The Orlando Acquittal

Omar Mateen’s wife, Noor Salman, was acquitted by a Florida jury of charges of aiding in her husband’s plans for the attack which resulted in the murder of 49 people at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando (a subject THC covered in prior posts). The charges were filed by federal prosecutors.

Three startling items of note came out during the trial:

First, according to the prosecutor, the planned target off Mateen’s killing spree was the shopping and entertainment complex at Disney World, not the Pulse nightclub.

[The prosecutor] Sweeney showed a video of the Disney Springs complex that captured Mateen walking near the House of Blues club in the hours before the Pulse attack. In it, he looks behind him at police officers standing nearby.

 “He had to choose a new target,” she said.

In other words, contrary to the media and Obama Administration spin at the time this was not a deliberate attack on the gay community and other evidence at the trial indicated Mateen had no idea Puse was a gay nightclub.

Second, the government stated prior to trial, including to the media, that Noor had accompanied her husband in "casing" locations, including the nightclub, before the shooting, a claim used to deny her bail.  However, at the trial it was revealed that the Justice Department and FBI lied:

But when Fennern testified today, he admitted that the FBI had learned “within days” of Salman signing the statement that this claim was false. Using geolocation data from cellphone records and documentary evidence of the couple’s whereabouts, the FBI had already concluded — long before Salman was arrested — that it was impossible that she went to Pulse with Mateen on that date. Indeed, the evidence, as The Intercept documented previously, is very clear that the first time Mateen ever went to Pulse was to attack it, after simply searching Google for “nightclubs downtown Orlando.” The FBI agent also testified that Salman’s cellphone records show she was never near Pulse.

Upon hearing Fennern’s testimony that this crucial part of Salman’s statement could not have been true, and that the FBI knew this very early on, the judge began questioning him in front of the jury about the FBI’s discovery that this claim was false. After taking a break, but prior to the return of the jury, the judge more aggressively scolded the prosecutors: “I’ve heard many, many times the drive around Pulse nightclub had occurred.” “I think I’ve kicked the beehive,” he added. Though the judge said, in response to a request from Salman’s lawyers, that he was not prepared to reverse his ruling denying bail in court, he invited them to file a written motion to seek a reversal.

Third, during the course of the trial, the Justice Department disclosed that at times between 2005 and the murders in 2016 Omar Mateen’s father was an FBI informant.  Attorneys for Noor Salman alleged that although FBI interviewed Omar Mateen in 2013 because of allegations regarding him, the agency declined to take action in order to protect his father’s status as an informant.

From January 1, 2013 to September 3, 2013 Robert Mueller was Director of the FBI.  On September 4 he was succeeded by James Comey.  Maybe someone can ask them about it.

Peak Crazy

Chris Murphy, Connecticut's juvenile junior senator has gone completely insane, along with the rest of the Democratic Party.  He's told the Washington Post that because Republicans opposed his unconstitutional proposal on firearms "Republicans have decided to sell weapons to ISIS"!

Senator Elizabeth Warren has tweeted her endorsement of that statement.  You remember, her don't you?  She's the Harvard Law School professor paid $350,000 a year to teach one course, all the while complaining about income inequality and who culturally (and falsely) appropriated a Native American identity to further her career.

Let's restate the facts once again:

We know Omar Mateen supported ISIS, the Democratic Party and Hillary Clinton.  Since we also know that the government, in which Sen. Murphy places such touching faith, investigated Mateen several times and did not place him on the terrorist watch list, the Democrat proposal would not have prevented the murders in Orlando.  We should point out however, that legislation banning the sale of firearms to registered Democrats would have at least prevented Mr Mateen from legally purchasing firearms.

But what is truly appalling about Murphy, Warren and the rest of the Democrats is that they blocked a Republican proposal to allow the government to block sales to those on the watch list provided the government showed probable cause for placing them on the list within 72 hours, a proposal that had the support of the NRA.

[UPDATE & CORRECTION:
The ACLU opposed the Republican proposal, along with the Democratic ones on the grounds that the entire watchlist process is fatally flawed.

Our nation’s watchlisting system is error-prone and unreliable because it uses vague and overbroad criteria and secret evidence to place individuals on blacklists without a meaningful process to correct government error and clear their names.

This post has been edited to correct the error.]

The apparent truth, based on their actions yesterday, is that Democrats would rather Americans die if they are unable to humble the NRA as part of their overall campaign to eviscerate the constitutional rights of those they disagree with.  If you doubt it, read Sen Murphy's full comments to the Washington Post.

