Are you (somewhat) surprised about the round number of exactly 50 dead from the Orlando nightclub?
So am I.
A coincidence like that is not unheard of, of course, but it turns out that the number is (slightly) misleading.
A day after the massacre, it turns out the number of dead was actually 49.
Not much of a change, agreed, but still: Why the number 50, then?
The media seem to have decided again to include the mass murderer among the "victims."
(Which is technically true, insofar as you are counting the "dead" per se.)
Now why would I use the word "again"?
Don't you remember United Airlines Flight 93? It took forever to design a memorial for the 40 heroes aboard the plane who fought back against the hijackers on September 11, 2001, making it crash in a Pennsylvania field instead of on its intended target.
And when a design was finally chosen, not only did it seem to resemble, deliberately or not, a red crescent, it seems like the number chosen to honor the victims was 44.
Why? Because among the dead were the four terrorists, naturally…
Apart form that, Dalrock points out on his website that When seconds counted, the police were only three hours away:
… so far it looks to me that whoever was in charge failed in a major way. My guess is that he or she became fixated on the idea that this was just another hostage scenario, and ignored all evidence that this was a terror attack for a full three hours. … Something doesn’t make sense here, and I strongly suspect we are going to learn in the coming days that the police response was terribly botched.
In the meantime, let us get back to the Apologizer-in-Chief. In the wake numerous instances of political correctness (shookhran to Ed Driscoll and Stephen Green of Instapundit), the New York Post's John Podhoretz laments that
Here again, and horribly, we have an unmistakable indication that Obama finds it astonishingly easy to divorce himself from a reality he doesn’t like — the reality of the Islamist terror war against the United States and how it is moving to our shores in the form of lone-wolf attacks.Related: my dispassionate in-depth examination of the history of gun control —
He called it “terror,” which it is. But using the word “terror” without a limiting and defining adjective is like a doctor calling a disease “cancer” without making note of the affected area of the body — because if he doesn’t know where the cancer is and what form it takes, he cannot attack it effectively and seek to extirpate it.
So determined is the president to avoid the subject of Islamist, ISIS-inspired or ISIS-directed terrorism that he concluded his remarks with an astonishing insistence that “we need the strength and courage to change” our attitudes toward the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender community.
That’s just disgusting. There’s no other word for it.
America’s national attitude toward LGBT people didn’t shoot up the Pulse nightclub. This country’s national attitude has undergone a sea change in the past 20 years, by the way, in case the president hasn’t noticed.
An Islamist terrorist waging war against the United States killed and injured 103 people on our soil. We Americans do not bear collective responsibility for this attack. Quite the opposite.
The attack on the Pulse nightclub was an attack on us all, no less than the World Trade Center attack.
To suggest we must look inward to explain this is not only unseemly but practically an act of conscious misdirection on the president’ s part to direct out attention away from Omar Mateen’s phone call [in which he called the cops to pledge his fealty to ISIS].
True to form, the president spoke more words about the scourge of guns than about the threat of terror. In doing so, he actually retards rather than advances the cause of gun control he so passionately advocates.
What Is to Blame for the Shootings? Does the Blame Lie with
the Right to Bear Arms Or Can It Be Found Elsewhere?
