Alas, the epic Obama Gun Dance continues. Only this time, he was safely tucked away at the home of some rich San Francisco fundraiser where he could speak more freely. Or, at least he could if it weren’t for the magic of the internets..
You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. So it’s not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.
So, in other words, he’s saying that people in small, Pennsylvania towns are a bunch of bitter, racist, gun nuts who are too religious. Throwing gun ownership and religion in there next to xenophobia as if they’re equally as bad somehow was a nice touch too. Was he reading from the Violence Policy Center manual on building straw men? Oh, wait, he used to be on the board of directors for the Joyce Foundation, so he probably wrote the manual.
Anyhow, after Hillary!™ called him out for being an elitist asshat, he tried to backpedal away from his statements with this:
Nobody is looking out for you. Nobody is thinking about you. And so people end up — they don’t vote on economic issues because they don’t expect anybody’s going to help them. So people end up, you know, voting on issues like guns, and are they going to have the right to bear arms. They vote on issues like gay marriage. And they take refuge in their faith and their community and their families and things they can count on. But they don’t believe they can count on Washington.
Ahhhh. I see now. He thinks they’re all just sad pandas because the mean ol’ government won’t come take care of them. And I guess he’s also implying that if they accept the Obamamessiah into their hearts, they’ll all lay down their arms and stuff and let the state protect them or something.
Since he’s apparently even more out of touch with reality than anyone imagined, I’ve got a news flash for him and his cult members:
Some of us neither asked for nor want the state to coddle us!
Now, I can’t speak for small town Pennsylvania (or anyone else), but as a city-dwelling atheist from Virginia who likes immigrants and isn’t worried about losing a job, I don’t “cling to my guns” because Washington isn’t “looking out for me” or what have you. I keep them because I do not want or need Washington to “think about me.” Especially since his definition of “help” seems to be collectivist enslavement..