CUI BONO? VANTAGGI BIDEN. CBS’s Nancy Cordes Echoes White House ‘Whew, Sure Glad the Focus Shifted Away.’ “CBS’s coverage of the aftermath of the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump has been awful throughout, but Chief White Correspondent Nancy Cordes may have just plumbed a new low. Today, there was a brief pause in the media’s ongoing lecture about ‘tone’ and ‘rhetoric’. Watch as CBS’s Nancy Cordes channeled the Biden campaign’s relief at the shift in campaign focus- away from discussions about Biden’s cognitive decline and questions of his continued viability, either as a candidate or as president.”
Archive for 2024
July 14, 2024
MARK STEYN: What They Wanted. “Just a decade ago, Trump was an amiable bipartisan non-ideological telly-celeb schmoozing with Bill and Hill and doing cameos in Home Alone sequels. The Democrats chose to upgrade him to Hitler – complete with moustache. . . . And, just for the record, Saturday night was not an assassination attempt: One Republican voter was killed, and at least two others are injured. That’s to say, an American family has had a great big hole blown in its heart – because on a summer afternoon they went to a campaign rally. Just another day in the United States’ uniquely unique ‘peaceful transfer of power’ – and on to next week.”
Milwaukee approved every RNC protest request—without vetting or checking identities. And they gave protest groups no limits on the number of people allowed. @nypost's @amysikma: https://t.co/BwokKoGkKd
— Kelly Jane Torrance (@KJTorrance) July 12, 2024
Flashback:
🚨Flashback to Lincoln Project cofounder Rick Wilson in 2023:
"They're still going to have to go out and put a bullet in Donald Trump." pic.twitter.com/FqMFty7SlO
— Real Mac Report (@RealMacReport) July 14, 2024
JOHN LUCAS: Some Further Thoughts on the Attempted Assassination of President Trump, Including Some About What Was Behind it. I think that every soldier who is facing fire for the first time thinks, ‘How will I perform? Will I acquit myself with honor?’ Trump showed the world how he reacts under fire. After being shot, he got on his feet and launched a figurative counter-attack, fist in the air and exhorting, ‘Fight! Fight! Fight!’ CNN’s Jamie Gangel took great exception to Trump’s response to his attempted assassination.”
Well, of course. They don’t want you to fight back, they want you to give up.
OPEN THREAD: Discuss the events of the weekend. Did anything happen?
WHAT WE CAN LEARN FROM AMERICAN HISTORY AND THE FOUR PRESIDENTS SHOT DEAD?
Sixteen years [after Lincoln’s assassination], in 1881, James Garfield was shot at a Washington railroad station and died two months later. And in 1901, William McKinley also died from bullet wounds after he was shot at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York.
However, it was the experience of the man who succeeded McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt, that is the example perhaps closest to the attack on Trump. In 1912, “Teddy” was running for a non-consecutive second term as president when he was shot before he was to deliver a speech to a crowd in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The bullet passed through his steel spectacle case and a folded copy of his speech before lodging in his chest.
Roosevelt was a big game hunter and one-time volunteer soldier, so had some experience of the impact of gun shots. He made the judgement that because he was not coughing blood, he was probably not fatally hurt, and went on to give the speech, blood gradually soaking through his shirt as he did so.
Roosevelt’s response, that it “takes more than that to kill a bull moose” consolidated his reputation for bravado, and forever endeared him to his most enthusiastic supporters. In what is perhaps a lesson for Trump, who may like to model himself on Roosevelt in his reaction to the attack, it was not enough to win him re-election.
And as Joseph Campbell noted in 2011 after the attack on Gabrielle Giffords: Blaming assassination on overheated commentary: No new tactic.
The extreme attempts to politicize the weekend shootings in Arizona were dismaying and wrong-headed, but not without parallel.
Efforts to link the attack on Democratic Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords to overheated political rhetoric and, more explicitly, to Republican Sarah Palin and the conservative Tea Party movement were evocative of a campaign more than a century ago to blame the assassination of President William McKinley on the yellow press of William Randolph Hearst.
McKinley was fatally shot in September 1901 by an anarchist named Leon Czolgosz, who, according to Hearst’s finest biographer, was unable to read English.
Even so, Hearst’s foes–notably, the New York Sun–sought to tie the assassination to ill-advised comments about McKinley that had appeared in Hearst’s newspapers months earlier.
Plus ça change.
UPDATE: Byron York on “Rhetoric and the Trump assassination attempt:”
Last December the conservative writer and commentator Mollie Hemingway wrote that “This extreme and dangerous genre — of claiming Trump is Hitler — should probably be given the name ‘Assassination Prep.’”
Back in 2011, during the Obama years, an insane gunman shot Democratic Rep. Gabby Giffords at an event in Arizona. Much media commentary in places like the New York Times, Washington Post, and the cable networks focused on an ad that former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin had released featuring a map of the United States with small crosshairs scattered around the country where there were tight congressional races. Giffords’ district was one of them, although Palin did not name any of the candidates.
