If He Goes, Censure Him
The House must impose some sort of consequence on Obama for his Oregon ghoulishness.
By Scott McKay – 10.7.15
If President Barack Obama follows through on his threat to visit Roseburg, Oregon later this week the House must pass a resolution of censure before he gets off Air Force One.
Call the president’s planned trip to the site of the Umpqua Community College shootings last week the straw that broke the camel’s back, if you will. But his announcement Monday evening that he was going to Roseburg, after prominent individuals including the publisher of the local newspaper had made it clear he was not welcome there as a result of his statements following the shootings, display a crass disregard for the wishes of the American people which must be met with some official response.
Obama didn’t even wait until the bodies were cold in Roseburg, or worse, for all of the next of kin to be notified, before launching into what originally appeared to be the usual noisy harangue about gun control. That was to be expected; after all, the president has well-earned his repute as the worst of the gun-grabbing ghouls of the Left, greedily feeding as he does on every tragic mass shooting to fuel his animus for the Second Amendment.
But this rant was not the garden variety. No, before it was over the president had done two things to ratchet up the rancor in the debate over gun rights in the wake of a mass shooting.
The most forthrightly obnoxious was his departure from the usual Democrat false narrative that “it’s impossible to avoid politicizing these mass shootings, because if we wait a respectable time for the victims to grieve there will just be a new, fresh mass shooting we then can’t talk about.” Instead, the president decided to put his cards on the table and, for once, tell us precisely what we always thought was in his heart…
“And, of course, what’s also routine is that somebody, somewhere will comment and say, Obama politicized this issue,” he said. “Well, this is something we should politicize.”
That came just following another statement a bit less crass but a lot more threatening…
“We know that other countries, in response to one mass shooting, have been able to craft laws that almost eliminate mass shootings,” said Obama. “Friends of ours, allies of ours — Great Britain, Australia, countries like ours. So we know there are ways to prevent it.”
That might seem a reasonable statement, until you consider what he’s actually talking about. In 1996 and 1997, the UK and Australia conducted programs of confiscation among their citizenries, taking a large number of privately owned firearms out of the hands of their citizens and all but banning their sale in the future.
We may share a language with those countries, and a similar cultural tradition, but with respect to the gun rights issue, as National Review’s Charles C.W. Cooke noted, America couldn’t be further apart from the Brits and Aussies. In neither of those countries does a constitutional right to keep and bear arms exist; here, it’s ensconced in our Bill of Rights just following the freedoms of speech, press, and religion. And while a very small number of gun owners were extant in those two countries before the gun-grabbers won their respective days, American gun ownership is perhaps more pervasive than any nation on earth.
There are some 300 million privately owned guns, owned by nearly half the households in the country. Obama wants to confiscate them or create a forced buyback program, which is the same thing. It will never, ever pass in Congress, so why is he even discussing it? How does he expect that to work? How does he think it could be done without violating the Second Amendment’s admonition that “the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed”?
And perhaps most importantly, how many Americans is Obama willing to kill to effect his grand policy initiative? Because if he thinks implementing a mass confiscation of weapons in this country is possible without violence on a very large scale by the men with guns he sends house to house to take the guns of some 100 million well-armed citizens, he is as ignorant about the American people as he is about the Constitution. Not only will individual gun owners resist and with violence, but states and local governments will also resist. In fact, the federally employed men with guns Obama would task with such an action would in large measure resist as well.
For those obnoxious actions and statements, David Jaques — the publisher of the Roseburg Beacon in that city — said on Thursday that Obama was not welcome to ply his rhetoric in that aggrieved locale.
Any visit by President would be “a campaign stop for agenda to take away American citizen’s right to own firearms,” Jaques told Breitbart News’ Lee Stranahan. Jaques pointed out that the local sheriff, John Hanlin, had declared that any attempt by the federal government to impose unconstitutional or extra-constitutional laws or edicts regarding gun rights would be resisted by his office.
And despite this obvious rebuff, Obama insists on forcing himself on a town recovering from a grievous loss?
Shall we stop for a moment and consider that not once has Obama mentioned the truly important fact hanging over the Roseburg massacre? That being the hideous nature of the crime — the murderer demanded to know the religion of his victims and those calling themselves Christians were shot in the head. Nine of them died — or more precisely, they were martyred for their faith. Has that ever happened before in America? Certainly it bears presidential mention, no? From a man who calls himself a Christian?
Perhaps the media has its answer for why some 61 percent of Americans disbelieve him when he identifies himself so.
Certainly there are more reasons for a congressional censure of Obama beyond Roseburg. After all, last week Obama’s inexplicable policies toward Iran, Russia, Iraq, the Assad regime in Syria and ISIS came together in an astonishing explosion of American irrelevance in the Middle East, putting into question whether it’s truly historic incompetence on his part producing this result or something else. And last week we saw a September jobs report showing that the Obama economy is an abject, seven-year failure producing unsustainable numbers of out-of-work Americans with only the foreign-born showing any significant level of upward mobility. That followed disturbing reports of our military brass punishing American soldiers in Afghanistan for doing something about the rampant pederasty among our tribal warlord allies there, and reports that while the president’s administration is conducting a more or less open-door policy for Muslim “Syrian refugees” who are causing so much trouble in Europe, it is blocking any access to this country for Christian victims of the atrocities there. And as the revelations surrounding Hillary Clinton’s emails continue to tumble forth, it’s still worth asking how Obama could have allowed such an irresponsible breach of protocol and security — which may have had consequences so far-reaching as to cripple our intelligence community for years to come — on his watch.
Any of those would be apt grounds for censure — or worse. But going to Roseburg is just the last straw. If he does it, put it on the record that this country, through the voice of its elected representatives in the People’s House, has had enough.
The American Spectator Foundation is the 501(c)(3) organization responsible for publishing The American Spectator magazine and training aspiring journalists who espouse traditional American values. Your contributions are tax deductible to the extent permitted by law. Each donor receives a year-end summary of their giving for tax purposes.
Copyright 2013, The American Spectator. All rights reserved.
Source URL:
http://spectator.org/articles/64282/if-he-goes-censure-him
