in chicago, thirty three were gunned down, five of those died in laguna woods, california, chinese immigrant from las vegas walked into a presbyterian church and shot six elderly taiwanese parishioners. police say he was motivated by some kind of political and ethnic hatred. and of course, most famously of all, on saturday afternoon a teenager in a mock military uniform walked into a grocery store in buffalo and shot more than a dozen strangers with a rifle. no doubt you ve seen accounts of this on the news which you probably haven t seen details w about any of the 10 americans who were murdered in that store in buffalo. you may not even know their names, much less who they were or who they loved. most of them were black. we know that . but beyond the way they look, not a lot has been reported about them because the coverage hasn t beenth about them nor in fact has it really been about the gunman. unhe was an 18 year old called paten gendron.le gendron was mentally illd peyto
he s an independent journalist. his work is. on substance amongi other placesns, joins us tonigh. glenn, thanks so much for coming on . so every mass shooting, of course, is a tragedy. every murder is a tragedy. every death is a tragedy. but how chilling was it to watch the immediate mobilization of a political party using a the pretext of a killing to make bobbly political points? i don t think i ve ever seenev anything like it . yeah, i mean, you know, i think one of the things that healthyr society does is unite whenever there s a horrific act that violates the values of all decent people. we saw that in the wake of 9/11, for example, for a few days or a couple of weeks.ks but unfortunately another path can be taken and often is by political leaders. e youwa might remember in 1995 whn there was that hideous attackrt on the federal courthouse in oklahoma city, the clinton administration immediately seizedhola on that to say we ned a back door access to be ableo to control the interne
always announcing what you are going to do. he used on the campaign trail to make fun of the administration to say we are going to invadee mosul in three weeks. we re going to invade mosul in two weeks.ks does he have a point? he has a point. first of all, i was not in the obamaio administration. i worked for his campaign and previous to that i worked for the state department actually under president bush. i was based in baghdad. president trump has a point the u.s. goverment was slow to respond to isis and have a military campaign against isis in iraq and in syria. but it s going pretty well now. i was in iraq last in december, two months ago. and the campaign is going quite effectively. in fact, we have pushed isis out of the eastern part of mosul. they are in the western part of mosul. they will be out of iraq soon. the real struggle right now will be to come up with a plan to pacify iraq after isis is pushed out and to find a way to push isis out of syria where theis battlefield