Democrats, Maxine Waters, is the sky falling?

By John Kass

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/columnists/kass/ct-met-kass-maxine-waters-democrats-20180626-story.html#nt=outfit

June 26, 2018

Maxine Waters

Just  what will the rage-filled American political left and their Democratic Party handmaidens do when they take power?

Given their recent calls to mob action, harassing Republicans and their families out of restaurants and movie theaters, spittle flying from angry mouths, America is right to wonder what will happen when the left holds the federal hammer in its hands.

The end of Donald Trump is a dream they chase, just as they chased White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders and her family from the Red Hen restaurant in Lexington, Va., a few days ago.

But just about the last thing any American wants to dream about is the rat cage strapped to your face before a thorough confession of political sins. Then come the other rituals, from the shaving of heads to the public walks of atonement, with Maxine Waters cackling and shrieking in the background.

Oh, pardon me. I’m sorry. Did I just type “rat cage”? What was I thinking?

With all the easy references in media to “Nazis” these days, a dehumanizing term applied to Americans who dare believe their country should have secure borders, I thought perhaps a small mention of “rat cage” might be acceptable, too.

I apologize. My hyperbole is wantonly irresponsible. And what makes my sin worse is that now we’re being told by the voices of reason to take a step back and remember a time of gentle civility in America, before Trump and his brutish, vulgar ways.

So, let’s remember those civilized times, shall we?

It seems almost quaint to remember Hillary Clinton kicking more than 60 million people to the margins of American culture. She sentenced them to eternal limbo in her “basket of deplorables.” Remember?

Her audience tittered and giggled. A few wise Democrats saw this instantly as a horrible mistake, just as Chicago Democrat David Axelrod now understands that the ugly sounds coming out of U.S. Rep. Maxine Waters’ mouth — and the larger Democratic orgy of public shaming of Republicans — are terrible political mistakes.

Chicago is a practical town. A crooked, violent town, yes, and broke, but practical in some things. Wise Chicago Democrats could see the chaos Clinton unleashed with her “deplorables” remark.

But by then it was too late. America heard her words. And more than 60 million of them voted for Trump.

It wasn’t the only reason she lost the election. It wasn’t the Russians. Clinton was the dowager empress of a discredited Washington establishment. 2016 was the year of insurgency. And her “deplorables” comment became a rallying cry.

Shaming is a goad. It keeps people in line, lest they stray and are devoured on social media as a lesson to others.

Americans aren’t big on shaming. They don’t like it when it comes from the Twitter feed of some anonymous troll with a cartoon head.

They like shaming even less when they envision themselves as the next target, up close, their families surrounded, the screamers in their faces, flecks of spittle flying. What comes after shaming? Pain.

But the left loves to publicly shame those who challenge them. The left’s attacks on conservative speakers at college campuses was but a precursor to what’s happening now.

Americans don’t mind debate. What they do mind is picturing themselves ordering a chicken dinner and being told to leave because of their politics, as happened to Sanders.

Or shouted at in a restaurant, and outside her home, as is happening to Kirstjen Nielsen, the secretary of homeland security.

Or being yelled at and allegedly spat on as was Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi at a theater where she hoped to watch the documentary on the gentle Mister Rogers.

Spittle, hate, shaming and Mister Rogers?

Won’t you be my neighbor?

Waters, the Los Angeles Democrat considered a hero and wise woman to some, argued publicly that those loyal to President Trump should be hounded, publicly.

“And if you see anybody from that Cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd,” Waters said at a rally the other day. “And you push back on them.”

This is exceedingly dangerous. It begs violence. And if it happens, it will rightly be put in the lap of the Democrats.

Because Waters is a Democrat, and what she calls for is mob action and vengeance. The mob lunges forward, filled with self-righteousness and seeks a dehumanized enemy.

But the left loves to publicly shame those who challenge them. The left’s attacks on conservative speakers at college campuses was but a precursor to what’s happening now.

Americans don’t mind debate. What they do mind is picturing themselves ordering a chicken dinner and being told to leave because of their politics, as happened to Sanders.

Or shouted at in a restaurant, and outside her home, as is happening to Kirstjen Nielsen, the secretary of homeland security.

