Both writers cited the speeches Obama has made and events he attended in the months since the massacre of innocents at Newtown. The number of these speeches and events can be described as a handful, as can the number of months since Newtown.  What Pierce and Bouie are saying, then, is that the President, with a handful of speeches and events during a handful of months, failed to overcome a deeply entrenched and effective gun lobby, and this proves that previous criticism of his lack of leadership is bunkum, that presidents, particularly ones facing the kind of opposition this one does, simply don’t have the power and influence to sway public opinion and legislator’s votes.

Part of the failure, which really shouldn’t be described as failure until the President gives up, is Harry Reid’s. The background check measure that was filibustered to death today would have passed, with a few Republicans voting “yes” and a few Democrats “no,” had Reid reined in the filibuster when he had the chance.

The other part of the failure can be laid at the feet of Pierce and Bouie and anyone else who thinks stumping for some legislation for a few months and giving up if you lose constitutes leadership. If the President keeps working for it and gun control proponents in Congress bring this legislation up repeatedly during this session and the next, and it still doesn’t pass, then we can talk. If he doesn’t keep at it, then it wasn’t leadership but a passing enthusiasm.

Republicans don’t give up this easily. They bring up the stupidest and nastiest ideas in the form of legislation every day they can for decades until they get what they want. Bush George-un worked his ass off, in his own way, on behalf of the Iraq invasion, campaigning for it almost daily for more than a year, sending out every recognizable name in his administration with every manner of lie, working the press like a geisha — a favor returned in spades — even when he was on vacation until he got a majority of legislators and ultimately a public majority to back him. That was leadership. He should be painting his little doggie portraits in a cell in the Hague because of it, but it was leadership.

If Democrats brought up Medicare-for-all legislation every year for 40 years, even when they were the minority, campaigned on it, built think tanks around it, I’m pretty sure we would have Medicare for all right now. Instead, we have comically low official tax rates for rich people and comically low effective ones for huge, profitable corporations, and a continuing erosion of social welfare and social insurance programs. This is not coincidence.

The President seems genuinely put out by the fate of the background check measure. I hope he doesn’t read what Pierce wrote — which includes, not for the first time, the sentiment that Obama is too good for America — and what Bouie wrote, and instead takes for his example people like James Brady and Gabrielle Giffords, who intend to keep trying despite suffering the effects of having been shot in the head, which is worse than not getting your way on some legislation that you put a few months of effort into.

Mr. Pierce, Mr. Bouie: grow up.

It wasn’t too long after that, maybe 20 minutes, when reports of the atrocity in Boston began popping up on the feed, and among my first reactions when I saw the early accounts of two dead was “Well, that doesn’t sound too bad.” Less than the 30 dead at the wedding and the 30 in the other bombs in the other cities, anyway. It took a little while to locate some shock, and 24 hours later I still find myself thinking the same thing — horrible but could’ve been worse — and wondering the same thing that occurred to me yesterday when I was looking at stories about it: what would the papers be like if this was happening in an American city every week or two?

I got thousands of results when I searched Google News for the bombing. Initially they were the same two or three stories and then there were more. I stopped regularly watching television news more than 20 years ago — around the time the elder Bush’s Iraq extravaganza broke CNN’s Bernard Shaw — and haven’t seen more than an hour of it here and there since so I don’t know how that went, but I know how it went.

I don’t know how it went in Afghanistan and Iraq, with the wedding and the bombs and whatever other violence they suffered. I don’t know what they have by way of newspapers or what the penetration of television is. The Newseum in Washington, D.C., has a daily roundup of the front pages of more than 400 US newspapers (more than 800 worldwide) every day, but none from Iraq and only one from Afghanistan. All but a very few US papers have a Boston story today — I didn’t look at all of them but I only noticed two that didn’t. Many of the overseas papers do too. The one paper listed for Afghanistan, the Mideast edition of Stars and Stripes, doesn’t.

