It’s hard to believe that it’s been less than seven weeks since an assassin came within the proverbial whisker of killing Donald Trump.
Every story, every incident has multiple dimensions. Something may happen in the present but its causes are rooted in the past and its effects are felt in the future. Then there are the different actors, all with their own stories and trajectories; however, all are united in that one incident for that one moment, like a real-life version of Rashomon. So it was on July 13 in Butler, PA.
Some of the actors have drawn public attention and are in the process of being fleshed out. There was the target, Trump, who came within a hair’s breadth of being killed. That iconic photograph of him, with blood streaming down his face, fist raised high, yelling “fight.” Then there is the stunning incompetence of the Secret Service that day; revelations of dangerously sloped roofs, unsecured buildings, and just the general disarray and poor execution of what was once held to be an elite organization.
Oh and then there was the revelation that the Secret Service had actually RAMPED up security given evidence of an Iranian plot against Trump. I wonder what security for Trump looked like before then.
The third and perhaps most important story is one that has been hardly told at all, in fact has disappeared from view and quite literally has reached a dead end. If Trump is the direct object of the sentence, the one who was acted upon, then why does no one speak of the man who is the subject, who not only performed the action of firing the rifle, but was the presumptive Creator of that day?
I speak of Thomas Matthew Crooks.
Mike
Some Observations from the DNC
I don’t spend alot of time following political conventions, but I did catch some of the DNC this week and some things stuck with me.
First, what happened to the protests?
They were expecting massive protests with 100,000 people coming to town. “Make it Great like ’68!” Chicago prepared for the impending riotpocalypse with boarded-up buildings and a scheme that left the United Center, with its perimeter fencing and ID requirements, better defended than either our border or electoral system.
It sounded about right given the pro-Hamas heat over the past ten months. So what happened?
Monday’s protest at Union Park? Organizers were expecting 30,000 to 40,000 and maybe got 10% of that number. There were pictures of hundreds of unused protest signs littering the park grass (only Tea Parties clean up after themselves).
Tuesday? Even fewer protesters marched on the Israeli consulate and when they became violent the police squashed it with 55 arrests made. However even that in reality was a bit anti-climactic. Wednesday? 2,000. Thursday? The last and biggest night of the DNC? About the same.
So again, what happened? Few protesters and those who showed up were from the fringe Trotskyite microsects. I know it was midweek but couldn’t they get some buses down from Dearborn? I mean even the WNBA draws better than this.
The scuttlebutt is that since the Spring protest encampments, the Dems have been desperate to avoid similar optics for the DNC and have been making calls to that effect. I’m guessing somebody (finally) picked up the phone on the other side and the parties cut a deal for a nice, quiet convention. So what was in the deal? I think we have to wait until the day after the election to find out.
Second, don’t ever doubt the power of the corporate media.
There’s a lot of schadenfreude on the Right about both the cratering level of public trust in the media and its declining business model, but that misses the point. The power of the media is in that it sets the Overton window for can and cannot be discussed and inserting and withdrawing issues from public discussion. You may not believe what they say, but good luck in getting opposing views to be aired
Over the past two months, the media has gone from Biden’s Praetorian Guard, to pushing him to leave the race, to calling for a mini-primary, to then just appointing Kamala (who for the past 3 ½ years no one thought was a viable presidential candidate). All of those about-faces were done with a precision that would have made a parade ground gunnery sergeant proud.
The Democrats have (so far) pulled a minor miracle in jettisoning Biden, avoiding a party collapse in finding a successor, and leaving the DNC roughly tied with Trump. They never could have pulled this off without having the media act as their PR auxiliary. Can the Democrats and the media keep this whole phantasm going until November? I doubt it but I’m impressed (and horrified) by what they have accomplished so far.
I have a question. How does the actual coordination with the media happen? What’s the 2024 equivalent of JournoList? Is it Zoom, Slack channel, volcano lair?
Third, the arrogance of the Obamas.
The Democrats are still Obama’s party and he makes no bones about it. The tradition used to be that immediately upon leaving office, the departing president would then leave town. The now ex-president left his successor’s inaugural and proceeded directly to Union Station and took the next train. Now of course they get a final ride on Air Force One. Not Barry, he just moved a few miles up the street to the Kalorama neighborhood and continued to pull strings. That’s arrogance.
