If you missed this segment on MSNBC last night during the hours-long coverage of the latest gun terrorist attack on the United States, take a few minutes and watch it. ThinkProgress editor Igor Volsky was brilliant, passionate, and perfect.
This followed his hours-long Twitter call-to-account for all the politicians that stopped to offer their "thoughts and prayers" following yesterday's shooting in San Bernardino.
Those tweets are damning, and perfectly illustrate why "thoughts and prayers" don't even rise to the level of a Hallmark card.
Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) had some choice thoughts, too:
Chris Murphy: I'm just sick and tired of people's "to do list" after these shootings beginning and ending with tweeting out "thoughts and prayers." Thoughts and prayers are important, but they don't change the reality on the ground in America today.
Thoughts and prayers aren't enough to stem the rising tide of mass shootings. I'm sick. I'm sick and tired of listening to my colleagues check a box with a sympathetic tweet and then go back into hibernation.
Meanwhile, having tweeted their obligatory "thoughts and prayers," Donald Trump and Ted Cruz went about the business of making this single shooting into a campaign issue, with all of the attendant "scary Muslim" language attached.
Trump is overjoyed that 14 are dead and 21 wounded, because it means his poll numbers will rise. Granted, he just retweeted one of his followers, but there's no question he agrees with that.
[Trump] retweeted a supporter who pretty clearly appeared to suggest that the shootings in San Bernardino, Calif., on Wednesday — shootings that killed 14 and injured 17 — would help Trump's "poll numbers."
Cruz, on the other hand, went into full-tilt warmonger mode:
Sen. Ted Cruz on Thursday linked the shootings in San Bernardino, Calif., to the attacks in Paris, telling donors and activists with the Republican Jewish Coalition that America needed a "war president" who would take such events more seriously.
Of note: No candidate mentioned the mass shootings in Colorado Springs, Colorado, nor did they mention the other mass shooting in this country yesterday. That one took place at a clinic in Georgia, where three were injured and one killed.
No "thoughts and prayers" for those people, which is why it's clear that "thoughts and prayers" are just a phony aphorism intended to deflect any serious thought. Or action. Because the NRA just wouldn't care for that at all.
