NASHVILLE - During his keynote speech at this year's National Rifle Association, Wayne LaPierre said that every week while he's traveling the nation, people come up to him with concern about the condition of the nation. Americans feel their freedoms are eroding, and they fear for their jobs and the future for their children.
"In a nation where almost everywhere you look, in profoundly troubling ways, freedom has been diminished. Our right to gather, our right to speak, our financial freedom, our right to care for our families as we see fit, our religious freedom, our right to privacy - all of it in decline," he told the crowd at the 2015 NRA Annual Convention in Nashville April 11.
But Sunday, CNN host John King ignored those comments, saying LaPierre is a “big voice in the conservative movement. Most of the Republican presidential wannabes ran to the NRA meeting to lobby for support.”
In his speech, LaPierre irritated the leftist media when he focused on politicians and media as purposely evading truth:
We are the Americans who grew up learning that a young George Washington could chop down a tree, but never tell a lie. The fabric of America was stitched from those simple, powerful words from our Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths.” We were taught that honesty is the best policy and, from its very beginning, honesty has always been America’s best policy.
Not anymore. Among the political class and media class in this country, truth is no longer self-evident. They wake up every day to lie and spin. To weave a fabric of untruth. To deceive us only to serve and protect their own careers, their own wealth, their own fame and their own agendas.
We wake up every day, shake our heads and say, “Oh my God, it’s got to stop.” The whole character of our country is slipping away and we fear we may never be able to recover.
LaPierre continued, pointing to the national news media for failing to do their job.
Our greatest vulnerability as a nation is a national news media
that fails to tell the truth. They’ve become so skilled at lying and
so averse to honesty that they hate and demonize anyone who dares tell the truth.It is well said that, “The further a society drifts from truth, the more it will hate those who speak it.” Maybe that’s why the political elites and their media enablers hate the NRA. We tell the truth and we never back down.
He warned the gun owners to remain vigilant as Barack Obama closes his second term:
As he prepares to leave office and leave his final legacy, there is
no telling how far President Obama will go to dismantle our freedoms and reshape America into an America we won’t even recognize. And when he’s finished, he intends to go out with the coronation of Hillary Rodham Clinton.
Then LaPierre said ten words that was the topic of the CNN Sunday show: "Eight failed years of one demographically-symbolic president is enough."
New York Times reporter Jonathan Martin insisted that such language could damage the Republican Party: "That's not the face that Jeb Bush wants on the top of their party. If you surveyed ten GOP strategists and showed them that clip and said is the face you want for your party? Ten out of ten would say, no, it’s not."
The Baltimore Sun's Leonard Pitts Jr wrote about LaPierre's words:
Still, as insults go, it was a rather neatly-crafted twofer. On the one hand, it demeaned the nation's first African-American president and welcomed the day the White House is, well ... de-Negro-fied. On the other hand, it also demeaned the candidate seeking to become the nation's first female-American president and promised to save the White House from, well ... woman-ification. Evidently, Mr. LaPierre wants America to get back to normal, "normal" being defined as when the president is white and male.
The leftist Daily Beast asked "Will the NRA's Wayne LaPierre Ever Stop Lying?"
CNN nor the other sources steered around LaPierre calling upon Congress to pass a national right-to-carry law.
Read the whole transcript of LaPierre's speech HERE. Read Newsbusters' evaluation on the media's reaction HERE.