Or being yelled at and allegedly spat on as was Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi at a theater where she hoped to watch the documentary on the gentle Mister Rogers.

Spittle, hate, shaming and Mister Rogers?

Won’t you be my neighbor?

Waters, the Los Angeles Democrat considered a hero and wise woman to some, argued publicly that those loyal to President Trump should be hounded, publicly.

“And if you see anybody from that Cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd,” Waters said at a rally the other day. “And you push back on them.”

This is exceedingly dangerous. It begs violence. And if it happens, it will rightly be put in the lap of the Democrats.

Because Waters is a Democrat, and what she calls for is mob action and vengeance. The mob lunges forward, filled with self-righteousness and seeks a dehumanized enemy.

What adds to the danger is that Trump voters have already been dehumanized as “deplorables” and most recently and loudly as Nazis by many in media and the left, for daring to think America should have control over its borders.

Trump wouldn’t know civility if it bit him. He’s not an example of prudence and good manners. And he’s no Mister Rogers.

What he’s doing is making Waters the public face of his opposition. He won’t let it go. Her idiocy has great currency.

Some Democrats, like Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer of New York, properly admonished Waters. But unless Democrats censure her publicly in the House (and they wouldn’t dare), they’ll sidestep this and search for some new outrage to change the subject.

They are such expert dancers in Washington, as they must have been in their past lives, in the glittering French palace of Versailles, knowing just when to point the toe, and when to put their best foot forward, while stepping off to the side.

Listen to “The Chicago Way” podcast with John Kass and Jeff Carlin athttp://wgnradio.com/category/wgn-plus/thechicagoway.

jskass@chicagotribune.com

Twitter @John_Kass

MORE FROM JOHN KASS:

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Trump and Democrats both weaponize children in immigration fight

By John Kass

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/columnists/kass/ct-met-trump-immigration-kass-0620-story.html

June 20, 2018

In this photo provided by U.S. Customs and Border Protection, a U.S. Border Patrol agent watches as people who've been taken into custody related to cases of illegal entry into the United States stand in line at a facility in McAllen, Texas, on June 17, 2018. (U.S. Customs and Border Protection's Rio Grande Valley Sector / AP)

Raw emotion unleashed makes for potent politics.

And the wave of emotion in America over the plight of families separated and children held in detention along the southern border is as potent as anything we’ve seen in a while.

It has allowed political actors to say just about anything and get away with it. PresidentDonald Trump’s opponents gleefully drop the race card. They breathlessly accuse him of child abuse.

White House immigration policy has even been compared to the death camps of Nazi Germany, as Never Trumper and former CIA Director Michael Hayden did the other day on Twitter, to his shame.

Emotion is exactly what politicians want, especially if they have that media prod in their hands, the better to herd public opinion.

Republicans held that prod years ago, when the Bush administration pushed its disastrous war in Iraq. And Democrats have it now, with the specter of those children being separated from their parents along the border.

It makes for power politics.

But does it make for sound policy?

If you don’t feel powerful emotion at the sight and sound of children being taken from their parents who tried to cross illegally over the southern border, you have no heart.

The repeated images of frightened children, some shouting “Papa! Papa!” as they’re taken away by federal agents, are horrible and beyond words.

But what’s also apparently beyond words is this: The children in the detention centers have now been thoroughly politically weaponized by the left and their allies in the Democratic Media Complex.

The children are the arrows in the Democratic quiver. Republicans are panicking, trying to come up with compromise legislation. Polls show Americans are overwhelmingly opposed to Trump’s family separation policy.

And so Democrats have absolutely no political incentive to help solve the problem in Congress. They’d rather draw their bows and let fly at Trump.

“There’s no need for legislation,” said Senate Democratic Leader Charles Schumer of New York. “There’s no need for anything else. You can do it. Mr. President, you started it, you can stop it.”

Make no mistake, Trump is deserving of the arrows. He did this ham-handedly, with confused and contradictory messaging. The public relations disaster he created is written on the panicked faces of his fellow Republicans.

Yes, the Obama administration engaged in forced separation too, but not nearly to this extent.

Trump was first to weaponize these children. With his “zero tolerance” policy aimed at either deterring illegal immigration or helping negotiate changes in immigration law in Congress, the president took things to a grotesque, draconian level.

