“You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. And what I mean by that is an opportunity to do things that you think you could not do before.” —former Obama White House Chief of Staff and current Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel

“It’s not a question of what you’re free to do, but of what is seemly to do. And a shared sense of what is seemly is vital to keeping any society functioning and, ultimately, free.” —columnist Mark Steyn

Last Sunday night, America endured the deadliest shooting in the nation’s history. And while the bodies were still strewn on the ground, and most Americans remained numbed by the scope of the massacre in Las Vegas, many leftists were more than willing to abandon anything remotely resembling seemliness in an effort exploit a crisis they saw as an opportunity to advance their political agenda.

If there is something that better epitomizes the divide that afflicts this nation, one is hard-pressed to imagine what it is.

Moreover, the Left’s level of unseemliness is mind-numbing. All of the following occurred less than 24 hours after the atrocity took place, and long before anyone had any idea why Stephen Paddock did what he did. To wit:

“If they wouldn’t do anything when children were murdered I have no hope that Repugs will ever do the right thing,” wrote CBS legal executive Hayley Geftman-Gold on Facebook, alluding to Sandy Hook. “I’m actually not even sympathetic bc country music fans often are Republican gun toters.”

Even for a left-leaning CBS, Geftman-Gold crossed the line. To its credit, the network fired her.

Former presidential candidate Hillary Clinton started off reasonably, with a tweet about “we are grieving with you.” But in a contemptible follow-up, she couldn’t resist plumbing the depths of the progressive swamp. “The crowd fled at the sound of gunshots,” she stated. “Imagine the deaths if the shooter had a silencer, which the NRA wants to make easier to get.” Don’t imagine; listen for yourself.

Rep. Seth Moulton, a Massachusetts Democrat, promised he would not take part in any bipartisan moment of silence. “As after #Orlando, I will NOT be joining my colleagues in a moment of silence on the House Floor that just becomes an excuse for inaction,” he tweeted. “Now is not a moment for silence; it’s a time for action,” he added, in a follow-up tweet. One suspects many families, still waiting to see if their loved ones in critical condition will live or die, would disagree.

British atheist Richard Dawkins thought the tragedy merited some “humor” — as in commending Paddock for his marksmanship. “Durn tootin’, great shootin’. Cool dude sertin’ he’s 2nd Mendment rahts. Hell yeah!” Dawkins tweeted Monday morning. “Every country has its psychopaths. In US they have guns.”


In Britain, they have callous jerks.

Current Esquire and former Boston Globe columnist Charles Pierce blamed the atrocity on the Left’s favorite targets, namely gun owners, NRA CEO Wayne LaPierre, Donald Trump and Christians. He referred to the Constitution as “a formalized, legalistic ritual of blood sacrifice,” and accused Trump and La Pierre of creating “an America of the mind in which blood sacrifice is the highest form of patriotism.”

Christians? “Christians believe that the sacrifice of Christ on Calvary obviated forever the need for further blood sacrifice,” he writes. “However, not even that could obviate or eliminate the entirely secular desire for blood sacrifice within a society perceived to have gone astray.”

The Leftmedia also wasted no time attempting to frame the issue. “This is going to re-open the debate over guns in this country,” declared “Good Morning America” co-host George Stephanopoulos at 7:47 a.m. Monday morning. On NBC’s “Today,” Tom Brokaw took a similar tack, asserting that we can’t have a conversation about gun control because it “becomes so emotional between the gun owners of America, who are protected by the NRA, and other people who are saying, ‘There ought to be a more reasonable middle ground.’” Perhaps it never occurred to Brokaw that a “more reasonable middle ground” might require the suspension of politics for a period of mourning. One day later a “reasonable” Brokaw was urging Americans to “organize” against the NRA.

Late-night talk-show host Jimmy Kimmel was equally arrogant. The Left’s latest useful idiot declared Republicans “should be praying for God to forgive them for letting the gun lobby run this country.”

Academia? A self-described teacher calling herself Ann#TheResistance tweeted, “Lots of white Trump supporters in Las Vegas at route 21 watching Jason aldean (sic). Pray only trumptards died! #prayforvegas.” Drexel University professor George Ciccariello also added race to the mix. “It’s the white supremacist patriarchy, stupid,” he tweeted. He further lamented that his take would be back-burnered, adding, “But liberals will drown out all discourse with a deafening chorus screeching ‘gun control.’”

If the name of this twisted individual rings a bell, maybe it’s because he was the same professor who wanted to “vomit” when an airline passenger gave up a first-class seat for a soldier.

Filmaker Tariq Nasheed also pushed the white supremacy angle. “Terrorist Stephen Paddock being from Mesquite NV, the same place where armed white supremacists pointed guns are LE, is not a coincidence,” he tweeted. He added another gem a bit later. “Have you all noticed the twists of logic these people are engaging in to spin this susp. white supremacist terror attack, & blame Black ppl?” One is left to wonder about Nasheed’s own twists of logic, whereby he reasons that an assumed white supremacist targeting an overwhelmingly white crowd makes any sense.

British leftist Piers Morgan also insisted the tragedy required immediate polarization. “It’s ‘too soon’ to talk about gun control, said the White House this afternoon. That’s what the NRA and its supporters always say after these massacres in the hope it shames everyone into supine silence,” he wrote in a Monday column for the Daily Mail — apparently oblivious to the reality he just undermined his own assertion.

There were many more leftist outbursts, spewing varying combinations of hate, bigotry and other obscenities. PJMedia columnist Sarah Hoyt aptly described their purveyors as “carrion crows” who should “get down on their knees and beg whatever God they believe in to forgive them and turn them into real humans, with real human feelings.”

It isn’t likely to happen. As Mark Steyn reminds us, America is now a place where even manners have been reduced “to objects of partisan controversy.”

For far too many leftists, freedom and license have become interchangeable terms, and ideological reflex trumps simple human decency. It is the inevitable result of being mired in an echo-chamber of self-reinforcing and increasingly abhorrent convictions, all rooted in the belief they “have found the revealed truth, and imposing it upon the benighted normals like us is so transcendently important that they are relieved of any moral limitations,” as columnist Kurt Schlichter stated last February.

They are not. And the bet here is that a nation of overwhelmingly decent and seemly people have had their fill of formulaic, prejudicial and predictably exploitive repugnancy presented as “transcendence.” The American Left is spewing itself into irrelevancy, one self-serving outburst after another.

It couldn’t happen to a more deserving bunch.