There have been times when emigrating to Australia seemed like a good idea, but it doesn’t take a lot of reflection to recognize the futility. After all, Nevil Shute wrote On the Beach in 1957 and Stanley Kramer turned it into a movie in 1959 in which Australians waited for death to arrive in a post-nuclear cloud of contamination from someone else’s war.
Given the developments in communication — not just the Internet but instantaneous TV-by-satellite and global telephoning — over the past 67 years, there aren’t so many of us who can even remember when the Antipodes dwelt in splendid isolation.
The whole world is not only watching but is forced to participate, unless, like the fortune teller in Fiona Katauskas’ cartoon, they make a conscious, perhaps futile, effort not to.
Well, if it’s any comfort, a lot of us up here feel the same way.
Morten Morland suggests that Saturday’s assassination attempt has sent America into a state of terrified chaos and I wish I thought he were right. Perhaps he is, but, if so, it’s not because the event was unprecedented.
As Robert Ariail points out, we’ve got a long tradition of at least trying to kill our leaders, though we haven’t always proved terribly good at it. Part of the problem is that most of the would-be assassins have been considerably unhinged, starting with the fellow who, in 1835, attempted to shoot Andrew Jackson only to have both his pistols misfire.
Garfield and McKinley would likely have joined Reagan in recovering from their wounds, had they had his level of medical care available, but, then, he’d have likely joined them in death had he lived in their times. It’s a different sort of luck, but luck is a factor in most things.
Right now, there are questions about why the Secret Service didn’t have a wider security radius around the site, which is reasonable, but also about why they didn’t spot the guy with the gun in time to stop him, which amounts to demanding a miracle.
It reminds me of a fellow who appeared on Front Page Challenge because he’d been in the reception line when McKinley was shot. He said that, just before the assassination, he’d said to someone that he wondered how that fellow in line ahead of them expected to shake hands with the president, since he had his right hand wrapped in a towel.
If the kid Saturday had climbed up there with a camera to get a picture of Trump and the Secret Service snipers had shot him, we’d be asking all sorts of other questions.
And the fellow who grabbed Lynnette Fromme’s arm wound up being outed as gay, which at the time resulted in saving Gerald Ford’s life and ruining his own.
Well, perhaps if Thomas Crook had a funny nickname like “Squeaky,” we’d write off his attempt as absurd, the way her futile effort was dismissed, though that doesn’t explain why we also wrote off Sara Jane Moore as a nutjob.
Perhaps we were made of sterner stuff back then, or maybe we just didn’t have so much media, both social and commercial, to get us all het up.
Plus maybe being marinated in a continuous, unrelenting bath of Dirty Harry and CSI and so forth has left us with greater, but totally unrealistic, expectations of both armed lunatics and unfailing law enforcement.
Juxtaposition of the Day
Well, it’s a lovely thought, and also if frogs had wings, they wouldn’t keep bumping their little asses on the ground.
After JFK was killed, TV networks canceled some Westerns and cop shows, and toned down the gunfire on those that remained. And following the attempt on Reagan’s life, the name of the character on Greatest American Hero was changed from Hinkley to Hanley.
This time around, as John Cole notes, the GOP didn’t even cancel an appearance by gubernatorial candidate Mark Robinson, who recently declared that “some folks need killing.”
Not, John Deering reminds us, that Robinson was setting a new standard for violence-inspiring rhetoric.
And with the sudden outrage over Biden having said we should “put Trump in a bulls-eye,” am I the only person who remembers that Republicans defended metaphors, back when Sarah Palin’s PAC ran an ad putting Gabby Gifford’s district in the crosshairs?
Juxtaposition of the Day #2
As for toning down the rhetoric, Mike Lester rightly points out that Trump’s Democratic opponents have been publicly grateful that he escaped all but unscathed, and he’s correct that they previously compared his plans and his approach, particularly Project 2025, to the rise of the Nazi movement in ’30s Germany.
But in terms of pots and kettles, Brodner notes that the GOP has just nominated for vice-president a man who texted his former law school roommate, “I go back and forth between thinking Trump is a cynical a****** like Nixon who wouldn’t be that bad (and might even prove useful) or that he’s America’s Hitler.”
I guess he came down on the unprintable-but-useful side, but he’s still a curious choice, given that Haley, Rubio and DeSantis were available. Not that they hadn’t said a few negative things about Dear Leader, too, but they hadn’t compared him to Hitler.
Who, I should note, is still considered a bad person by those who don’t embrace the Great Replacement Theory and hope to arrest and deport 20 million immigrants.
Juxtaposition of the Day #3
Slyngstad notes that insane conspiracy theories sprang up with the speed of a bullet following the assassination attempt, and he’s right, though they weren’t slowed down by having elected officials join in spreading the public delusions.
But Wilcox points out that rejecting plain facts and denying obvious realities has long been a hallmark of Trump’s approach to campaigning and to governing, and that, if he has cried wolf for the past eight years, it’s little surprise that his listeners have taken up the practice, even when their delusions work against his interests.
