Unsurprisingly, Republicans are blaming this school shooting in Uvalde Texas not just on mental illness but on everything else except the most obvious culprit: guns.
Beto O’Rourke, the former Democratic presidential white knight and current Democratic gubernatorial candidate, threw this into righteous relief on Wednesday. He crashed a press conference Texas Republicans were holding, and called them out for firing off hackneyed mass-shooting talking points while doing nothing to redress gun violence.
Beto O’Rourke disrupted Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s press conference on the Uvalde school shooting on Wednesday, prompting Republicans alongside the governor to shout down his Democratic challenger and call him a ‘sick son of a bitch.’
As members of the audience shouted ‘go home,’ attendees of the presser could be heard yelling ‘you are out of line’ to O’Rourke as he walked up to the stage to confront the governor.
‘You are doing nothing,’ he asserted as he approached Abbott.
(The Daily Beast, May 25, 2022)
Sen. Ted Cruz led the chorus of those shouting down O’Rourke. But Cruz is the hypocritical SOB who applauds Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell for taking pride as the grim reaper of all gun-control legislation. This, even though legislation to ban military-style weapons, ban high-capacity magazines, and mandate background checks would clearly make these tragedies far less deadly – even if they don’t prevent them.
But Republicans like Cruz and Abbott have adopted the Trumpian method of telling the ‘Big Lie,’ no matter what. It stems from a perverse form of reverse psychology, which presumes the more brazen your lie, or the more hypocritical you are, the less likely people are to think you’re actually lying, or being a hypocrite.
The effect would be to normalize your lies and hypocrisy. This is rather like Trump realizing early on that the more he publicly humiliates men like Cruz, the more loyal they become to him. Sure enough, today Cruz is more Trumpier than Trump himself.
Finally, in my original commentary on this latest massacre, I decried the media’s complicity, which invariably includes eyewitness interviews that seem intended to do nothing more than entertain the way horror movies do. But interviewing 10-year-olds smacks of kiddie violence porn.
Frankly, it borders on child abuse to have children relive their trauma like this. And, again, the only reason for doing so is to gratify macabre public interest.
Related commentaries:
Uvalde mass shooting…
Legacy Note: With over 5,600 posts spanning 20 years, I am easily the most prolific blogger on the most eclectic array of topics on the web. That makes The iPINIONS Journal an unparalleled archive of informed political and cultural commentary. Visit the ARCHIVES section in the sidebar or search by topic. You won’t find a more consistent, independent voice on world affairs.