Another piece of evidence in the attempts to isolate GOP voters from reality comes in the form of a video message from NRA executive vice president and CEO Wayne LaPierre to NRA members. MediaMatters provides a handy transcript and some commentary, the latter of which I quote incompletely:
LaPierre said his prediction that Obama “would come for our guns and do everything in his power to sabotage the Second Amendment” “came true” following the 2012 Sandy Hook massacre, when Obama “exploited a horrible tragedy to launch a blizzard of gun bans, magazine restrictions, and gun registration schemes against law abiding gun owners all across the country.” (Nothing proposed by Obama would have violated the Second Amendment as understood in the Antonin Scalia-authored Supreme Court decision District of Columbia v. Heller. The background check bill that was voted on in the Senate after the massacre specifically prohibited the creation of registries.)
Following terror attacks carried out by ISIS, LaPierre claimed Obama “attacked you harder than he attacked ISIS. He used the terrorism his own weaknesses and failures made possible to try to gut your right to shoot back at the terrorists he refused to kill.” (As commander-in-chief, Obama is actually carrying out a military campaign against ISIS which routinely kills the group’s leaders and fighters. Nothing Obama has ever proposed would bar citizens from shooting back at terrorists.)
LaPierre claimed that Obama “has transformed America into a sanctuary nation for felons, criminal gangbangers, drug dealers, repeat offenders, and illegal aliens” and that “our inner cities now rank among the most dangerous places in the world.” (Although there have been upticks as well as dips, violent crime hascontinued to fall under President Obama.)
MediaMatters has several more rebuttals to LaPierre’s claims, the last being that Clinton wants to abolish gun ownership – a claim well-debunked.
But for my purposes, we’re seeing another far-right leader attempting to build a firewall around the right-wing base, isolating them from reality, by asserting that he was right about the horrors of liberal Obama – when he was tangibly wrong. I recall how shortages of ammunition were reported when Obama was elected, as gun owners scurried to buy soon-to-be banned supplies.
Those bans ever happened. Not even hinted at. Question is, are gun owners credulous fools, or will they look around and, who knows, maybe vote the bum out?
I expect we’ll be seeing more of these sorts of outright lies (I tried to find a kinder way to put that, but it was not to be) in the next few years as their predictions prove untrue. After all, it’s a big country – it may not be so bad here as it is over there, right?
And the media is not to be trusted, of course.
Maybe not even Fox News.
Yep, even Fox will get thrown under the bus if a shrinking audience forces them to become a better news source. A lesson from fiction is that the bad guys tend to chew each other up. Maybe the same will happen in real life.
