Acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney's primary Sunday show job was to patch up the damage done by revelations that Trump's team requested the navy move the warship USS John McCain so that Trump's hostility towards a dead veteran would not derail a Memorial Day speech to service members the White House still has to feign a bare minimum of respect towards.
But he was also asked about the latest mass shooting, because on any given Sunday there is always going to be at least one new mass shooting to talk about. On Friday, 12 were killed in a Virginia Beach government building. Ex-House Republican Mick was not shy in trotting out the hoariest of House Republican concerns: That it is much too soon to talk about this.
"We have too many of these shootings, and every time the first thing we talk about is politics," Mulvaney said on NBC's "Meet the Press."
"The mourning period hasn't even stopped yet, let alone the healing process," he added. "So, let's not get too deep into politics too soon. Let's think about the families."
You can, in fact, fairly see the deep concern for the families oozing off the man and sliding down onto the studio floor.
"There are things the government can do and there are things this government is doing, but we are never going to protect everybody against everybody who is deranged."
“You have laws on the books that make murder illegal, yet they still do it. Laws are not going to fix everything."
You could replace Mick Mulvaney with a Speak 'n Spell and it wouldn’t have made much difference.
At this point Republicans would do just as well with an enormous spinning wheel, game-show styled, containing each of the phrases that are pulled forth to respond to each and every mass shooting. From you can't protect everybody to criminals are still going to get guns to it's not time to talk about this yet, the ol' Thoughts and Prayers Wheel spins and spins and spins.
It must be said, though, that Mick Mulvaney's view of what this country should be is very peculiar, and seems to be quite different from what past visionaries professed to have in mind for us. In Muvaney's America it should "surprise nobody" if the military is asked to move ships around so that the sitting commander does not have an inopportune bout of the fee-fees; when it comes to the common rabble, however, even the hope of not getting murdered in your workplace is something the government cannot offer much concrete help with.
If only Mulvaney and his fellow Republican functionaries spent as much time thinking about “the families” as they did attempting to put bubble wrap around anything in the would-be president’s path. Or half as much. Or, in fact, even a solid and uninterrupted forty minutes.