Liberal Daily Beast writer Michael Tomasky joined the gang of other liberal journalists expressing their overwrought, melodramatic outrage this morning at the NRA's latest Web ad which calls President Obama to task for dismissing their call for armed guards in the nation's schools.
But, being Tomasky, he had to crank the amp up to 11, suggesting that the ad was darkly coded in a way that might inspire violence against the president's daughters (emphasis mine):
Let’s start with the ad’s broken logic. A, the Obama family has Secret Service protection; B, other American families do not; C, because of this, Obama is an elitist and a hypocrite. It’s pretty ludicrous. Malia and Sasha Obama get lots of things because their father won the presidency. They also have a chauffeur; get to ride on a big fancy airplane free of charge and don’t have to endure any TSA-related indignities; live in a beautiful big house rent-free; and so on. By the ad’s logic, all of these are instances of hypocrisy.
[...]
It’s not even the logic, though, that’s most disturbing. The main thing here is what’s between the lines; the hot buttons in the pro-gun amygdala the ad is designed to push. Just mentioning the president’s daughters in an ad full of violent imagery and sounds—silhouettes of assault rifles, profiles of heavily armed soldiers, martial music—is an invitation to certain viewers to make certain mental connections. I’ll stop there. But it’s really a shocking thing.
In typical liberal journalist fashion, Tomasky completely omitted the fact that polls show most Americans support the NRA's call for armed guards in schools, even though these statistics are coming out of the same polls which liberal journalists cherry-pick to highlight increased interest by the public in new gun control measures. Noting that fact would undercut the underlying liberal narrative that the NRA is extremist, out of touch with America and utterly incapable of bringing a legitimate point of view to the debating table.
Additionally, it appears Tomasky is completely unaware of the fact that the Sidwell Friends School, which the Obama daughters attend, does in fact employ armed guards.
This fact has been reported widely in conservative media outlets, but if you don't believe those, there's always the school's website itself, where you can find "special police officer" personnel listed in the directory as well as job opening postings for special police positions.
Indeed, Tomasky should have been clued in to this by the presence of NBC Meet the Press host David Gregory in the ad (see image below). Gregory, like Obama, has a child in attendance at Sidwell Friends, and thereby his kid is protected by armed guards at school.
What's more, the liberal journalist averted prosecution in the District of Columbia for illegally possessing and displaying on air an empty high-capacity rifle magazine.
But why let facts get in the way of a smear job. Tomasky and other liberal journalists are effectively trying to shame the NRA into silence with faux outrage, all the while ignoring their legitimate arguments.
