It comes as no surprise that Barack Obama jumped on Omar Mateen's mass shooting in Orlando the way any self-respecting ghoul jumps on a fresh corpse to aid Hillary Clinton's campaign.  A real leader would have called out this act of militant "Islamic" terrorism as an act of war against the United States, but Obama chose instead to promote a political agenda.

Today marks the most deadly shooting in American history. The shooter was apparently armed with a handgun and a powerful assault rifle. This massacre is therefore a further reminder of how easy it is for someone to get their hands on a weapon that lets them shoot people in a school, or in a house of worship, or a movie theater, or in a nightclub. And we have to decide if that’s the kind of country we want to be. And to actively do nothing is a decision as well.

Obama's political exploitation of this act of terroristic violence against the United States is entirely consistent with his press secretary's violation of the Hatch Act by campaigning against Donald Trump.  The president and vice president have far more leeway under the act as to what they can say to influence an election, but Obama's ghoulish conduct in the aftermath of an attack on the United States is nonetheless repugnant.  Franklin D. Roosevelt, for example, did not use the bombing of Pearl Harbor as an opportunity to pitch the New Deal or campaign for Democrats who faced re-election in 1942.

Former DNC chair Ed Rendell (D-Penn.) also doubtless welcomed the shooting, as shown by his previous comments on the Newtown school shooting.  "[T]he good thing about Newtown is, it was so horrific that I think it galvanized Americans to a point where the intensity on our side is going to match the intensity on their side."  We get it, Fast Eddie: never let a dead child go to waste.  Senator Bob Casey (D-Penn.), meanwhile, took less than a day to propose a ban on gun possession by people convicted of misdemeanor hate crimes even though Omar Mateen had no criminal record whatsoever.

The blood on the floor of the Pulse nightclub had probably not even dried before I got the following email from Americans for Responsible Solutions.  "Congress must close loopholes in our laws that allows criminals and domestic abusers to get their hands on guns. Congress must act to ensure that the dangerously mentally ill find it easier to access affordable treatment than a firearm."  Mateen had never been adjudicated as mentally incompetent, and only after his crime did his wife accuse him of domestic violence.

The General Motors ignition switch fiasco, in which engineers were not even permitted to use safety-related words, underscores the fact that we cannot solve a problem if we will not even name it.  The bottom line is that Omar Mateen took it upon himself to implement sharia law in the United States.  He called 911 during his crime to identify himself as a member of ISIS, and he almost certainly acted on ISIS's position that gay people should be killed.

The United West reported, in fact, that the Husseini Islamic Center in nearby Sanford, Florida invited Sheikh Farrokh Sekaleshfar to speak at their mosque.  This individual said homosexuals should be executed and that, although United States law prevents him from putting this into practice here, the only way for gays and lesbians to be forgiven is for them to die.  Mateen acted on this despicable rhetoric, or rhetoric and ideology like it, and I personally filed a Form 13909 complaint against this mosque to the Internal Revenue Service.  If somebody wants to incite violence against Jews, Christians, the wrong kinds of Muslims, women, LGBT people, or anybody else, he should not do it on tax-exempt money.