This is the Hillary Clinton school of leadership after Benghazi.
We have a sheriff's department that ignored and even arguably covered up a flood of warnings about the future school shooter, and whose personnel wouldn't actually go into the school, possibly because of a stand down order. But Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel boasts of his amazing leadership.
JAKE TAPPER: Are you really not taking responsibility for the multiple red flags that were brought to the attention of the Broward Sheriff’s Office before this incident, whether it was people near him, close to him, calling the police on him…
SHERIFF ISRAEL: Jake, I can only take responsibility for what I knew about. I exercised my due diligence. I’ve given amazing leadership to this agency…
TAPPER: (interrupting) Amazing leadership???
ISRAEL: Yes, Jake. There’s a lot of things we’ve done throughout. You don’t measure a person’s leadership by a person not going into…
TAPPER: Maybe you measure somebody’s leadership by whether or not they protect the community and in this case you’ve listed 23 incidents before the shooting, involving the shooter, and still nothing was done to keep guns out of his hands, to make sure the school was protected, to make sure you were keeping an eye on him. Your deputy failed. I don’t understand how you can sit there and claim “amazing leadership.”
It's a new level of leadership.
"Our deputies have done amazing things," Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel said. "We've taken this — the five years I've been sheriff, we've taken the Broward sheriff's office to a new level."
A new level of pandering to Islamist groups, perhaps.
That level of arrogance in the face of a massacre has little precedent except Hillary Clinton after Benghazi or John Landis after the Twilight Zone deaths. There's not only a complete lack of culpability, but a narcissistic showboating that is simply obscene. Any decent, sane human being would be torn apart to know that this happened on his watch. But the Broward County Sheriff talks about how sick he is and then boasts about how amazing he is. That's not normal behavior.
The sheriff's arrogance is also cover. He's covering for the decisions that were made, pretending that he doesn't know about them, while implicitly suggesting that he did know about them.
But instead of taking on the guy who was actually responsible for this mess from Day 1, the media and lefty groups continue their witch hunt against a public firearms lobby. And you can bet that Hertz and Delta won't be spending Scott to the back of the line.
Local law enforcement failed miserably. But all the controllers can think about is how to make sure that everyone who isn't with the Broward County authorities is just as helpless as they are.