A Clever Plot Exposed

According to the President and the New York Times, the culprits responsible for the Orlando massacre are Republicans, opponents of same-sex marriage, and law-abiding gun owners. And now we discover that these agents of intolerance cleverly manipulated Omar Mateen, a registered Democrat and Hillary Clinton supporter*, into actually doing their dirty work for them. We must be thankful that the real evildoers behind this tragedy have been exposed through the unrelenting efforts of Our Glorious Leader and his free press!

* Writing in the June 20 edition of the Washington Post, Mohammed Malik, who reported his suspicions of Omar Mateen to the FBI, remarks:

I last saw him at a dinner at his father’s house in January. We talked about the presidential election and debated our views of the candidates that were running – he liked Hillary Clinton and I liked Bernie Sanders. This banter continued through texts and phone calls for several months.

Political Theater: My Senator Strikes Again

(Sen Chris Murphy from the escapist)
 
Chris Murphy is the junior senator from Connecticut.  THC wrote of him in 2014 (see My Senator), at which time he referred to him as a callow youth.  He now thinks that unfair to callow youth, since they often shed their inexperience and immaturity as they get older while the now-42 year old Murphy shows no sign of such growth.  In fact, he strikes THC as a younger version of Barack Obama, combining a lack of real world experience, intellectual shallowness and overweening (synonyms: conceited, cocksure, cocky, smug, haughty, lofty, patronizing, arrogant, proud, vain, imperious) self-confidence in his abilities, along with a firm conviction that he is best placed to decide how society should operate.

Let's take a peek at Senator Murphy's resume:

After attending college, and while still in law school, he was campaign manager for an unsuccessful Democratic congressional candidate (1996).  Following that we have:

1997   Works for State Senate Democratic Majority Leader
1998   Elected as State Representative
2002  Elected as State Senator
2006  Elected to U.S. Congress
2012   Elected to U.S. Senate

He has worked diligently to attain political power and gain the ability to requisition and then spend other people's money as he sees fit.  Given the electorate in Connecticut, it is likely he will remain comfortably secure as a Senator until he chooses to retire with a generous, and inflation-protected, pension for the rest of his life, though it is worrisome to this observer that he also harbors national political ambitions.

THC first focused on Senator Murphy because of his astonishingly arrogant and ill-informed comments regarding Obamacare, made on Meet The Press in early 2014.  When pressed about the problems with Obamacare (which this blog has documented), Murphy whined that it was a tough job since "we were reordering one sixth of the American economy" and that "the only way to do it was to make it big". 

What kind of hubris does it take for someone to think they have enough knowledge to reorder one-sixth of the largest economy in the world?  That he can centrally direct such a reordering?  That he will have the ability to quickly obtain information from millions of sources and intelligently adjust as needed?  It is simply insane.  And we can only assume he was comfortable with the bodyguard of lies needed to assure Obamacare's passage, even with a Democrat majority in Congress at the time.

Let's remember that the marketplace is where voluntary collective action happens every day, forcing all participants to adjust quickly and continuously, but where both the direction of collective action and those adjustments are unpredictable.  For Progressives like Murphy, voluntary collective action is intolerable, precisely because it is not guaranteed to go in the direction that they feel it should, regardless of the desires of individual citizens.  Looking with disdain on the disorder of markets, Progressives seek an ordered world, centrally directed by The State.

Senator Murphy's latest "excellent adventure" is his recent 15-hour filibuster in support of legislation regarding gun control and the government terrorist watch list.  As someone remarked, Murphy's filibuster is the longest time anyone has spent on the Senate floor in an attempt to deny citizens their constitutional rights since Democratic Senator Strom Thurmond filibustered civil rights legislation in the 1960s.

THC uses the term "political theater", since the Majority Leader had already agreed to a vote on the measure and even if it had been in effect prior to Orlando it would not have changed anything since the very government that Murphy wants to grant more authority to, had already investigated Omar Mateen and removed him from the terrorist watch list!!!

Don't believe THC?  Read this exchange between Murphy and ABC's Jonathan Karl on Sunday:

MURPHY: So, it may have in the sense that if you partner together with the bill that stops terrorists from getting guns…

KARL: But wait a minute. He didn’t buy those guns at a gun show. And he would have passed the background—he did pass a background check.