And now, Democrats and others who are part of the left’s no-borders alliance feel they’ve scored a significant political victory. They’re not wrong. They have scored a victory, at least in the short term.

In the past, people crossing the border illegally (a misdemeanor) with children were charged, then released into the United States with the promise they’d return to court. Naturally, few returned. And so, more came with children. They had been given incentive.

Border policy was already a complete mess when former President Barack Obama took office, and he was slammed by the left as a betrayer and as the “deporter in chief.”

In 2014, at a CNN town hall meeting, Democrat Hillary Clinton said deterrence was critically important.

“We have to send a clear message: Just because your child gets across the border, that doesn’t mean the child gets to stay,” Clinton said. “We don’t want to send a message that’s contrary to our laws or will encourage more children to make that dangerous journey.”

But talking about sending a message when children are involved is quite different from actually sending it.

Trump sent that message and now he’s paying for it.

He made securing the border the centerpiece of his presidential run. It propelled him past establishment Republican candidates who tried appeasing the desire of business for cheap labor, without angering those who were economically left behind.

But they were inconsolably angry. And Trump was not about compromise. But he seems ready to compromise now. And Republicans, facing the midterm elections, are worried.

Republicans and Trump are now focusing on a new plan for the families who don’t properly seek asylum at border crossings, but who are caught illegally crossing the border.

The law now limits the amount of time minors can be held to 20 days. One Republican plan would allow children to be kept with their parents in detention for longer than that. A revised bill would give the Department of Homeland Security powers to use $7 billion in “border technology funding” to build family detention centers.

Can you see the problem here? Refugee camps growing along the southern border, families and children held for extended periods, with the left increasing its call to let everybody in and put an end to something as cruel and exclusive as borders.

It could serve as an incentive for others to come, and our new refugee camps could grow even larger, as desperate people run from poverty, the cruelty of their corrupt Central American governments and the violence back home.

In the short term at least, Schumer and the Democrats won’t budge. Schumer’s got those weaponized children in his quiver and ample support in the media.

But what are the long-term consequences? We’re not really thinking about the long term, are we?

We don’t want to see those children crying. We just want an end to it. And the long-term consequence of policy isn’t on our minds.

Listen to "The Chicago Way" podcast with John Kass and Jeff Carlin — athttp://wgnradio.com/category/wgn-plus/thechicagoway.

jskass@chicagotribune.com

Twitter @John_Kass

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Left's knee-jerk reaction to Waffle House killings runs counter to facts

By John Kass

http://www.chicagotribune.com/

April 24, 2018

Travis Reinking, the suspect in a deadly shooting at an Antioch Waffle House, is escorted into Hill Detention Center for booking in Nashville, Tenn., Monday, April 23, 2018.  (Lacy Atkins/The Tennessean)

Travis Reinking, the mentally disturbed man charged in the Waffle House killings, had his guns taken away with the help of law enforcement.

This is a fact.

But the guns were returned to him by his father, and four people were killed the other day in that Waffle House in Nashville, Tenn.

These, too, are facts.

President Donald Trump did not give the guns back to Reinking, the NRA didn’t, and theRepublicans did not meet in a quiet cloakroom so innocents would be slaughtered.

Law-abiding gun owners of America didn’t demand that the guns be returned to a man with obvious mental illness.

The killer’s father, Jeffrey Reinking, did that on his own, according to police.

He took possession of the guns from law enforcement. He knew that his son was sick, that he may well have been dangerous.

And yet he gave them back to his son.

Facts.

Yes, facts are stubborn things, aren’t they?

Yet immediately after the Waffle House killings, the hot takes were launched in media, on Twitter, and the high priests of the left began attacking the Second Amendment right to bear arms.

It was Trump’s fault and the NRA’s fault and the fault of America’s “gun-culture” and the Republicans’ fault, and the fault of the patriots who wrote the Constitution to protect liberty and minority rights, and on and on.

If you’re a regular consumer of American news, you know this liturgy by heart. Do we really need another “town meeting” on national cable news to unleash the demagogues?

