CNN'S DISHONEST TOWN HALL

I fully intended to watch and give my account of tonights so-called Town Hall event on CNN.  Obama and CNN needed a forum to advance the President's latest foray in governing by proclamation.  This was to be their dog and pony show.  

I lasted 13 minutes.  

Perhaps some good points were made by people intent on upholding the second amendment.  Every time I switched back to watch, all I saw was the President lying or some designated victim pumping up emotions.  One thing all politicians know how to do is make that Argumentum ad Misericordiam.

I. Argumentum ad Misericordiam (argument from pity or misery) the fallacy committed when pity or a related emotion such as sympathy or compassion is appealed to for the sake of getting a conclusion accepted.

1. Hence, assent or dissent to a statement or an argument is sought on the basis of an irrelevant appeal to pity. In other words, pity, or the related emotion is not the subject or the conclusion of the argument.

Can you imagine any white president before the last decade or so, resorting to tears and the gross manipulation of cripples and victims relatives to sell a policy?  What have we become?  What happened to our reason and backbones? 

I'm glad the NRA had the wit to stay away.  There is no reasoning with people who control both the setting and the crowd.  It's a set-up and all you can get, even if you win is to be called unfeeling and "Mean." 

Anderson Cooper was letting Obama filibuster when I finally changed the channel.  I did catch one thing.  The President can't really explain how his rather modest (though illegal) extension of federal gun regulations would reduce gun related deaths in any large measure.  He admitted that by his own reckoning, only about two thousands would be prevented. He even admitted that a great many gun deaths are suicides.  He is reduced to the lie that the so-called loopholes are responsible for the all those urban street murders that happen in Chicago and Washington and New York. If only those hillbillies in Indiana weren't "Buying up trunkloads of guns and selling them" to all those poor ghetto kids…etc. etc.  What I find deeply offensive about this is his posturing as though he were making a rational argument; as though he believed that normal Americans might be gulled into accepting this BS when they know from their own lives that he is lying.  No one who knows the slightest thing about the topic could credit a word he says.

I did catch him alluding to what he calls the "internet loophole."  According to Obama there are a significant number of people selling firearms directly to consumers over the Net.  To do so is already a federal crime.  Yet, he chose to refer to unnamed "studies" to make this point rather than federal enforcement cases.  It seems to me that as President all he had to do is tell his subordinates to do their jobs.  

As alluded to above, the gun crime problem here in America is largely a matter of urban blacks having a strong taste for each other's blood.  No amount of cracking down on all the rest of us will ever solve that.  That doesn't stop our black, Chicagoan, law professor President from blaming people in Indiana for HIS cities failure.  Yes, occasionally a mad man or a Muslim acts out violently.  So far both types have been able to get their gun of choice via the same background checks the Obama finds so helpful.

I know it's too much to hope but I wish just one of the town hall participants had asked the President if the only rights we retain are those not already abused by his feckless urban relative.