Following yesterday’s late afternoon announcement that outgoing Maryland Democrat Barbara Mikulski would back Barack Obama’s nuclear Iran deal, a wave of liberal headlines this morning proclaimed that the president had put in place the last piece of his legacy. Whether Obama and his supporters have anything to cheer about down the road when the history of his presidency is written remains to be seen.
But the success of the Obama years or lack thereof won’t be reckoned exclusively on the basis of the Iran deal, the fate of Obamacare, or any other single accomplishment. Rather, it will be on the aggregate strength — or weakness — of a host of policy decisions he made during his two terms and his peculiar brand of governance. In this regard, Obama will be seen as one of the most radical and possibly the most radical president in nation’s history. And this on the basis of his appointments alone.
Consider as a case in point his pick for surgeon general, Vivek Hallegere Murthy. It’s not that the British-born Murthy is a champion of late-term abortions (though he probably is) or believes in fully government-subsidized sex reassignment surgeries (though he probably does) that makes him controversial. The problem, rather, is his position on guns. Namely, he thinks one of the questions doctors should ask patients during a routine medical history is whether the person has any guns in his home.
Investors.com notes that in 2014, before his nomination, Murthy, now 38, was president and co-founder of Doctors for America, an anti-gun group that advocates making gun control a facet of the practice of medicine.
His group, which has been dubbed “Docs vs. Glocks,” has pushed Congress to ban “assault” weapons and “high-capacity” magazines.
He also wants to spend more tax dollars on more research to prove that fewer guns mean a lower crime rate, despite the fact that a number of reputable studies prove the opposite.
In a preliminary hearing before the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee back at the time of Murthy’s nomination, Sen. Lamar Alexander asked him about his social media comments on firearms, such as a tweet before the 2012 presidential election that included the odd claim that “guns are a health care issue.”
Murthy’s Twitter timeline is full of his anti-firearms screeds. A tweet from December 2012 reads, “NRA press conference disappointing but predictable — blame everything in the world except guns for the Newtown tragedy. #wakeup.”
Like so many gun control zealots, Murthy ignores the fact that mass shootings such as the one at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Conn., occur in so-called gun-free zones where the only armed individual is the predator.
One especially troubling aspect of Murthy’s view that doctors should counsel their patients against exercising their Second Amendment rights is that such information entered into a patient’s private medical records would be available to the government under Obamacare.
