In a post titled “A Defeat for Demagogy,” The Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto has a nice cross-section of the liberal media’s hysteria over “the cowardice of Congress,” “the apparent impotence of President Obama,” and “the depravity of the gun lobby,” ostensible factors all in the defeat in the Senate yesterday of the assault weapons ban. (Of the three quotes, all from a piece by National Journal’s Ron Fournier, one might quibble with the third, or at least the use of the noun depravity. Granted the gun lobby is powerful, much in the way that Big Labor is powerful — which is in numbers: Both have members in the millions. But would Fournier as readily call the American Federation of Labor depraved?)

Fournier’s beef with Obama is that he “vowed to ‘use whatever power this office holds’ to convert the tragedy at Sandy Hook Elementary School into commonsense common good.” What Fournier fails to acknowledge is that Obama did what he promised. This time, however, his efforts failed to win the hearts and minds of the public. As Taranto notes, it’s how government in a democracy works.

Apart from the palpable disappointment expressed in the headline of the articles quoted — Mike Lupica’s screed in the Daily News was titled “Spineless Pols Spit on the Graves of Newtown Victims by Not Pushing for Assault Weapons Ban” — one cannot help be struck by the incivility of the comments. Lupica, for example, asks how “the president and any other big politician … allows the gun nuts from the National Rifle Association to win again.” Like Fournier, Lupica is a sore loser.

But far and away the unintentionally funniest argument is by MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, who picked up yesterday where the ban’s sponsor, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), left off. In her now-infamous challenge last Friday by Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), Feinstein shot back:

I was a mayor for nine years. I walked in — I saw people shot. I’ve looked at bodies that have been shot with these weapons. I’ve seen the bullets that implode. In Sandy Hook, youngsters were dismembered.

Cue Maddow, who, Taranto writes, “made much of the 1978 assassination of George Moscone, Feinstein’s predecessor as San Francisco mayor.”

So what’s the problem with that? It’s that Moscone’s murderer used a pistol, not an assault rifle. Shouldn’t Maddow have known that before going on air and making a perfect fool of herself (again)?

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