A Load Of Bovine Excrement

I just read Mayor Bloomberg’s response to the defeat of Manchin-Toomey. If you need some organic fertilizer for your garden, there is a lot of it here.

“Today’s vote is a damning indictment of the stranglehold that special
interests have on Washington. More than 40 U.S. senators would rather
turn their backs on the 90 percent of Americans who support
comprehensive background checks than buck the increasingly extremist
wing of the gun lobby. Democrats – who are so quick to blame Republicans
for our broken gun laws – could not stand united. And Republicans – who
are so quick to blame Democrats for not being tough enough on crime –
handed criminals a huge victory, by preserving their ability to buy guns
illegally at gun shows and online and keeping the illegal trafficking
market well-fed. Senators Manchin and Toomey – as well as Majority
Leader Reid and Senators Schumer, Kirk, Collins, McCain and others –
deserve real credit for coming together around a compromise bill that
struck a fair balance, and President Obama and Vice-President Biden
deserve credit for their leadership since the Sandy Hook massacre. But
even with some bi-partisan support, a common-sense public safety reform
died in the U.S. Senate at the hands of those who are more interested in
attempting to protect their own political careers – or some false sense
of ideological purity – than protecting the lives of innocent
Americans. The only silver lining is that we now know who refuses to
stand with the 90 percent of Americans – and in 2014, our ever-expanding
coalition of supporters will work to make sure that voters don’t
forget.”

At least he blames both Democrats and Republicans alike for the failure of the bill. I’ll give him that.

What I find interesting is his ideological blindness bordering on hypocrisy. If you rewrote the first two sentences and substituted Colorado for Washington and US, you’d have exactly what just happened in Colorado. To say that most Coloradans were in favor of those gun control bills would be a lie. Moreover, the Democrats in the Colorado House and Senate were told by their leaders (and Bloomberg’s lobbyists) to ignore what their constituents were saying. If that isn’t turning their back on Coloradans, what is?