After ripping Kirsten Powers two weeks ago forcing an apology on Twitter, Kirsten Powers has penned a piece over at the Daily Beast that dissects the missed opportunity for President Obama in his healing hands speech/pep rally:
But there was another job: shutting down the nonsense about how Sarah Palin or right-wing talkers caused the shooting. This matters not only because it’s important to tell the truth, but also because it would set the stage to move on to really examining the true causes of this nightmare massacre.
Obama mostly chose to be vague on this point, “For the truth is that none of us can know exactly what triggered this vicious attack. None of us can know with any certainty what might have stopped those shots from being fired, or what thoughts lurked in the inner recesses of a violent man’s mind.”
He did add to his prepared remarks that incivility did not cause this tragedy, but he stopped short of a full rebuke of the complete irresponsibility of those who have been stoking anger at conservatives who–as far as we know–had nothing to do with this.
When the president did lay blame, it was on Americans in general. Among the many odd assertions he made: suggesting that “what a tragedy like this requires” is that “we align our values with our actions.” We were told to “expand our moral imaginations.”
Huh?
A mentally ill gunman opened fire at a Safeway. A lack of “aligning” or “imagination” really wasn’t the problem.
Obama said during his speech we should not blame those who think differently than us, which caught my ear.
It’s the same as the “hands-off the children” during the campaign where it may not have been the Obama campaign itself that didn’t swipe at the Palin children, but it surely was his minion media that pounced relentlessly on Palin’s kids, and frankly have not laid off since.
While I agree that Obama’s speech writers delivered him a great speech, and he delivered it well, I could have done without the t-shirt, concession stands, and woots. A speech with all of that patriotism should have been given after Ft. Hood, which clearly was an act of terrorism and leads me to the exit question of why not?