For all of the attempts at manipulating the news cycle with professionally prepared and carefully scripted comments, elections often turn on unpredictable events.

The insights gleaned from a politician’s immediate response to real-time events drive public impressions far more than paid advertisements.

Think back to the U.S. presidential race in 2008.

With the world melting into a U.S.-led financial crisis the Republican candidate, Senator John McCain, suspended his campaign and rushed back to Washington to save the day.

Trouble was, he didn’t have a plan and neither did his Republican colleagues.

In the ensuing days of confusion, McCain looked increasingly foolish, especially in contrast with the cool demeanour of Democrat candidate Barack Obama.

We all know how that election turned out.

Which is why, even as the horrible carnage of the massacre in an Orlando nightclub was being tallied, politicos on both sides of the U.S. presidential campaign went into full spin mode.

The facts about the latest episode of domestic terrorism are now clear.

A lone gunman, Omar Mateen, opened fire in a packed nightclub killing 49 people and wounding 53 others.

Mateen was armed with a military style assault rifle and a handgun. Although he was previously on the terrorist watch list and had been interviewed twice by the FBI, he legally purchased the weapons in the weeks before the mass murder.

Mateen stated he was sympathetic to the aims of ISIS but it appears he was not directed by a terrorist network.

The facts did not interfere with the narrative from either political camp.

Presumptive Republican candidate Donald Trump is not known for being a slave to reality.

Within hours of the massacre he tweeted that he had been proven right on “radical Islamic terrorism.”

If the insensitivity of his comments shocked anyone, they must have forgotten his infamous tweet last year in response to the horrific Charlie Hebdo shootings in Paris.

Trump used the hours after that tragedy to comment on the strict gun control laws in France.

No shock, then, when Trump opined that if the Orlando nightclub crowd had been armed it would have been a “beautiful sight”.

But all of that sounds positively lucid compared to his bizarre comments appearing to hint at Obama’s role in the Orlando tragedy.

In an interview with Fox News Trump said, “Look, we’re led by a man that either is not tough, not smart, or he’s got something else in mind. And the something else in mind — you know, people can’t believe it. People cannot, they cannot believe that President Obama is acting the way he acts and can’t even mention the words ‘radical Islamic terrorism.’ There’s something going on. It’s inconceivable. There’s something going on.”

You can’t make this stuff up.

But does any of this lunacy matter?

Not if the Democratic presumptive candidate, Hillary Clinton, can’t do any better.

Clinton’s response to the carnage in Orlando was more measured.

But it should be. As Secretary of State in the Obama cabinet, she had plenty of experience expressing concern over domestic and international terror.

Americans aren’t looking for expressions of concern.

They want the terror to end.

Who can blame them?

In response to the latest carnage, the U.S. Congress again failed to take any action to get the military weapons that put the mass in mass killings out of the hands of citizens.

We may not be safer in Canada, but we are saner

Snobelen was a cabinet minister in the Conservative government of Ontario premier Mike Harris from 1995 to 2002