Here’s a transcript and video of Obama’s Paris news conference, which was widely perceived as disturbingly unfocused and halting.
He said one thing in particular that received a lot of puzzled criticism:
“With respect to Planned Parenthood, obviously, my heart goes out to the families of those impacted,” Obama said in response to a reporter’s question. “I mean, I say this every time we’ve got one of these mass shootings; this just doesn’t happen in other countries.”
Remember, Obama said this at a press conference while in Paris. Paris, the city that has so very recently endured a series of mass shootings that killed over a hundred people, as well as the Charlie Hebdo shootings and the supermarket shootings that occurred in January of this year. Surely it oughtn’t to be much of a stretch for him to call them to mind, and some people have considered this evidence that he’s losing it in the cognitive sense.
I don’t think so.
Even when Obama denounced the Paris attacks right after they occurred, it sounded as though they had barely registered with him. So it’s not surprising that he might have already forgotten them, along with a few small incidents such as those listed here, as well as these and these, among others. Europe has had a large number of mass killings, of course, even in addition to Islamic terrorism. Not all are mass shootings, of course. But a high number of them are exactly that (including the Paris attacks both in October and last January). As for the others, the people are just as dead even if other means are used.
So, what’s going on here? The first thing you have to understand is that it’s not a slip of the tongue. Obama has said this sort of thing before—although not while in Paris one month after a heinous mass shooting. Note that in the quote he states “I say this every time we’ve got one of these mass shootings.” For example, after the Charleston shootings, he said:
But let’s be clear: At some point, we as a country will have to reckon with the fact that this type of mass violence does not happen in other advanced countries.
After that, he added that it doesn’t happen with as great frequency (although this article, which corrects for population, seems to prove him wrong even on that point). But originally he said these attacks simply don’t happen in other advanced countries.
That’s one of his mantras, because it combines several themes he holds dear: the superiority of Europe over the big bad United States, and the need for more gun control in the US (note that in Paris he specifically used the word “shootings” rather than the more generic “killings”). Therefore it is necessary for him to capitalize on every non-Islamic-terrorist act of mass shooting by hitting those themes, and if what he says represents a falsehood, or if on occasion (as in Paris) it lands him in a position that leads thinking people to conclude that what he’s just said is absurd, that doesn’t matter. The people he’s really addressing—liberals and the left—will for the most part swallow what he has to say with approval and assent, because they agree with his purpose: dissing the US, and restricting gun rights.
As I’ve stated for many years, Obama is a leftist with an agenda. He is relentlessly on message, and does not miss an opportunity to deliver that message. In addition, he has no shame about lying or misrepresenting the truth; you might say he is audacious in his ability to lie with conviction and with a straight face. One of the reasons he is able to do it is that he speaks to a higher truth and a higher cause—in this case, the cause of disarming the people and consolidating his own power and that of the left. It’s really very simple; I’ve explained it before in this post about the willingness to believe that 2 + 2 = 5.
But there’s another thing going on with Obama. Because the Paris attacks were terrorist attacks, in his mind they don’t really count. Terrorist attacks are some sort of extra category, because his goal is not to whip up outrage about them, his goal is to damp it down while whipping up outrage against ordinary US citizens with guns. That’s what he’s set his sights on (as it were), so that’s what he’s going to address.