The US is responsible for much of the violence in Iraq and Afghanistan. I don’t think Americans collectively are responsible; certainly some thousands of people should be in chains, and of course everyone who did their killings and kidnappings and whatever counter to the rules upon which the people who don’t go to war have settled. I don’t know what could have been done short of throwing some tens of millions of bodies upon the gears, in Mario Savio’s formulation; that is, climbing into the intakes of the engines on the troop and equipment transports, blocking the meetings of Congress, and otherwise physically impinging upon the ability of the concern to do business.

I guess that’s what we should have done, but that’s blood over the dam now. What I wonder, though, is how many Americans will wonder now what it’s like to live through a bomb at the marathon or the market or the church, or the missile attacks that may or may not be errant, every week or two or three, and whether if they get a sense of it then they might stoop to recklessness to stop the next reckless US government. Or whether we would just get used to it.

*This turns out to have been this, an 11-year-old London Daily Mail story that somehow burbled up in the feed.

Rand Paul, a sometime Libertarian who is so blindingly white that he splits into a rainbow when you hold a prism up to him, decided to take the new Republican outreach plan seriously and hied himself off to Howard University to reach out to some tinted folk and suggest reasons why they might want to vote Republican in the future. Predictably, he pancaked the landing. Giving full rein to his inner nitwit, he wondered if his audience knew that Republicans were among the founders of the NAACP; or, to put it another way, he wondered aloud if the students populating an elite academic institution steeped in African-American history might not be some ignorants. (Probably through an oversight, he didn’t remark that W.E.B. DuBois, among the most prominent founders of the NAACP, was a Socialist, or suggest that this might be a reason for Howard students to consider voting Socialist in the future.) He couldn’t remember the name of the first popularly elected African-American senator. And he couldn’t remember that he opposed a seminal feature of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. It’s safe to say that nobody who wasn’t already a Republican — a number probably including only Paul and his entourage — left the hall inclined to give the GOP a shot.

Also predictable, and representative of Rand Paul’s genius, was the enormous amount of publicity the speech garnered in the incestuous circles of the Washington press and the liberal press, which, no, are not the same although they attend many of the same parties. Some people, Paul among them, lauded the Senator for having the courage to go all the way to Washington, D.C. and expose himself as a white man to a large gathering of people of color. (Bill Clinton will be taking the same risk next month when he delivers a commencement speech there but so far he’s not getting the same credit for his courage.) Other people condemned the people who lauded Paul’s courage because the only reason Republicans talking to persons not of a blinding whiteness might require courage is that the Republican carry-on bag has 50 years of calculatedly malign attitudes toward people of color in it, which is a fair point.

(Andrew Sullivan is among the people crediting Paul and bemoaning the gracelessness of Paul’s liberal critics. I mention this only because if Justice were an actual thing, Andrew Sullivan would be condemned for his sins to life driving Tom Friedman around and around the world in a gypsy cab, forever receiving anecdotal advice in lieu of the tip, forbidden from picking up any passengers other than David Brooks and Joe Klein, who would themselves be forbidden from catching any other cab. This is not happening; ergo, Justice is not an actual thing.)

I should note that even though praising Rand Paul is kapu for liberals, whether for this escapade or the Brennan filibuster or any other — because unlike any Democrats he holds many reprehensible positions — he’s following the playbook of conservative apostate Bruce Bartlett, who does get love from liberals and has written a book detailing how Republicans can recapture the Negro vote by, among other things, explaining how once Republicans were the party of tolerance and Democrats were racists. I thought this was a joke when somebody mentioned it in passing, but it isn’t and Bartlett is proud of his work. (I once asked the usually communicative Bartlett if he had happened to run his thesis past any black folk when he was writing the book but he never answered me.)

Which is to say that when he went to Howard, Rand Paul was going by the book. Here’s my question, though: how many Democrats, when faced with the what-have-you-done-for-us-lately question that tripped up Rand Paul along with his assumption that black students at a historically black university would be ignorant of black history, would fare a lot better? What, for instance, would Steny Hoyer, the one-time Democratic majority leader in the House and a reliable corporate toady, say to lure black voters to the Democratic party if they had anywhere else to go?