President Barack Obama called it an act of terrorism and an act of hate. He noted that the massacre at a gay nightclub in Orlando was the deadliest shooting in our nation’s history.
“President Obama disgracefully refused to even say the words `radical Islam.’ For that reason alone, he should step down,” Trump said in a prepared statement issued by his campaign.
He added that if Hillary Clinton, the presumptive Democratic nominee, likewise fails to invoke the term to explicitly place blame for the attack, “she should get out of this race for the presidency.”
Neither Democrat is likely to heed the unsolicited bit of advice from Trump.
He was hardly alone Sunday in trying to score political points and push an agenda in the wake of a rampage that, like others before it, sparked fear, outrage and questions about what can be done to avert such horrors in the future.
This was a day of anger and shock and grief. But politics wasn’t far beneath the surface.
Trump wasn’t shy about jabbing at the president, or about turning the Orlando attack into a fresh data point in his push for a clampdown on Muslim immigration — or chest thumping about his own perceived prescience.
“Because our leaders are weak, I said this was going to happen – and it is only going to get worse. I am trying to save lives and prevent the next terrorist attack. We can’t afford to be politically correct anymore,” Trump asserted.
Cruz, too, issued a blistering condemnation of the White House’s current occupant.
“Our nation is at war,” said the Texas senator, who throughout his own bid for the White House hammered Obama for refusing even to utter the phrase “radical Islamic terrorism,” despite a litany of attacks for which such forces are responsible.
He reiterated that list on Sunday: 9/11, the Boston Marathon, Fort Hood, Chattanooga and San Bernardino. “Radical Islamic terrorism has declared jihad on America,” Cruz said.
Cruz has pushed legislation stripping U.S. citizenship from anyone who travels overseas and affiliates with a jihadi group. That would not, apparently, have applied to the Orlando suspect, but Cruz argued Sunday that this latest attack shows the wisdom and need for his proposal.
“We need a commander-in-chief who will speak the truth, and who will unleash the full force and fury of the American military to utterly destroy ISIS and its affiliates,” Cruz said.
And he pre-emptively attacked Democrats, saying “the next few days will be sadly predictable” as Obama, Clinton and other Democrats seek to play down the responsibility of “vicious Islamist theology” while using the attack as a pretext to try to restrict gun rights.
“They will try to exploit this terror attack to undermine the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms of law-abiding Americans,” Cruz warned.
Indeed, a few hours earlier in the White House briefing room, Obama had alluded to his long-standing desire for tighter gun laws. He pushed hard in the wake of the Newtown school shooting; Cruz, early in his Senate tenure, played a key role in stymieing that effort.
“This massacre is … a further reminder of how easy it is for someone to get their hands on a weapon that lets them shoot people in a school, or in a house of worship, or a movie theater, or in a nightclub,” Obama said Sunday. “And we have to decide if that’s the kind of country we want to be. And to actively do nothing is a decision as well.”
Clinton echoed the president. She called it both an “act of terror” and “an act of hate,” vowing to defeat “international terror groups” and to protect gay and lesbian Americans. Nor did she shy from using the event to reignite a debate over gun control.
“We need to keep guns like the ones used last night out of the hands of terrorists or other violent criminals,” Clinton said. “This is the deadliest mass shooting in the history of the United States, and it reminds us once more that weapons of war have no place on our streets.”
The politics of this event will play out for days and months.
This was a rare event on U.S. soil that mixed an array of issues: the targeting of a gay nightclub, the shooter’s professed loyalty to the murderous Islamic State, the sense that any gathering anywhere presents a soft target. The twin concerns that anyone with a grudge or a loose screw can get hold of a weapon — and that such evils will become a pretext for curbing constitutional rights.
Cruz dared the champions of gay rights to rethink their priorities.
“For all the Democrats who are loud champions of the gay and lesbian community whenever there is a culture battle waging, now is the opportunity to speak out against an ideology that calls for the murder of gays and lesbians,” he said.
“Nobody has a right to murder someone who doesn’t share their faith or sexual orientation. If you’re a Democratic politician and you really want to stand for LGBT, show real courage and stand up against the vicious ideology that has targeted our fellow Americans for murder.”
No comments:
Post a Comment