Using the Nashville Waffle House shooting in hot takes to shame Americans away from publicly supporting the Second Amendment must be extremely satisfying to some.

But it’s about as logical as using the Toronto van attack the other day to stop Canadians from renting vans.

When partisan politics meets fear and opportunity, the hot takes come rushing, and the herding of the mob commences and facts are pushed aside.

We’ve seen this before in the aftermath of other shootings, like the recent carnage at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida.

The immediate cry was to gut the Bill of Rights in the name of “common sense” gun laws, and those who didn’t join up were shamed.

Only later did facts come out.

An armed Broward County sheriff’s deputy refused to engage the shooter. Local law enforcement had repeated run-ins with the alleged shooter; they knew he was armed and dangerous and yet did nothing.

The federal PROMISE program, brainchild of the Obama administration, was designed to allow schools to deal with disciplinary issues without notifying police.

The 19-year-old suspect, former student Nikolas Cruz, was reportedly not in this program. But such policies may allow troublemakers like him to fall through the cracks.

Seventeen were killed, and he confessed pulling the trigger, authorities said.

But before the details were all known, the hot takes were already thrown.

Appeals to fear and rage aren’t policy, but they are effective politics, especially in a culture that has been weaned away from understanding that our republic was designed to be slow and deliberate to protect the rights of the minority against the passions of the day.

Now we’re fed a daily dose of policy by polls and pundits shouting on TV. Civics in schools is an afterthought.

Fear and rage are potent weapons. And there’s nothing like pushing raw emotion and political tribal chant to herd people to policy, whether that be another war in the Middle East or tearing up the Bill of Rights.

Are there good and honestly outraged and frightened Americans who just want to put an end to these shootings? Yes, of course.

But fear and outrage also have political utility. And those techniques are used by political hacks with their eyes on the 2018 elections.

That is the way of hot takes. Then, a few hours pass, and the facts start coming out.

In August 2017, the U.S. Secret Service arrested Travis Reinking, who is from downstate Morton, Ill., near the White House. He demanded a meeting with President Trump. Federal authorities contacted the Illinois State Police asking that Reinking’s state firearm owner’s identification card be revoked. It was. He gave up his FOID card.

Travis Reinking also gave up his guns, three rifles and a 9 mm handgun.

But his father gave them back to him.

In June 2017, Travis Reinking was wearing a dress, pulled it off and jumped into a pool and began yelling at people. Authorities said he was spotted tossing a rifle into the trunk of his car.

According to news reports, a Tazewell County, Ill., sheriff’s deputy told the father what had happened, adding in his police report that “he might want to lock the guns back up until Travis gets mental help which he stated he would.”

That report mentions Jeffrey Reinking taking Travis’ guns away earlier.

And in May 2016, the sheriff’s office found Travis Reinking talking of suicide, that pop singer Taylor Swift was stalking him and that he had weapons.

You want “common sense” gun laws? How about promoting Gun Violence Restraining Order bills in the states? A GVRO would allow family members living with a mentally ill person to seek a court order to temporarily seize their guns.

But in this case?

This one is not on law-abiding gun owners who safely keep weapons to defend themselves and their families, as is their right.

This one’s on the father.

He gave those guns back to his son.

Listen to “The Chicago Way” podcast with John Kass and Jeff Carlin atwww.wgnradio.com/category/wgn-plus/thechicagoway.

jskass@chicagotribune.com

Twitter @John_Kass

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'Chappaquiddick' and the power of myth

By John Kass
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/columnists/kass/ct-met-chappaquiddick-kass20180410-story.html
April 11, 2018


Frogmen dive into the water as they try to raise the car belonging to Edward Kennedy Photo: GETTY

"Chappaquiddick” is an impressive, fascinating and clinical film about a young Ted Kennedy, the power of myth and the corrosive cynicism of mythmakers.

And so the other day, in a Chicago movie theater, as the closing credits were rolling, people left their seats without saying, “I really liked it” or “I really hated it.”

The theater was as silent as that quiet moment just after a sigh.

But one man enjoyed “Chappaquiddick” so much that he gave it a slow long clap that went on and on. A few moviegoers — obviously aging baby boomers raised on Camelot — stared at him in irritation, their hands on hips, heads tilted, like peeved, graying birds.

