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July 14, 2024

Trump shooting brief thoughts, ending with the NYT

First, we now know the suspect is Thomas Michael Crooks. He was 20 years old. His dad reportedly bought the weapon, about six months ago. The son appears to have been a gun and explosives semi-nut, if the T-shirt he was wearing is any indication. Also, per the AP, bomb-making materials were found inside his car. Also per that first link, he was a registered Republican, but also reportedly donated to the Progressive Turnout Project PAC. Even that donation isn't what it seems, per Ryan Grim. He notes it's a more spammy org than something like Politicus, and also that, by the date of the donation, Crooks would have been 17 at the time and it was thus illegal.

As of the time of this posting, no motive has been identified. He apparently left no social media hints or anything like that.

That story has a good aerial photo of the layout of the site. And, yes, it's pretty unbelievable that the Secret Service did not have the building where Butler was at secured. No, it doesn't look good that the shooter got with 150 meters. And, unlike Lee Harvey Oswald, this wasn't a weekday and I'll presume he didn't work there. (Oswald was at roughly the same distance from JFK.) Per another Beeb piece, a witness said he could see Crooks "bear crawl" onto the roof, and even see that he had a gun.

The Beeb now has a video reconstruction.

The Independent has more, as British newspapers appear to be having fun generally running circles around American ones:

A local police officer encountered Crooks before he fired towards Mr Trump, AP sources say. Not long before shots rang out, rally goers noticed a man climbing to the top of a roof of a nearby building and warned local law enforcement, according to two law enforcement officials.
One officer climbed to the roof and encountered Crooks, who pointed his rifle at the officer. The officer retreated down the ladder and Crooks quickly took a shot toward former President Trump, and that’s when the US Secret Service counter snipers shot him, said the officials who spoke to the AP on condition of anonymity.

Oy.

Longer-term issue: How well or or how poorly do presidential detail Secret Service coordinate with local law enforcement and what can be done to improve that?

The Independent also got his uncle to speak.

Reached by phone, Crooks’s uncle, Mark Crooks, told The Independent that he had “no idea” what might have spurred his nephew to take aim at the former president.
“I don’t know what to say,” he conceded.
The uncle said he hadn’t had any contact with Crooks “in years”, despite living just 20 miles away.
“I haven’t seen the kid since he was little,” Mark Crooks said. “He never wanted to bother [maintaining a relationship with me and my wife], so we don’t see him.”

More oy, and the kid now officially seems a bit thrown off.

==

More sidebar to the story:

First, yes, NRA wingnuts, this does raise again the issue of gun control and peripherals, just weeks after SCOTUS said bump stocks were constitutional.

Second, per the general tenor of tweets that I was calling out, duopoly-style tribalism got played up on Musk's cesspool.

Third? No, Speaker Mike Johnson, there's no need for the House to conduct a full investigation. That's what law enforcement agencies do. And, now that we know he was a registered Republican and his dad bought the gun, that's going to be a big fail, but you'll make it an ugly one, I'm sure.

==

Now, to the backstory:

I had LESS THAN ZERO desire to post something here last night, though I did do some callouts of the nuttery on Twitter.

This is the first:

Of a four-part chain, followed by:

And part 3:

Then part 4:

With a special sidebar for Jim Stewartson, 

who's already a conspiracy theorist and I think mentally ill, and I have no idea why people whom I follow or vice versa follow him.

That said, my ideas on "following" on Twitter may be different from others. If I want to see the latest stupidity from an egregious idiot, I can just search for them without following.

Per this Beeb piece, not all the Twitter nuttery was (apparently) from the US, but a great majority of the social media nuttery was from Twitter, as Elmo's clown car was exactly that yesterday. 

And, "oh, goody," a political advisor to LinkedIn owner and BlueAnon mega-donor Reid Hoffman tried to push the "staged" idea onto journos. Dmitri Mehlhorn appears to have been smoking Russiagate-style crack. Meanwhile, Hoffman's own comment from recently about wishing he had made Trump "an actual martyr," looks incredibly stupid.

==

Meanwhile, I must ask WHAT ROCK the NYT editorial board has been sleeping under with a rushed-out Saturday house editorial with the title: "The Attack on Donald Trump is Antithetical to America."

Another tweet of mine has the reality, instead, or at least a nickel version of it:

OK, let us break that out more.

Jackson's attempted assassin was just nuts. (Interestingly, he went to St. Elizabeths, eventual home 150 or so years later, for John Hinckley.)

But, most other actual or would-be assassins, as I noted in a newspaper column on the 60th anniversary of the JFK assassination?

None of them were criminally insane by the definition of either their times or ours, but all of them had some degree of mental unsteadiness.

And, they were all politically motivated.

John Wilkes Booth assassinated Lincoln after recognizing the Civil War was almost over and kidnapping him wouldn't work.

Charles Guiteau? A semi-insane office seeker upset that James Garfield wouldn't give him a major position.

Leon Czolgosz? An "anarchist of the deed," as they were known back them.

Oswald? Off his rocker, but believing that Cuba was indeed the worker's paradise, and that it did deserve "fair play."

Squeaky Fromme? To the degree that "Charlie's Girls" and the whole Manson cult was politicized, this was political. And, to the degree that being a Charlie's Girl was nuts ...

Sara Jane Moore? Many years later, she cited her radical political views related to the Symbionese Liberation Army. But, she had other issues that indicated she wasn't fully together.

So, only Hinckley and Richard Lawrence, Jackson's would be assassin, were apolitical.

But, the NYT editorial is worse beyond that.

America's "culture of the gun" also means this is not antithetical to America. Rather, it's right up the American exceptionalism alley.

And, the NYT is in a city in a state which DRASTICALLY changed its ballot access laws for third-party and independent candidates at the presidential level in 2021, and as far as I know, the NYT said boo about that on its editorial page. For its editorial board to try to lecture intelligent non-duopoly voters in America about democracy is both laughable and disgusting.

Oh, my callout of this American exceptionalist pontificating extends to any Congresscritters and other politicos, as well as other members of the media, who talk similar stupidity.

And, above all, to

 

John Nichols actually gets it right, and draws parallels to the attempted assassination of Teddy Roosevelt in Milwaukee.

==

Finally, while I have no political use for Brainworm Bobby, I don't give a rat's ass that the Secret Service says you need to poll at 20 percent to warrant protection. Biden can override that anyway, or Homeland Security Secretary Mayorkas can if Biden's not blocking that. Update: That FINALLY is going to happen.

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