Glenn Reynolds: The New York Times Diverts Attention From Obama Foreign Policy Failures to Guns

Following up on yesterday's post on William McGurn's Wall Street Journal Op/Ed on why liberals push gun control, I found this piece by Professor Glenn Reynolds, thanks to Sebastian, on the New York Times using this very strategy to divert attention away from Obama's foreign policy failures with their front page editorial on gun control:

Over the weekend, The New York Times ran a front-page editorial — its first since 1920 — on the subject of gun control. This led Jonah Goldberg to comment:

“The Peace of Versailles, Buck v. Bell, the Great Depression, Pearl Harbor, the Hitler-Stalin Pact, the Ukrainian famine, the internment of Japanese-Americans, the Tuskegee experiments, the Holocaust, McCarthyism, the Marshall Plan, Jim Crow, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Kennedy Assassination, the 1964 Civil Rights Act, Kent State, the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, Watergate, withdrawal from Vietnam, the Killing Fields, the Iran hostage crisis, the Contras, AIDS, gay marriage, the Iran nuclear deal: These are just a few of the things the New York Times chose not to run front page editorials on.”

So is the Times editorializing now because gun control is more important than Pearl Harbor? Or because Obama is in trouble? Because when people are talking about gun control, they’re not talking about Obama’s many failures, ranging from the failures of vetting and counterterrorism that may have led to the San Bernardino attacks themselves, to Obama’s foreign policy debacles in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, to how the #BringBackOurGirls hashtag campaign against Boko Haram accomplished nothing, to how Putin is running wild in Eastern Europe, to Obama’s plans to import more poorly-vetted refugees from Muslim countries that foment terror or the still-anemic economy that has left far too many Americans unemployed or underemployed despite years of “recovery.”

Reynolds closes by saying when you’re shouting and pounding the table as the Times did last week, it’s probably because you’re losing the argument.