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Obama’s speech
I’ve read Obama’s Wednesday night speech in Tucson. His remarks were for the most part appropriate and at times eloquent. This was because he was speaking of the deaths as a human event, a human loss, and not politicizing them. However, his remarks became inappropriate and political when he turned from the loss of life and began speaking of the supposed lesson we can learn from it, namely that we must become more “civil” as a society. When he said, “what we can’t do is use this tragedy as one more occasion to turn on one another,” that was a false statement, because at the time he was speaking, and for five days before that, starting within a couple of hours of the terrible event, it had already become an occasion for his supporters, the members of his party, to be blaming the mass murder on Republicans. For him not to mention that plain and undeniable and horrible fact, for him to act as though both sides might somehow be equally at fault for turning on each other and must be equally cautioned not to blame each other, is a huge lie. It was liberals who unilaterally—in some cases out of the most cynical political calculation, in some cases out of genuine belief—blamed the mass murder on Republicans. If Obama was serious about seeking self-reflection and reconciliation, he needed to be explicit about that point and to declare that the liberals’ demonization of Republicans and conservatives was wrong. That would have brought reconcilation. Naming the actual aggression by his own supporters, and saying that this must stop, would have brought reconcilation. Instead, by suggesting that both sides are equally at risk of the sin of blaming others, and that it is only from this moment forward that we should avoid blaming others, he was in effect attacking Sarah Palin for her own remarks on Wednesday in which she finally replied to the liberals’ five-day long demonization of her and other Republicans and denounced it, entirely correctly, as a blood libel. The practical effect of Obama’s remarks was to give the liberals a free pass for their five-day-long hate campaign against conservatives, while indicting any conservative self-defense against that hate campaign as the very act of “blaming others” that must be avoided and that stands in the way of unity and love.
In addition to the wrong elements in the speech itself, a much more serious problem was that the entire setting of the speech was wrong, namely the “Together We Thrive” theme of the rally (a theme which, Michelle Malkin points out, the White House was certainly involved in choosing). As a VFR reader said last night, “Together We Thrive” is a liberal fascist slogan, “an implicit or subliminal condemnation of anyone who is ‘divisive,’ which means anyone who opposes the liberal agenda.” By speaking at a rally organized around the liberal fascist slogan “Together We Thrive,” Obama made his entire speech, including the good, human, and non political parts of it, a lie. But, as I have observed before, everything Obama says, including “and” and “the,” is a lie. Email entry |