Trump: Let’s not politicize this tragedy, except to help me.
Trump, Republicans, and Murdoch puppets, always immediately respond to American gun carnage events with statements not to consider gun control, or assess blame, or “politicize” the event, but to mourn the killed and wounded. Then they blame it all on “mental health”.
I saw Republican Gov. Rick Scott of Florida, where the school shooting just occurred, struggling to recall these words when just confronted with the shooting in his state.
Trump immediately tweeted that we had to do something about mental health. His Twitter account was immediately trolled by people who recalled that one of his first acts as President was to cancel Obama’s regulation that guns should not be sold to those that the IRS had declared mentally incompetent to fill out their own tax returns, which is just a sliver of the people with mental problems. Some also mentioned his attempts to destroy health plans and Medicaid that would cover mental health problems. Then there were those that commented on the President’s own mental health. With sharp trollers like that, why does the President even bother to tweet?
Within a day, however, the right wing feasted on the report that the FBI could not follow up on a phoned-in warning, to say the FBI was at fault, and had to stop their Trump investigation. In another day, now Florida Senate candidate and Trump buddy Gov. Rick Scott declared that FBI Director Christopher Wray, who was nominated and confirmed for a non-partisan ten year term six months ago, should resign. Talk about instant politicization.
Then Trump tweeted that the FBI was spending too much time looking for Russian collusion in his campaign, and that was harming their effectiveness, trying to exploit the tragedy for his own advantage. People who know how the Department of Justice work, pointed out that the investigation by Special Prosecutor Mueller was independent of the work of the justice department, and of the FBI. There are 37,000 workers in the FBI, hardly a reason for the Director to resign. The problem was that the FBI did not share the warning with local police, which was a similar mistake made with Egyptians training in piloting that led to 9/11.
That reminds me, why are 130 people working in the White House with only temporary clearances?
If a goof by someone in the White House meant that a President would have to resign, the country would now be run by a Congressional intern in the line of succession.
I am also offended by Trump’s photo-op with doctors and first responders, and Gov. Scott, and the Florida D.A., all carefully lined up and posed, with wide smiles at being photographed next to the president. What about the Tragedy?
The shooter in Florida left clues everywhere, and was well known to police who visited him many times, the school, which expelled him, and various social media. In this case, Big Data analysis would have easily identified him as a potential hazard, and flagged his background check, if we had laws that were really effective in preventing the sale of guns and ammunition to such potentially dangerous people.
Again, Democrats can’t call for gun controls because they would be taking advantage of a tragedy (to prevent future ones), but Trump, Murdoch, Scott and other Republicans can.