MURPHY: He did pass a background check, but if the Feinstein bill was in effect, the FBI could have put him on the list of those who are prohibited from getting guns. And what if he went into the gun store and was denied? He could have just gone online or to a gun show and bought another one.

KARL:  OK. But what I’m trying to get at is that every time there’s one of these terrible tragedies, there’s these proposals. Your proposal would have done nothing in the case of Orlando. It would have done nothing to stop the killing in San Bernardino, and in fact, was unrelated to the killing in Newtown. So why are we focusing on things that have nothing to do with the massacres that we are responding?

MURPHY: First of all, we can’t get into that trap.  I disagree. I think if this proposal had been into effect, it may have stopped this shooting. But we can’t get into the trap in which we are forced to defend the proposals simply because it didn’t stop the last tragedy. We should be making our gun laws less full of Swiss cheese holes so that future killings don’t happen.

By the way, did you pick up on Murphy's cultural insensitivity and microaggression with his reference to "full of Swiss cheese holes", when Switzerland combines a high rate of citizen ownership of firearms with a low rate of gun use in the commision of crimes?

Because of this, the actual proposal under debate is not particularly important, but it's useful to understand some of the terms around this debate which first arose after the San Bernadino Islamist massacre in late 2015.

References to both the "No-Fly List" and the Terrorist Watch List" are being thrown around.  The first has less than 100,000 names while the various terrorist databases that are often collectively referred to as a "Watch List" contain perhaps 1.1 million names.  There is some uncertainty about the specifics since there has never been official confirmation of the numbers on either list and the names are kept secret as well as the process by which they have been placed on either list. We do know the process is flawed as public figures like the late Senator Edward Kennedy have wound up on the No-Fly List.  In addition, most of those on the lists are not American citizens.

The objection to automatically barring firearms purchases by those on the list is precisely because of its secret nature and the known quality control problems regarding placement on American citizens on the list. Among others, the ACLU has objected to the proposed Democratic solution and has led yet another Democrat contemptuous of our Constitutional rights, West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin, to complain that "due process is killing us".

Unfortunately, last year the Democrats opposed a Republican solution to the problem, supported by the National Rifle Association, would have allowed the government to delay for 72 hours the purchase of firearms anyone on the lists, during which the government would need to show probable cause for placing that person on the list.

[UPDATE:  This afternoon, the Republican measure to allow the government to prevent firearm sales, subject to the 72 hour provision, received a majority vote - 53 Senators voting in favor, but it was filibustered by Democrats, who were more concerned to keep the issue alive than to actually do anything of substance.]

So, how comfortable are you with the Democratic proposal to allow the Executive Branch to unilaterally place American citizens on lists which constrain their constitutional rights without them being afforded due process of law?  Before you answer, remember that our next President will be either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump, both of whom support restrictions on free speech, unchecked executive power and consistently confuse their political opponents with personal enemies and, at least as to Hillary, also have contempt for Second Amendment (firearms) and Fifth Amendment (due process) rights?

Of course, we all know this discussion is besides the point because what Chris Murphy, Barack Obama and their supporters are after is to ultimately dismantle the Second Amendment and take all privately owned firearms away.  The current effort is just an attempt to "not let a crisis go to waste" and seize some new ground, from which further advances can be made later.

The Democrat position is best summed up by Tom Maguire over at Just One Minute: 

The Jihadists are coming

We can't stop them

So give up your guns 

Doubling Down Against Americans

. . . it just gets worse . . .

After ranting yesterday about President Obama's rhetorical tricks and his disgraceful attempt, aided and abetted by his amen corner, to take an ISIS inspired massacre at a gay club in Orlando and convert it into an assault on law-abiding Americans, THC was going to stand down.  That is, until he saw Attorney General Loretta Lynch's comments on the Sunday talk shows, in which she shamelessly doubled down on the Administration's descent into madness.

First, on ABC's This Week, AG Lynch stated:

"Tomorrow, for example, we’ll be releasing a partial transcript of the calls between the killer and the hostage negotiators so people can, in fact, see the type of interaction that was had there. I say partial because we’re not going to be, um, for example, broadcasting his pledges of allegiance.”

Her explanation:

We are trying not to revictimize those who went through that horror. But again we’re trying to get as much information about this investigation out as possible, and we want people to provide information that they have taught us.”