After the shooting, there were many calls for Republicans and conservatives to denounce the “rhetoric of violence” that commentators said Palin’s words represented. “Swearing off the rhetoric of violence: Will any prominent conservatives denounce ‘reload’ and ‘crosshairs’ imagery?” asked the left-wing journalist Joan Walsh. Her sentiments were echoed by many Democrats.
Now, there has been a great amount of what could be called the rhetoric of violence directed at Trump. After all, it appears that the multiple Democratic prosecutions and lawsuits directed at Trump, while damaging, will not keep him from running for president. In addition, after the debate, Biden’s much-discussed age-related infirmities have contributed to a continuing Trump lead in national polls. Democrats have thrown about everything they can at the former president, and so far, it has not worked. Frustration is high among Democrats.
Read the whole thing.
THE NEW SPACE RACE: Japanese venture seeks to develop commercial space station module.
IT ONLY TOOK NINE MONTHS SINCE OCT. 7: Yesterday’s New York Times reports on how Hamas “blurs the lines” between civilians and combatants, as if this is somehow breaking news rather than the way the terrorist death cult has been operating in Gaza for decades. The good news is that this means that the Times’ sources think Hamas is on the verge of defeat and collapse, so there is no point in running interference for it anymore.
DISPATCHES FROM THE INTERSECTION OF TRUNALIMUNUMAPRZURE AND NEW CIVILITY WATCH:
WATCH:
Awkward gaffe from Joe Biden: “We resolve our differences at the battle box.” pic.twitter.com/2IyDIYc0IQ
— Steve Guest (@SteveGuest) July 15, 2024
IF YOU COME AT THE KING, YOU BEST NOT MISS: Democrats fret about the political fallout from the Trump rally shooting. “The presidential contest ended last night,” said a veteran Democratic consultant.
In the hours after a would-be assassin fired a bullet through former President Donald Trump’s ear, Panfilo DiCenzo, a 40-year-old Democratic voter from Pittsburgh, drew a simple conclusion about the political effect of the attack: “It definitely is good for Trump.”
DiCenzo reasoned that undecided voters may “be more likely to vote for him out of sympathy” and that “especially with the upheaval in the Democratic Party, you know, more and more people I think are a little bit confused as to who to vote for.”
At a time when President Joe Biden has been struggling to shore up support with fellow Democrats following a miserable June debate performance and shaky cleanup effort, some professional Democratic political operatives said Saturday’s shooting will end up sealing the incumbent’s electoral fate.
“We’re so beyond f—ed,” one longtime Democratic insider said, noting that the image of Trump thrusting his fist in the air, with blood dramatically smeared across his face, will be indelible.
That’s from those crazy right wingers at NBC. Now let’s check in with the MAGA-hat wearing chaps at Axios: Trump rally shooting upends Democrats’ Biden crisis.
Most lawmakers who spoke to Axios said it is too early to say whether the cessation in tensions will last until the Democratic National Convention next month.
But the second senior House Democrat offered one reason for why it might: “We’ve all resigned ourselves to a second Trump presidency.”
Still though, don’t get cocky. As Stephen Kruiser wrote in April, “Back in the Tea Party days, I used to say that any Republican candidate polling lead under six percent wasn’t outside the margin of ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now). Now that early voting starts sometime around Super Bowl Sunday and Election Day is Election Seven or So Weeks, I’ve revised that. If a Republican isn’t up by at least eight points in a poll, he or she is not outside the Margin of Magic Mail Ballots.”
MICHAEL MCCONNELL ON CHEVRON’S DEMISE: The Courts Strike Back Against the Bureaucracy.
MARK STEYN: What They Wanted.
The other night my youngest expressed a wish to see The Manchurian Candidate — the original, of course. And, as great as it is, its famous ending seemed an artifact of a lost and somewhat innocent age: a man is able to stroll into a political rally and access easily a high-up vantage point with a direct line of sight to the nominee.
Couldn’t happen now.
And yet it just did:
Shooter was about 150 yards from Trump on a rooftop with a direct line of sight to the stage.
It defies every security protocol ever written that this rooftop was not secured, and law enforcement personnel were not standing up there. pic.twitter.com/a1WfwMRZPA
— John Cardillo (@johncardillo) July 14, 2024
* * * * * * * *
This is going to get a lot worse before it gets better. Just a decade ago, Trump was an amiable bipartisan non-ideological telly-celeb schmoozing with Bill and Hill and doing cameos in Home Alone sequels. The Democrats chose to upgrade him to Hitler – complete with moustache.
And while we’re in Manchurian Candidate levels of leftist paranoia: Top Democratic strategist pushed reporters to consider ‘staged’ shooting.
The top political adviser to Democratic mega-donor Reid Hoffman suggested that the attack on Donald Trump could have been “staged,” even as Hoffman was criticized for joking before Saturday’s attack about Trump becoming a “martyr.”
The adviser, Dmitri Mehlhorn, apologized for his remarks after Semafor published this story, and said his email laying out his claims was “drafted without consultation from team members or allies.”
Hoffman, the founder of LinkedIn, whose net worth is reportedly $2.5 billion, joked at last week’s billionaire confab in Sun Valley that he wished he had made Trump “an actual martyr.” Sunday, he said on X that he was referring to “accountability to the rule of law” and that he’s “horrified and saddened” by the attack.
