Maureen Dowd, "No Bully in the Pulpit": Bitching About Obama, Ignoring Boston

As I explained to my wife earlier today, our family has had its fair share of trauma. Two of my army buddies lost their faces to a Molotov cocktail, and my son's officer died a yard away from him. I'll spare you the details of both of these incidents, but if there is such a thing as post-traumatic stress syndrome (PTSD), we both suffer from it. I've seen a lot over the course of a lifetime, but nothing left me prepared for what happened in Boston. Just a month ago, my daughter and I were spending quality time together on the streets where this horror played out. I had hoped that radical Islamic terror would not revisit America's shores, but my dreams were shattered.

"Radical Islamic terror"? You don't see these words in the headlines of The New York Times and The Washington Post. Rather, you see idle talk about discovering the motive for this latest travesty. The motive? It's as clear as day: radical Islamists hate the U.S. and will do all they can to destroy America's infrastructure, culture and way of life. You don't believe me? Type the words "Islam death to America" into Google, and spend the rest of the day educating yourself. Travel from Iran to Egypt, to Yemen, to Indonesia.

Radical Islam opposes women's rights. It opposes gay rights. It opposes religious freedom. It opposes freedom of speech.

It's time to wake up.

In her latest New York Times op-ed entitled "No Bully in the Pulpit" (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/21/opinion/sunday/dowd-president-obama-is-no-bully-in-the-pulpit.html?_r=0), Maureen Dowd again ignores what happened in Boston and busily berates Obama for failing to gain Senate approval of new gun control legislation. Dowd writes:

"President Obama has watched the blood-dimmed tide drowning the ceremony of innocence, as Yeats wrote, and he has learned how to emotionally connect with Americans in searing moments, as he did from the White House late Friday night after the second bombing suspect was apprehended in Boston.

Unfortunately, he still has not learned how to govern.

How is it that the president won the argument on gun safety with the public and lost the vote in the Senate? It’s because he doesn’t know how to work the system. And it’s clear now that he doesn’t want to learn, or to even hire some clever people who can tell him how to do it or do it for him.

It’s unbelievable that with 90 percent of Americans on his side, he could get only 54 votes in the Senate. It was a glaring example of his weakness in using leverage to get what he wants. No one on Capitol Hill is scared of him."

Obama is a fabulous teleprompter speaker, but an incompetent leader? You don't say. It took Dowd more than four years to find this out.

Gun control? As I've stated repeatedly, I favor a ban on the sale of assault rifles and stricter background checks. But I also acknowledge that each year knives kill four time more Americans than rifles (see: http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2011/crime-in-the-u.s.-2011/tables/expanded-homicide-data-table-8).

And now Americans have painfully come to learn of the dangers of pressure cookers packed with explosives.

Guns don't kill, people do, and there are plenty of organizations like al-Qaeda prepared to teach them how to do it.