May we sell you a bridge in Brooklyn?  Now, of course that's not the reason.  Instead she is hewing to the line that minimizes the role of Islamic terrorism as the direct cause.  It reminds THC of Obama's remarks in February 2015 regarding the killings by Islamists at a Jewish supermarket in Paris, which he referred to as "a random act of violence" as he tried to pretend he did not understand the motivation.  The difference with Orlando, and it is a fine example of the rhetorical trick explained in our last post, is that the Paris massacre took place in another country which made it difficult to make it about America's ills, while Orlando is domestic and suitable for being turned into an attack on the President's enemies, who are domestic, not international, despite the fact that the Orlando shooter, Omar Mateen, was a registered Democrat!

UPDATE:  Under massive ridicule for its planned redaction of the terrorist calls, the Administration has backed down and released the full transcript.


And that's exactly where AG Lynch went in her next appearance on CNN's State of the Nation in which Dana Brash asked her directly about whether the shooter mentioned a gay-inspired motive in the three calls he made during his killing spree:

Attorney General Loretta Lynch: It will contain the substance of his conversations. And there were three conversations between this killer and negotiators

Dana Bash: He was, of course, in a gay nightclub. Did he talk about his feelings about gay Americans?

Lynch: You know, he didn’t get into that. So we’re still exploring why he chose this particular place to attack. We’re asking people who have information to come forward… We are trying to learn everything we can about this individuals motivations. As you note, he was in a gay nightclub. This was an act of terror and an act of hate targeted against a community, the LGBT community, the Latino community, and of course the LGBT community is so far too often the victims of these types of crimes.

Notice what the AG has done here?  She admits the shooter did not mention a gay related motivation [THC does believe that there is plenty of other evidence that supports the view that it being a gay establishment played a role] but after making that admission, neatly pivots into making it an attack on her fellow Americans consistent with President Obama's perverted approach.  Her response actually makes no logical sense but she is so desperate to continue the Administration's attack on those it sees as its critics that she plunges ahead anyway.

From the start of his presidency, Barack Obama has focused on creating strawmen and blaming Americans in his efforts to transform the country and redeem it from the original sin of its creation.  What is alarming is that the pace of his divisive efforts has continually accelerated since his 2012 reelection.  It's time for all decent Americans to say "enough".

Orlando: More Rhetorical Tricks From The President

President Obama has chosen to characterize the terrible murders in Orlando primarily as an attack on the LGBT community and avoided attributing sole responsibility to the ideology of Islamic terrorists. With the help of his echo chamber, this allows him to make the event about America and chastise us for our supposed lack of tolerance and of the necessity of gun control – in other words, to convert this massacre inspired by a foreign ideology into an assault on his domestic political opponents who are bitterly clinging to guns or religion (the phrase he used to describe voters hostile to him in 2008), despite the fact that Omar Mateen was a registered Democrat, and a Hillary Clinton supporter!

If, instead, he chose to characterize the murders more truthfully as an attack on America we would be having a discussion about the Islamic terrorists responsible. Was the specific attack in Orlando motivated by hatred of gays? Yes, it certainly looks like that, but the Islamists have made it clear that in addition to gays, they also hate, and have killed, Jews, Christians, atheists, Hindus, Moslems who don't agree with them and Americans in general  – we are all in this together.  Looking on the bright side, we can be thankful Obama didn’t characterize the San Bernadino massacre as an assault on government employees and use it to denounce those who want less government and regulation!

By making the choice he did, Obama chose to focus on dividing Americans when he could have easily chosen to unite us. Why are we not surprised?

If you are interested in reading more about Obama’s rhetorical tricks here is a post from last year: Rhetorical Tricks & Tics: It's Always About America. To summarize:

When speaking of America’s ills, ignore the broader global context, so the audience remains focused on America’s sins but when confronted with the ills of another country, always be sure to refer to what you characterize as similar ills in America. That way, no matter what, the focus remains America’s ills.

Although Obama is the first American President to employ the rhetorical trick of always making it about America’s supposedly unique ills, his way was paved for decades by an educational system which has marinated children and young adults in this way of thinking. They are powerless against this reasoning because it is what they know, are made to feel guilty if they don’t accept it, and can signal their virtue if they do.

As Jonah Goldberg recently noted "the essence of serious thinking is the capacity . . . to make meaningful distinctions", or as he also put it more bluntly "to distinguish s*** from shinola".  The essence of Barack Obama's academically derived rhetorical trick is to disable the ability to make meaningful distinctions.  And what President Obama is selling is definitely not shinola.

It is as if Barack Obama was designed by the tenured faculty of a liberal arts college, who are free to "teach the children well" and when the money runs low can always send another tuition bill to the parents.