But he just kept on slow clapping because it was the right thing to do.

“Chappaquiddick” is set some 50 years ago, on a warm July night in 1969, when Edward “Ted” Kennedy (Jason Clarke) drives off a bridge and into the water, then leaves Mary Jo Kopechne (Kate Mara) alone in the car to die.

That it has taken so long to tell this story on film is an indictment of the cynical politics of Hollywood. But in this film, there is at least one moral character: Kennedy’s cousin, Joe Gargan (Ed Helms).

After Kennedy abandoned Kopechne in the water, he walks all the way back to his rented house. Gargan sees him there, dripping wet and staring out into space.

“Come on, Teddy,” says Gargan. “What’s the big idea?”

“I’m not going to be president,” Kennedy says.

It is an astonishingly honest line, full of self-pity, full of real pain, full of the heavy weight of family obligation and the memory of his late brothers Joe, John and Robert.

It was just one line in a superb performance by Clarke, and oddly, even while he pities himself, you can feel some pity for the man.

He could have shouted it, but he simply said it, as a flat fact of life, or as an inconvenient truth.

Yet as he said it, Mary Jo was trapped in the black Oldsmobile in the water, gasping in an air bubble in the submerged car, saying the Lord’s Prayer, suffocating alone.

Predictably, some reviewers have panned “Chappaquiddick” or nitpicked this detail or that, pronouncing the movie a failure because, they insist, old Joseph Kennedy had suffered a stroke and couldn’t have possibly uttered the word “alibi.”

But for all that, every American who thinks and reads and bemoans the lack of intellectual honesty in our politics may feel a small obligation to see “Chappaquiddick” and think on it afterward.

Why?

Because selling American politics is all about the selling of myth, and America has been spoon-fed the “Camelot” saga of the Kennedys and their tragedies by an adoring media for decades.

So perhaps a few Americans might have at least a passing interest in seeing how that myth works and at what cost and who pays.

What we do know is that in the proper hands, mythology is a tool that can be used to buy some much-needed time.

For the Kennedys, time enough to craft a media strategy, time to get Kopechne’s body out of Massachusetts, time to get the right investigators, time to make sure Ted wouldn’t go to prison.

And that would give him time to drink and time to go to seed, time to become the liberal lion of the Senate, loved by Democrats and revered by the media, as his liberal politics were and are the media’s liberal politics.

There would even be time later for Kennedy to run for president, and time for him to be held up as the champion of women’s rights, even as he’d rub up, unsolicited, against a waitress to make his infamous “waitress sandwich.”

But all that would come later.

Ed Helms and Jason Clarke in 'Chappaquiddick'

“Chappaquiddick” concerns itself with Ted Kennedy needing enough time to step over Mary Jo Kopechne’s corpse.

That’s where the wise-men come in, called by patriarch Joe Kennedy to the family compound in Hyannis Port, Mass., to spin the story back under control.

They did what political masters do best, manipulate the American desire for myth and feed it to us to protect young Ted Kennedy.

They couldn’t do it alone; they needed help. And because much of establishment media revered the Kennedys, they figured help would come.

Spitballing their plans about the timing of the news leak, about the importance of getting the body out of Massachusetts, how best to steer news coverage long enough for America to be overwhelmed by a fantastic event coming days later that would dominate the news:

Those first steps of man walking on the moon.

In the group of media alchemists called upon to save Ted Kennedy were former Defense Secretary and Kennedy man Robert McNamara (Clancy Brown) and mythmaker Ted Sorensen (Taylor Nichols).

Sorensen was President John F. Kennedy’s speechwriter and the ghostwriter of “Profiles in Courage” for which Kennedy — not Sorensen — received the coveted Pulitzer Prize.

I’d read the book as a little boy, a book all about great moral courage. But there was little courage in “Chappaquiddick,” as those great wise-men helped Ted Kennedy step over that young woman who died alone in his car, after he’d abandoned her.

And when it was over, I couldn’t help but slow clap as the credits rolled.

“You really liked this movie that much?” asked a pleasant woman from Arkansas.

Yes, I did.

And I’d see it again, if only to remind me of how great men honor themselves, protected by honored spinners who pull those strings tied to American hearts.