The scale of Hoffman’s political donations isn’t public but Mehlhorn said on a recent private conference call that “Reid and I have invested nine figures of our own money to prevent Trump from getting back into office.” (The money appears to be largely Hoffman’s.)
In an email Saturday at 7:34 pm that appeared to be addressed to sympathetic journalists, and which was also sent to Semafor, Mehlhorn wrote that one “possibility — which feels horrific and alien and absurd in America, but is quite common globally — is that this ‘shooting’ was encouraged and maybe even staged so Trump could get the photos and benefit from the backlash. This is a classic Russian tactic, such as when Putin killed 300 civilians in 1999 and blamed it on terrorists to ride the backlash to winning power. Others who have embraced this tactic of committing raw evil and then benefitting from the backlash include Hamas on October 7. If any Trump officials encouraged or knew of this attack, that is morally horrific, and Republicans of decency must demand that Trump step down as unfit.”
The other possibility, Mehlhorn wrote, “is that some crazy anti-Trumper in this chaotic moment decided to assassinate the former President.”
Mehlhorn, who co-founded a fund called “Investing in US” with Hoffman, made clear his impulse was toward the false flag theory. “I know I am prone to bias on this, but this is a classic Putin play and given the facts seems more plausible. Look at the actual shot. Look at the staging. Look at how ready Trump is to rally; this pampered baby shit his pants when an eagle lunged at his food. Look at how quickly Trump protects himself at the expense of others, but showed few of those lifelong instincts in this moment. And consider how often Putin and his allies run this play.”
He continued: “I know it feels yucky to discuss such a possibility. But in this case, the odds are so high, and the stakes so consequential, we must as[k] the question.”
As Glenn Greenwald tweets in response:
So… the people who spent years claiming Trump conspired with the Kremlin to hack DNC emails, and that Putin controlled the US with blackmail, and that reporting from Hunter Biden's laptop was "Russian disinformation," are drowning in "conspiratorial thinking"?
You don't say. https://t.co/jSrVtlB9Ko
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) July 14, 2024
UPDATE:
The RussiaGate bullshit was not cost-free. It broke these people’s brains so comprehensively, they will spend the rest of their lives in that unreality. pic.twitter.com/MNsiugNgXu
— David Reaboi, Late Republic Nonsense (@davereaboi) July 14, 2024
CHANNELING TEDDY ROOSEVELT:
Trump’s sense of the moment, his instinct to reassure his supporters and show strength just seconds after getting wounded in an assassination attempt, was simply epic and will live through American political history https://t.co/PMcT41oRSO
— Rich Lowry (@RichLowry) July 13, 2024
R.I.P. DR. RUTH: Sex Therapist and Israeli Sniper.
76 YEARS OF THE LEFT’S HITLERS: From the Little Man on the Wedding Cake to Donald Trump.
The left’s first Hitler, however, was one of history’s most famous losers, the little man on the wedding cake, the man who all the polls predicted would be elected president in 1948 but whose moving plans were upended as incumbent President Harry Truman won a stunning and totally unexpected victory: Thomas E. Dewey. The potted history of the 1948 election is that Truman won by being honest and down-to-earth, dealing with the real concerns of Americans while the haughty Dewey confined himself to lofty generalities. Old Give-‘Em-Hell-Harry gets kind treatment from historians; they’ve forgotten, or don’t want us to remember, how ugly Truman’s campaign really was.
On Oct. 26, 1948, exactly one week before election day, the New York Times ran a front-page, above-the-fold article entitled “PRESIDENT LIKENS DEWEY TO HITLER AS FASCISTS’ TOOL.” It began: “A Republican victory on election day will bring a Fascistic threat to American freedom that is even more dangerous than the perils from communism and extreme right ‘crackpots,’ President Truman asserted here tonight.”
Sound familiar? It should: the Democrat playbook hasn’t changed for 76 years. The Times continued: “Already the ‘gate’ has been opened ‘just a little bit’ by the Eightieth Congress to admit this totalitarian specter to the shrines of democracy, the Chief Executive told his audience in Chicago Stadium.” Nowadays he would have said “our democracy.”
These were the Democrats’ glory days, and they’ve been trying to relive them ever since. Old Joe Biden, however, is a tatterdemalion Harry Truman, and he may not emulate his great comeback. But for incendiary gutter rhetoric, he is a worthy son and heir of the Man From Independence.
It actually goes back prior to that: In his 1944 State of the Union address, FDR smeared the laissez–faire Coolidge era of the 1920s as “the spirit of fascism:”
One of the great American industrialists of our day—a man who has rendered yeoman service to his country in this crisis-recently emphasized the grave dangers of “rightist reaction” in this Nation. All clear-thinking businessmen share his concern. Indeed, if such reaction should develop—if history were to repeat itself and we were to return to the so-called “normalcy” of the 1920′s—then it is certain that even though we shall have conquered our enemies on the battlefields abroad, we shall have yielded to the spirit of Fascism here at home.
When the Babylon Bee runs the headline, “Democrats Warn Of Terrifying Fascist State Where Government Shrinks And People Can Afford Groceries