Still, it’s an ill wind that blows no good, and while Clay Jones may be overreaching to attribute to Trump the sales of T-shirts he saw in Milwaukee, there’s little doubt that the near-tragedy will be used for promotion rather than to inspire moderation.
As soon as I heard that the shooter was a registered Republican with no clues to what motivated his acts, it raised my suspicion that we may have just seen another Mark David Chapman, a Lennon fan who decided that killing him would marry their names together in history, and that he wasn’t reacting to anything Trump had said or done.
Has there been any statement released about the medical evaluation of DJT’s injury? (For a man of supposedly amazing physical fitness, his team is seems to be hesitant to release any medical details at any time.) Although I know little about firearms, my feeling is that given the angle of the shot, DJT was not directly hit by shrapnel from an object struck by the original bullet.
Has he or his team reached out to Corey Comperatore’s family?
As of last night, according to MSNBC, they have not.
Snopes reports that the NY Daily news as reporting that DJT spoke with Comperatore’s widow on the 16th.
Again I say I refuse to accept any pearl-clutching from the GOP given their history of violent rhetoric and terrible policies.
Considering America’s tradition of assassinations and near-misses, I’m kind of amazed this hasn’t happened to Trump sooner, given the sort of person that he is.
I responded to Lester’s cartoon on GoComics with a rundown of the many comments Trump made that included violent rhetoric over the years, beginning with his snark about Hillary potentially appointing judges if elected and maybe how the “Second Amendment People” could “do something” back in 2016, up through his speech to his acolytes on January 6th, 2021.
To which Lester responded “The cartoon is about charges of NAZI and HITLER from the left. That’s its. You can broaden it if you want. I’m not.” Translation: “I’m ignoring your point completely and I refuse to notice the valid comparison.”
But that’s also the end of comments on political cartoons on GoComics until at least 2025. They got tired of the vitriol, and while I’ll miss the back and forth, I can’t say I blame them.
Note: I drew my cartoon early Sunday morning, before I saw the T-Shirts in Milwaukee.
You’re a prophet! Or at least you can spot a profit!
And the MAGAverse is already hawking t-shirts (using the photo by AP photographer Evan Vucci). Did they bother to get the rights? Always Be Grifting.
I’m not buying it. We’re talking about the inciter-in-chief, the malignant malaise who has built his ENTIRE schtick on violence, hatred and division. He’s fervently endorsed it, condoned it, advocated it – heck, blatantly DEMANDED it.
Now, apart from the obvious very real tragedy of the dead and maimed in Butler, thanks to this (depending on your viewpoint) miraculous stroke of divine intervention / stage-managed photo opportunity, the demonized and persecuted Anti-Christ is suddenly magically transformed, divinely anointed as Van Gogh, the smug Prince Of Peace, this glowing messianic beacon of unity and lerv, totally primed to ride a nationwide wave of newly-discovered pacifist sentiment all the way from the RNC Megachurch Convention to the Oval Office.
And immediately, predictably, lemming-like, media commentators are dutifully echoing and promulgating the myth. Probably out of, as Wiley’s cartoon yesterday or Phil Hands’ today suggest, a universal fatigue with it all, a desperate craving for even just a moment of sanity and “normalcy”.
Simultaneously and largely thanks to this amazing act of kismet, the threat of Project 2025 is momentarily paused, de-fanged. The odious, principle-free B-J “Never Tr*mp” Vance has had his moment of clarity and conversion. Equally miraculously, hot on the heels of all this, with the classified documents case astonishingly now vanished, spirited away into thin air, the GQP stars are aligning perfectly. In this uniquely febrile moment, failing an actual murkle, Amerikan Democracy has never seemed more deeply in peril.
Your “kid with a camera” comment brought back a long-forgotten memory: Summer of 1976, I’m living in Erie, PA, freelancing photographs for the Erie Times-News, and Jimmy Carter has come to town on a campaign swing. He’s got a speech set for Perry Square (the center of downtown Erie) and knowing the park very well I’d picked out a tree to climb to get some pictures.
It never occurred to me that my setup consisting of a Ricoh SLR, 400mm lens, and a gunstock mount could possibly be a problem. Until about twenty minutes before the speech I’ve got two gentlemen in suits and dark glasses calling for me to come down from my perch. I suggested passing down everything I was carrying for them to inspect, mentioned ‘freedom of the press’ politely, and happily they accepted my suggestion. They looked my kit over, passed it back up, and one of them spent the rest of the speech at the base of my tree staring up at me, no doubt his hand was very close to his weapon. I settled myself in, made sure I didn’t make any deliberate moves, got a few pictures, and lowered myself out of the tree. He actually gave me a hand when I got down low enough.
I don’t remember selling anything to the paper that day. And, in retrospect, cannot see being treated anywhere near that politely anything over the past five elections.