On Friday, President Obama will casually drop by Southern California and visit the families and friends of the victims slaughtered in the San Bernardino terrorist attack before heading off to a nearly two-week-long Christmas vacation in Hawaii. Obama will not be meeting with the survivors, raising disturbing questions about the moral optics of the spectacle.
“It’s almost as like this is like an afterthought, that he’s flying on his way to vacation two weeks after the event,” San Bernardino County Supervisor Curt Hagman told CBS Los Angeles. “I have several of my, of our, employees who got injured who expressed dissatisfaction that he didn’t come out and visit with them as well.
“We reached out to the White House earlier this evening and asked why the president isn’t meeting with families of survivors and did not receive a response.”
CBS Los Angeles
The city official compared this president’s relative indifference to the urgent response of prior office holders. “I think you see the different reactions from when 9/11 happened when President Bush went out versus the reactions from Obama after our incident here,” stated Hagman.
Although President Obama generously took time out of his incredibly demanding schedule of circular meetings about “violent extremism” and rousing speeches about the peacefulness of Islam, the White House didn’t appear inclined to explain its dismissal of survivors. “We reached out to the White House earlier this evening and asked why the president isn’t meeting with families of survivors and did not receive a response,” reports CBS Los Angeles.
President Obama’s response time to Islamic terrorist attacks appears to lag far behind that of “shooting” massacres. Both in terms of tone and passion, Obama’s reaction to domestic attacks, especially when a white shooter is involved, diverges greatly from his reaction to terrorist mass slaughter, especially when the unspeakable culprit of Radical Islam is at fault.
The Charleston shooting in June prompted Obama to urgently respond to the crisis, delivering speech after speech about tolerance and gun crime. He even gave a nearly hour-long eulogy at the local church, singing funeral hymns for the victims. The president took his time and met with survivors, families, friends, and even parishioners.