Thursday, January 17, 2013

I love my POTUS!

Color me impressed. A month after the Sandy Hook horror, Obama has accomplished, as the New York Times rightly observes, "Gun Reform for a Generation."

I agree with that editorial for the most part:
It is past time that elected leaders did something about it without worrying, as Mr. Obama said on Wednesday, about getting “an A grade from the gun lobby.” It has been a bipartisan betrayal of the public’s safety, the fault of Democrats and Republicans, and of a string of presidents who have said mournful things after the mass murders at Columbine and Virginia Tech and Aurora and Newtown but did not act. 
Wednesday was the exception. One month after the Newtown, Conn., murders, Mr. Obama presented a comprehensive set of initiatives that was, for a change, structured around what needs to be done and not what political tacticians think the president could get a dysfunctional Congress to pass. Mr. Obama can be frustrating at moments like this, and his delivery today was as professorial as ever. But he stepped up to the broader issue before the nation in remembering the tragedy at Newtown.
I disagree with the NYTimes complaint about Obama being professorial - that's one of my most favorite things about Obama. I adore his professorialiness.

How can you not love this press conference? Although in spite of his professorial attitude, many people, including Krugman had this response to Obama's message to the House Republicans:
Just about everyone has been characterizing Obama’s press conference with “My offer to you is this: nothing.” with an embedded excerpt from The Godfather, Part 2.
That press conference was mainly about the debt ceiling though. Here is the video for the historic gun control moment:


And there couldn't be a more loathsome opponent in this fight if you got them from central casting - crazy gun nuts who see ANY regulation as an assault on their rights. And as the New Yorker's Amy Davidson notes:
It takes the National Rifle Association to build a campaign for guns around resentment toward children—specifically, resentment toward two girls named Sasha and Malia. On Tuesday, a month after twenty first graders were shot dead in Newtown, Connecticut, and a day before President Obama was set to announce a set of proposals for curbing gun violence, the N.RA. released a video that opened with a cartoon image of an arm holding a lunchbox with the Presidential seal on it. “Are the President’s kids more important than yours?” it asks. Obama’s children, the narrator says, have armed guards at their school; why don’t yours?
And later on...
These measures, too, sound relatively modest. And yet Steve Stockman, a Republican Congressman from Texas, has already called them grounds for impeachment, saying “I will seek to thwart this action by any means necessary.” Edwin Meese, who was Reagan’s attorney general, asked by Newsmax about the potential use of executive orders, also said that if Obama “tried to override the Second Amendment in any way, I believe it would be an impeachable offense.” The President is presented not as a political opponent, but as a criminal. 
Only nutty extremists like the NRA and its zombies could have no shame in counting Ed Meese as part of their movement - Meese was quite possibly the worst Attorney General of all time.

But make no mistake - there will be a cadre of extremist gun-mongers who will try something extreme, violent and illegal. I only hope that the end result will be every single one of the extremist gun-monger cadre will end up in jail.