Listen to “The Chicago Way” podcast featuring John Kass and Jeff Carlin athttp://wgnradio.com/category/wgn-plus/thechicagoway.

jskass@chicagotribune.com

Twitter @John_Kass

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Retired Justice Stevens Puts Democrats on a Pin with Call to Repeal Second Amendment

By John Kass
https://townhall.com/columnists/johnkass/
April 2, 2018


Retired Justice Stevens argues for repeal of Second Amendment


Democrats are panicking over retired Supreme Court Justice John Stevens' comments on repealing the Second Amendment.

You know they're panicking when they insist they're not panicking.

It is one thing for the left to slowly, carefully, methodically gut the Bill of Rights by using the media and their children's crusade as proxies.

But it's quite another thing to honestly declare your intentions about repealing the Second Amendment, which is what Stevens -- a Republican appointee but a liberal -- is advocating.

At least Stevens is honest about it, which is what you'd expect of a 97-year-old Cubs fan who saw Babe Ruth's called shot at Wrigley. But he's driven Democrats crazy.

Sunlight is the best disinfectant, yes, but what if you don't want to admit to the American public -- before the 2018 elections -- that shredding the Second Amendment is what's on the menu?

You panic and say, "That is not what I meant, that is not what I meant at all," as you're fixed upon a pin as in the T.S. Eliot poem, which is exactly what Stevens' op-ed in The New York Times did to the left.

Stevens fixed them on a pin, like insects on a board. An honest pin, to be sure, but a pin nevertheless.

So until Democrats can figure out an escape without demeaning the retired justice, those bent on trashing the long-held American right to bear arms just might want to remember happier times.

Like those halcyon days when they hadn't yet driven all the moderate Democrats out of their party, when John Kerry was running for president.

Kerry, the impossibly rich liberal, a beneficiary of the Heinz ketchup fortune thanks to his wife, was a worldly fellow, comfortable on a yacht. But he was plagued by his patrician, upper-crust demeanor.

Some political brain decided Kerry should go a duck huntin' and demonstrate his love for the Second Amendment. And he got all dressed up like Elmer Fudd.

All that was missing was the Fudd hat with the ear flaps. But that would have ruined Kerry's hair.

Somebody shot some ducks -- or perhaps an aide had them quietly strangled -- but either way Kerry proudly carried those dead ducks around for news photographers, to demonstrate his reverence for the Second Amendment and the American right to kill some ducks.

The Bill of Rights doesn't exactly mention duck hunting, but liberals have a way of conflating hunting with the right to bear arms.

Kerry didn't care. He even dropped his patrician airs for the afternoon and walked around like an animatronic Orvis catalog. And, he got some nice Ohio mud on his boots.



The photo op might have worked, if Kerry hadn't been wearing obviously stiff new gear, which made him look exactly what he was: a liberal politician in store-bought huntin' clothes pandering for regular folks' votes in Ohio by carrying a shotgun and a bunch of dead ducks.

Will we ever see Democrats touch a gun again in a photo op?

Perhaps, but they'll need a safe emotional distance between any fake Second Amendment reverence and that other recent Democratic event:

That children's crusade of the left called March for Our Lives, which was treated as some kind of spontaneous happening rather than carefully orchestrated theater.

In it, the young protesters held signs and spent George Clooney's money while demanding the government take away Americans' guns, because, in the words of student leader and apprentice demagogue David Hogg, stupid parents just can't be trusted with democracy.

"When your old-ass parent is like, 'I don't know how to send an iMessage,' and you're just like, 'Give me the (expletive deleted) phone and let me handle it,'" said Hogg in an earlier interview. "Sadly, that's what we have to do with our government; our parents don't know how to use a (expletive deleted) democracy, so we have to."

Of course you do. So just do it.

That's exactly what Stevens advocated in his New York Times op-ed piece.

Stevens wrote that he was moved by the demonstrations in Washington and other major cities, adding that they reveal broad public support for legislation to minimize the risks of mass killings by those with guns.

"But the demonstrators should seek more effective and more lasting reform," wrote Stevens. "They should demand a repeal of the Second Amendment."

