunately termed an instance of urban-warfare' and you reacted to that. (Rapid-dominance* and CQB** were my attempts to clarify my reasoning that a 90% hit-rate is amazing in the circumstances, even if shooting fish in a barrel.
)
* - I've never been involved in an actual rapid-dominance operation; but I do know the theory, the training mostly room-clearing ops.
** - I actually have some CQB training; I was deployed to Iraq. (Accurately shooting while moving is hard; accurately shooting something that's moving while you're moving is damn hard.)
So I guess Obama is going to be going to jail soon for illegally using the IRS to go after his political opponents and using the NSA to illegally spy on every American.
No, it’s impossible to prosecute the President criminally while he is in office, he can only be impeached.
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