Hours after the Virginia Tech massacre, Barack Obama spoke at a campaign stop in Milwaukee. Obama could have shown compassion unalloyed with politics, what one hopes to find in a leader when disaster strikes. But he didn't. In the grand tradition of leftist orators, Obama repackaged the awful news of the day to "reflect" on his own political themes."I hope," the candidate said about the massacre, "that it causes us to reflect a little more broadly on the degree to which we do accept violence in various forms all the time in our society: we glorify it, we encourage it, we ignore it, and it's heartbreaking."
In other words, some deranged madman just perpetrated the greatest shooting massacre in the nation's history, and Obama wants us to "reflect" on whatever "violence in various forms" that he can say we're responsible for. While people were crying on each other's shoulders in Blacksburg, tensely waiting by hospital beds and telephones, or gathering in candlelight vigils across the nation, this character was in Milwaukee trying to put the national nose in a corner to think about what we've done. (Any similarity between Obama's reaction and killer Cho Seung Hui's note "You made me do this" revealed later is sickly coincidental.)
A little pre-emptive postscript: I am by no means making light of the VT tragedy. I am, however, making light of those who would use it as a means of pandering to their base or furthering their political agenda.
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