It would be a more honest debate if Democrats would just drop the pretense and the mealy-mouthing and the business of carrying dead ducks around and follow Stevens's lead by declaring they want to repeal the Second Amendment. And have their candidates make that position clear in the upcoming midterms.

But Democrats are wriggling on that pin, saying they really don't want to mess with the Second Amendment.

"Not if they'd like to keep their jobs," said one of CNN's many leftists-in-residence, Symone Sanders, a former press secretary for socialist presidential candidate Bernie Sanders.

This is what happens when Democrats allow folks on the right and the Republican Party to define and frame the conversation," she explained, though Justice Stevens isn't exactly of the right.

And some of those young people in March for Our Lives demanded America get rid of its guns, but Sanders said she wouldn't go that far.

"Children are very different than elected Democratic representation."

In other words, use the children's crusade until you can't. And insist you really don't want to gut the Bill of Rights, until it's done.

The Cowards of Broward County

• SCOTT MCKAY

https://spectator.org/

February 26, 2018

Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel (left) and NRA spokeswoman Dana Loesch during a CNN town hall meeting in Sunrise, Fla.

 (MICHAEL LAUGHLIN/SOUTH FLORIDA SUN-SENTINEL VIA REUTERS)

CNN put on an atrocious spectacle last week, hosting a “town hall” production that was, as Fox News’ Tucker Carlson and the Chicago Tribune’s John Kass both remarked, a re-enactment of the Two Minutes’ Hate scene in George Orwell’s classic novel 1984. It was a remarkable example of shameless exploitation and ideological hate-mongering put on by the failing news network directed at the National Rifle Association.

Among the worst actors in CNN’s disgraceful play was Scott Israel, the partisan Democrat political hack masquerading as the sheriff in Broward County where the Parkland massacre took place. Israel engaged in a ridiculous back-and-forth with National Rifle Association spokeswoman (and stand-in for Emmanuel Goldstein) Dana Loesch, in which Israel offered one of the stupidest and most demagogic statements in recent memory, notable mostly for its having captured the zeitgeist of the gun-grabbing Left in the aftermath of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School carnage.

“You just told this group of people that you’re standing up for them,” Israel scolded Loesch. “You are not standing up for them until you say, ‘I want less weapons.’”

Loesch was attempting to explain that the NRA is for improving the federal system of background checks which failed to identify Parkland killer Nikolas Cruz as a dangerous psychopath when Cruz attempted to spend a chunk of the life insurance payout from his adopted mother’s death on a personal firearms arsenal, and that a better-functioning government implementing the laws already on the books, which the NRA has long argued for, would do more to stop the next Parkland from happening than any leftist gun-control fantasy. For her statements she was hooted at and called a murderer by the unhinged children in the audience.

But as Kass noted, Israel may have had his big moment playing to the crowd on CNN — but things have gone south from there…

What the public didn’t know at the time of Israel’s speechifying was that on the day of the shooting, a Broward deputy sheriff was stationed at the school.

When the shooting began, Israel’s armed deputy hid outside in safety and remained there.

But if the good sheriff — a political cat — had explained that business about his frightened deputy, he’d have ruined the show. So he kept his mouth shut.

That wasn’t the half of it. By the weekend it came out that Scot Peterson, the school resource officer who neglected to engage the shooter as he was duty-bound to do, wasn’t alone…

Not one but four sheriff’s deputies hid behind cars instead of storming Marjory Stoneman Douglas HS in Parkland, Fla., during Wednesday’s school shooting, police claimed Friday — as newly released records revealed the Broward County Sheriff’s Office had received at least 18 calls about the troubled teen over the past decade.

Sources from Coral Springs, Fla., Police Department tell CNN that when its officers arrived on the scene Wednesday, they were shocked to find three Broward County Sheriff’s deputies behind their cars with weapons drawn.

Peterson resigned Thursday once it became national news that he failed to run to the sound of the guns.

And the upshot is that Israel, who unquestionably knew his people had abjectly failed to protect the young people of Broward County, spent the week after the shooting pushing a political narrative that is irrelevant — demonstrably irrelevant — to solving the problem of school shootings.

Click on the link below to read the rest of the article:

https://spectator.org/the-cowards-of-broward-county/