It’s also arrogant for his wife to get up and make a speech at the DNC stating that she was taught by her parents to be “…suspicious of those who took more than they needed.” Of course, her family owns four mansions and is worth nearly $100 million, all based on leveraging their time in politics. I’m surprised she didn’t quote in her speech a famous community organizer who once said “I mean, I do think at a certain point you’ve made enough money.”
Btw… she looked fabulous in that $3,000 pantsuit. Wonder how long that $3,000 would feed a family of four. I couldn’t find a word in the media about the stunning hypocrisy; however, I did find a lot of stories praising her fashion sense.
Fourth, I have a real sense of dread.
Just watching the video from the DNC and feeling the vibes, and all that joy I smell hysteria and desperation. Desperate people do desperate things, desperate people with power do catastrophic things.
Of First Posts, Coups, and Cabals
So what to write for a first post? There’s a famous quote, misattributed to Lenin, which states, “There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.” It seems like we live in one of those times
One of my dirty secrets is that I follow the corporate media, scanning stuff like the NY Times and W. Post on a regular basis not such because I need to be informed by events but because as PR outfits of the Left those outlets offers insights into what the other side is thinking.
So this past weekend I saw this column from Maureen Dowd regarding the effort to get Biden to quit the race, “The Dems Are Delighted. But a Coup Is Still a Coup”. As a friend of mine put it, Dowd is the “catty conversationalist for the coastal cognoscenti” who alerts her smug fan base to what is both acceptable to talk about and what opinion to hold. So when she uses the word “coup”, a term many other leftist outlets have condemned the Right for using, it gets my attention.
It’s paywalled so here’s the key quote:
“Even though it was the right thing to do, because Joe Biden was not going to be able to campaign, much less serve as president for another four years, in a fully vital way, it was a jaw-dropping putsch.”
Putsch? An unfortunate term given its history; did Obama, Hakeem, and Pelosi meet in a beer hall before driving over to talk to Biden? What exactly did they say to Biden to get him to quit the race? It must have been pretty good because Biden’s re-election campaign did the equivalent of a car smashing into a wall at 60 mph, one morning he was all in and by the time lunch was finished that day there was the tweet announcing his withdrawal.
Dowd doesn’t go into the particulars, and the real intention of her column is not to offer such explanations but to signal to her faction of the Left that yes, Biden was forced out, but it’s okay and now we need to move on. She is like the trial lawyer who gets out in front of facts that might reflect negatively on her client so that she can spin them. She’s fulfilling the media’s historical role in taking what would be nasty news for the Left and covering it… with a pillow until it stops moving (h/t David Burge). The limited hang-out par excellence.
However we are still left without an explanation of what went down that day when Nancy met Joe resulting in an event unprecedented in American history. If we don’t respect the man then we should respect the office he holds and as even Dowd admits the President of the United States was toppled. To add insult to injury, he was overthrown, but not by by a delegation responding to an ongoing Constitutional process as was the case when Goldwater and Rhodes told Nixon that he was going to be impeached, but by a cabal which found Biden’s presence on the ticket inconvenient for their partisan purposes.
So what offer did Obama, Pelosi, and their fellow cabalists make that Biden couldn’t refuse? What was the kompromat? Biden the man has two personal weakspots, his family and legacy. Hunter was already on his own trajectory through the legal system, but did they threaten Jill or Ashley? Did they threaten to “leak” damning information about those tens of millions in foreign bribes?
The most plausible action was that they threatened to invoke the 25th Amendment, the ultimate hard ball, which would permanently mark his entire presidency as being an invalid.
The buried lede is that all those theories are nothing new, which means of course that their use to blackmail the President of the United States has been a permanent aspect of the past four years. That there always had been an ejector seat upon which Biden had been seated and that his presidency was never his own.
Leave aside that by threatening to invoke the 25th Amendment, the implication was that they were more than willing to put the country at risk and keep an invalid Biden in office as long as he would do their bidding regarding the election. The real problem is that Dowd’s column allows the world a fleeting and final glimpse behind the Wizard of Oz’s curtain and exposes the cabal that has been running the country with Biden as its compromised puppet for the past four years.
A final peek to let us all know how things really work, that behind the pretense of a constitutional republic is only a filthy cabal. Now that we have had our look, this whole episode can be safely packed away in the same warehouse as Matthew Crooks, Audrey Hale, and Indiana Jones’s Ark of the Covenant, never to be seen again.
That’s the purpose of Dowd’s column; it’s a psy-op, to let you know that what you see is a lie and to convince you that you are powerless to stop it.
Onto the Joy of Kamala.