STANDING-NEXT-TO-CHILDREN-GATE!
(updated)

All the wingers are whining about the fact that the president will announce his gun control proposals while standing with children. Yes -- how dare the occupant of the White House appear with children to advance a public policy goal!







Michelle Malkin is particularly livid:

Prop-a-palooza: The Use and Abuse of Kiddie Human Shields

The president of the United States will release a binder full of new gun-control executive orders on Wednesday. Instead of standing alone, bearing full responsibility for the imperial actions he is about to take, President Obama will surround himself with an audience of kids who wrote to him after the Newtown, Conn., school massacre. This is the most cynical in Beltway theatrical staging -- a feckless attempt to invoke "For the Children" immunity by hiding behind them....

The Obama White House has shamelessly employed this kiddie human shield strategy at every turn to blunt substantive criticism and dissent....

That would be the same Michelle Malkin who wrote this in 2004:

I am what this year's election pollsters call a "security mom." I'm married with two young children. I own a gun. And I vote....

We have educated our 4-year-old daughter about Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. She knows that there are bad men in the world trying to kill Americans everywhere.

She has helped us decorate packages of books and bubblegum for our brave soldiers....

Will [the presidential candidates] ensure that our children grow up in a world where the bloody, severed heads of Americans are not a weekly occurrence on the evening news? ...

Security moms will never forget that toddlers and schoolchildren were incinerated in the hijacked planes on Sept. 11. Murderous Islamic fanatics will stop at nothing to do the same to our kids.....

And this last year:

I took my 12-year-old daughter shooting this summer for her 12th birthday. Self-defense is one of the best gifts you can give a girl.

— Michelle Malkin (@michellemalkin) September 26, 2012

And then delightedly posted a series of pictures of kids with guns, sent in response to the above tweet:





I know, I know: accusing Malkin of hypocrisy is like accusing a bear of preferring outdoor toilet facilities. But the rest of the wingersphere thinks this argument is a winner ("Roger Pilon, with the libertarian-leaning Cato Institute, criticized the staging as 'tacky,'" Fox informs us), so I figure it can't hurt to state the obvious.

*****

UPDATE: I don't recall any right-wing complaints about this 2004 Bush campaign ad: