He said WHAT?

Michelle Malkin and Ben Smith are both on top of the over the top, ultimate-in-pandering comments made by the man who could be the ‘next black president’ (after Bubba) in a speech he made last night in Milwaukee where he referenced yesterday’s VTech massacre, in which he used the violence from yesterday’s tragedy as a springboard to talk about other types of ‘violence’ which he seemed to be morally equating to what happened at VTech. Smith summarizes:

“Maybe nothing could have been done to prevent it,” he says toward the end.

So he moves quickly to the abstract: Violence, and the general place of violence in American life.

“There’s also another kind of violence that we’re going to have to think about. It’s not necessarily the physical violence, but the violence that we perpetrate on each other in other ways,” he said, and goes on to catalogue other forms of “violence.”

There’s the “verbal violence” of Imus.

There’s “the violence of men and women who have worked all their lives and suddenly have the rug pulled out from under them because their job is moved to another country.”

There’s “the violence of children whose voices are not heard in communities that are ignored,”

And so, Obama says, “there’s a lot of different forms of violence in our society, and so much of it is rooted in our incapacity to recognize ourselves in each other.”

Many politicians would avoid, I think, about suggesting that outsourcing and mass-murder belong in the same category.

From there, he mourns again the Virginia dead, and then says, “This is an opportunity I think that all of us have today to reflect,” and then heads into his stump speech — education, healthcare, energy policy, politics being broken — but returning to the Virginia Tech shootings.

Got that? There’s “violence” in everything we do towards each other. It’s “violent” to outsource jobs to another country. It’s “violent” for Don Imus to call the Rutger’s women’s basketball team “nappy headed hos” (where was his mention of rappers in his speech, BTW? I didn’t hear it). It’s “violent” to ignore a child’s voice.

Jessica McBride, who sent the link along to Malkin, provided her with this brief transcript/summary:

He said we are a violence obsessed culture. “We glorify it, we encourage it, we ignore it.” In what honestly was a very boring, dry, rambling speech, he then listed a litany of examples of how violent we are. He excoriated “verbal violence” and specifically mentioned Imus but, tellingly, not Ludacris. Then, he mentioned violent crime in Milwaukee, and other examples of how violent we all are. In one bizarre example, he said that he was also talking about the “violence” of men and woman who lose their jobs to other countries. HUH?
And then he mentioned IRAQ…He started out by saying that our culture of violence is rooted in our supposed incapacity to understand we are all connected fundamentally as people (kumbayah!). We are still trapped in a belief that we can impose our wills on each other and differentiate ourselves and make ourselves feel better from one another because of the accidents of birth or race or gender, he said. We still think about our role in the world and foreign policy as if the children of Darfur are somehow less than the children here, and so we tolerate violence there. And then he said in that context:

“We base our decisions in terms of sending our young men and women to war not on the necessity of defending ourselves but the belief that somehow with military force we can achieve aims that should be achieved through diplomacy and alliances.”

And now, feeling as though you have no other choice when it comes to defending your country other than war is “violent.”

I’ve seen the paralleling of current events with the ‘larger picture’ in my lifetime, but this one takes the cake.

Sadly, the Senator is offering up similar rhetoric to what we’ve seen come from prominent icons in the liberal blogosphere, as I noted in my prior two posts on the VTech tragedy. I think it’s a real shame that the usual suspects are using yesterday’s horrific events to advance their anti-Iraq war agenda, but I can’t really say I’m surprised. But the Senator’s remarks are in a class all by themselves, and stand as a testament to his wacked-out vision of America, where perceived “wrongs” aren’t merely wrongs, but instead “violence.”