A few days ago, I noted that some ethnic grievance-mongers were griping that there wasn’t enough coverage of the Minnesota school shootings because many of the victims were Native American.

The race card-playing continues in the Friday A section of the Washington Post, under the eye-roll-inducing headline:

Native Americans Criticize Bush’s Silence

Response to School Shooting Is Contrasted With President’s Intervention in Schiavo Case

Ceci Connolly writes:

MINNEAPOLIS, March 24 — Native Americans across the country — including tribal leaders, academics and rank-and-file tribe members — voiced anger and frustration Thursday that President Bush has responded to the second-deadliest school shooting in U.S. history with silence.

Three days after 16-year-old Jeff Weise killed nine members of his Red Lake tribe before taking his own life, grief-stricken American Indians complained that the White House has offered little in the way of sympathy for the tribe situated in the uppermost region of Minnesota.

“From all over the world we are getting letters of condolence, the Red Cross has come, but the so-called Great White Father in Washington hasn’t said or done a thing,” said Clyde Bellecourt, a Chippewa Indian who is the founder and national director of the American Indian Movement here. “When people’s children are murdered and others are in the hospital hanging on to life, he should be the first one to offer his condolences. . . . If this was a white community, I don’t think he’d have any problem doing that.”

Kneel, kneel, before the gods of political correctness, oh, Great White Father in Washington!

The Post article echoes a somewhat similar piece in Thursday’s Los Angeles Times, which pounds the Bush administration for its pro-Second Amendment stance and for saying little about the school shooting compared to the Schiavo case. The Times piece quotes one hyperbolic anti-gun activist clearly a little too happy to be back in business:

“The bottom line is the gun lobby is too important a constituency to the Republican Party for them to do anything,” said Kristen Rand, legislative director of the Violence Policy Center, a group that advocates gun control. “The sad reality is if Terri Schiavo had been shot, the administration would not have lifted a finger to help her.”

Both newspapers, by the way, fondly reminisce about Bill Clinton’s lip-biting eagerness to jump on the anti-gun bandwagon after the Columbine shootings. See, Clinton wasn’t trying to politicize a tragedy. He Cared.

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Others blogging…

James Joyner asks: “Do we really expect the president to express his condolences to every murder victim in the country, or to mention every serious crime that takes place? What exactly is he supposed to say here? Columbine fit into Bill Clinton’s gun control agenda as Terri Schiavo fit into Bush’s “sanctity of life” agenda. What public policy position do these murders relate to?”

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