Why Does Obama Cry for Shooting Victims?

The president gave a 15-minute speech Sunday paying tribute to the September 16 Navy Yard shooting victims.

Pictures like this one from the Fox News article “Obama honors shooting victims, urges Americans to help stop gun violence” adorned with captions of “President Obama wipes his eye as he is seated with first lady Michelle Obama at a memorial service for the victims” flooded the news.

Of course, the caption didn’t clarify if he was wiping a tear from his eye or if a bug flew in there or something…but due to the slant of the articles, the mainstream media really wants people to at least believe the president was crying.

Despite the fact that the Navy Yard was primarily a gun-free zone and the SWAT team that could have been on scene within 15 minutes or less was told to stand down, thus allowing the shooter to continue his rampage for nearly an hour — both facts that render more gun laws useless to save lives in this situation — Obama seemed baffled that more gun laws had not been passed since last week. “It ought to be a shock to us. It ought to lead us to some sort of transformation,” the president said.

After the Sandy Hook school shooting last December, similar stories inundated the news cycle. Here’s CNN’s take on the speech Obama gave then:

“We’re going to have to come together and take meaningful action to prevent more tragedies like this, regardless of the politics,” the president said after wiping the outer corner of his left eye. CNN titled this video of his speech, “Obama weeps over school massacre.” The definition of weep is “to shed tears,” thus the act of weeping involves more than one tear. Again, it probably wasn’t a bug that flew in his eye, but there wasn’t even a visible tear here, let alone the multiple tears it would take to necessitate an official “weep”.

So, for the sake of argument, let’s just go ahead and assume crying in some form on the president’s behalf, no matter how invisible, actually did occur.

The question remains and I think it is a legitimate one: “Why does Obama cry for shooting victims?”

The reason I ask is, the president seems highly selective about which dead people he decides to publicly mourn over.

Again and again in the wake of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, President Obama was quoted as saying, “…if there is a step we can take that will save even one child…we should take that step.” Vice President Joe Biden gave similar ‘save even one child’ statements. I’m sure with all the emotional speeches these two have given in the wake of these two shootings, they would be really offended to hear that it almost appears as if they are attempting to politicize and exploit an event for the ultimately purpose of gun control.

Where were or are all of the president’s tears (or even a tear) for the children who have died from his drone bombing campaign that has blanketed the Middle East in more drone missiles than any other president in American history? Obama has ordered more than four times the amount of drone strikes as George W. Bush did, in a process that The New York Times describes as a ‘secret kill list’ overseen by a one-man judge, jury and executioner. That list includes American citizens and even a 17-year-old girl.

We are not officially at war in the majority of these countries. Although the drone program is finally on record, the president has never explained how it is even remotely legal by any definition.

Journalist Glenn Greenwald has reported that the American government will actually kill a lower-level suspected terrorist to entice higher-level suspected terrorists to attend the funeral, then drone strike the funeral. The U.S. has also hit weddings (see here and here), and sometimes our government even double taps — that is, our government will drone bomb an area, wait for rescue workers to arrive to help the survivors, then bomb again to kill even more.

If Obama wants to save children so badly, maybe he should stop drone striking them (just a thought). Policy Mic published this list of the names of all the children who have died in U.S. drone strikes so far in Pakistan and Yemen alone. There are 122 names on that list. It’s a lot more children than died in the Sandy Hook shooting, and some were infants.

Obama tears? Zero.

The article also discusses a Columbia Law School Human Rights Institute study that found as many as 98% of those killed in U.S. drone strikes are civilians. (So much for ‘surgical precision’.) That is a whole lot of dead people our president isn’t crying over.

So, again. I’m confused. Someone please explain it to me. Why does Obama cry over a few shooting victims when he’s using a secret kill list to selectively murder hundreds if not thousands of people overseas — including innocent women (some pregnant), elderly people, children and even babies who become ‘collateral damage’ — in the drone bombings of suspected terrorists without due process?