Trump Assassination Attempt Discussion

[Robert Montenegro]

Mr. Trump stoked the flames of political violence for almost a decade, then becomes a target of the biosphere he spearheaded?

 

Just how in the Hell this has any parallel to the murder of President Kennedy, is beyond any rational discourse.

 

President Kennedy was a man who put his life and legacy on the line to promote world peace and far-left political autonomy.

 

Mr. Trump lit a garbage fire of international far-right reactionaries and got burnt.

 

No parallel between the two events, whatsoever.

 

 

[Benjamin Cole]

Biden Halts 'Trump Is Hitler' Ads After Assassination Attempt

I applaud this decision by the Biden campaign. 

[Gerry Down]

3 hours ago, Gerry Down said:

The sniper was challenged on the roof by local law enforcement just seconds before the shooting. Apparently the shooter aimed the rifle at the law enforcement officer on the roof, who apparently ducked for cover. Then the shooter turned and began shooting at Trump.

It appears therefore he was rushed into shooting at Trump. This might explain why he missed.

3 minutes in:

[Cliff Varnell]

1 hour ago, Ty Carpenter said:

You missed the point. I think it’s apparent he was a registered rep, but did he hold conservative values?

Since Crooks was the shy, quiet type we may never see any social media manifestos.  But consider this:

For his high school year book photo he showed up in a T-shirt with Mt. Rushmore super-imposed on an American flag.

From USA Today:

Jason Kohler attended Bethel Park High School with Crooks and said he remembers the 20-year-old sat alone at lunch and was “bullied every day.” Kids picked on Crooks for wearing camouflage to class and his quiet demeanor, Kohler, 21, said.

</q>

He insisted on wearing camouflage to class every day in spite of the fact the other kids bullied him for it.

Then there is the t-shirt he wore to the shooting -- Demolition Ranch, a right-wing gun nut website.

Crooks wore his political affiliation on his sleeve -- literally.

1 hour ago, Ty Carpenter said:

I have a hard time believing a republican would shoot the Don.

A lot of patriotic conservatives hate Trump.  Liz Cheney, William Kristol, Paul Ryan, the Lincoln Project to name a few.

[Ty Carpenter]

13 minutes ago, Cliff Varnell said:

Since Crooks was the shy, quiet type we may never see any social media manifestos.  But consider this:

For his high school year book photo he showed up in a T-shirt with Mt. Rushmore super-imposed on an American flag.

From USA Today:

Jason Kohler attended Bethel Park High School with Crooks and said he remembers the 20-year-old sat alone at lunch and was “bullied every day.” Kids picked on Crooks for wearing camouflage to class and his quiet demeanor, Kohler, 21, said.

</q>

He insisted on wearing camouflage to class every day in spite of the fact the other kids bullied him for it.

Then there is the t-shirt he wore to the shooting -- Demolition Ranch, a right-wing gun nut website.

Crooks wore his political affiliation on his sleeve -- literally.

A lot of patriotic conservatives hate Trump.  Liz Cheney, William Kristol, Paul Ryan, the Lincoln Project to name a few.

Do democrats hate Mt Rushmore or something? When did reps corner the market on the ole monument?

[Cliff Varnell]

23 minutes ago, Ty Carpenter said:

Do democrats hate Mt Rushmore or something? When did reps corner the market on the ole monument?

No, Democrats don't hate Mt. Rushmore, they just don't feel the need to show up to a year book photo session promoting it.  That's a right wing fetish.  As is wearing military camouflage to school every day or Demolition Ranch gear to a mass shooting.  Crooks was the product of a right wing gun fetish culture Trump did his best to inflame.

 

Edited July 15 by Cliff Varnell

[Matt Allison]

https://www.inquirer.com/news/pennsylvania/thomas-matthew-crooks-trump-shooting-bethel-park-20240714.html

Edited July 15 by Matt Allison

[Pat Speer]

30 minutes ago, Cliff Varnell said:

No, Democrats don't hate Mt. Rushmore, they just don't feel the need to show up to a year book photo session promoting it.  That's a right wing fetish.  As is wearing military camouflage to school every day or Demolition Ranch gear to a mass shooting.  Crooks was the product of a right wing gun fetish culture Trump did his best to inflame.

 

I hope it doesn't ruin your day, Cliff, to know, I've agreed with pretty much everything you've said in this thread. 

[Cliff Varnell]

3 minutes ago, Pat Speer said:

I hope it doesn't ruin your day, Cliff, to know, I've agreed with pretty much everything you've said in this thread. 

As long as we stay away from the JFKA medical evidence, you and I are okay.

[Benjamin Cole]

First-day coverage. Interesting take. 

[Cliff Varnell]

5 minutes ago, Benjamin Cole said:

First-day coverage. Interesting take. 

So in order to get his "iconic" photo op, Trump stood in the open endangering the lives of everyone on-stage.

Never surrender?  How about Always Stupid?

Edited July 15 by Cliff Varnell

[Benjamin Cole]

I disagree with Morley on this one, and think that the "blame game" is rife in America. 

Protecting POTUS, and every major candidate, at all times may not be possible, at least not without creating such extreme security measures that the thugs, extremists and terrorists end up winning, in a way. 

But Morley knows his stuff, and I like to see various viewpoints. 

---30---

JFK Facts cross-posted a post from SpyTalk

Jefferson MorleyJul 14 · JFK Facts

Hear hear.  "If honor were more commonplace in American government, she would’ve resigned by now. Alas, that never seems to occur here...."

Fire Kimberly Cheatle

Biden needs to dump the Secret Service chief as a message to MAGA-world

JEFF STEIN JUL 14

READ IN APP

Cheatle: She’s gotta go. (CBS News)

Joe Biden could start building a bridge to Trump partisans outraged by their leader’s near death by an assassin Saturday by firing Kimberly A. Cheatle, the head of his Secret Service. 

If honor were more commonplace in American government, she would’ve resigned by now.  Alas, that never seems to occur here. Seppuku is not for us—not hardly: Officials go on and on, failing upward, as the saying goes, from one disaster to another, no matter the bloody stains on their résumés. 

In my adult lifetime, I can’t recall a senior official taking responsibility for the millions of lives lost from their failures—or outright mendacity— ranging from Vietnam, through Cuba, Chile and Central America,  onward through 9/11, through Iraq and Afghanistan, not to mention domestic disasters like opioid  megadeaths and bank collapses, and done the right thing by stepping up, apologizing, and resigning out of principle. My AI searches for examples came up blank. 

The Secret Service, too, stands out as a monument to stubborn shamelessness. None of its chiefs resigned after the feckless failures to protect JFK, Bobby Kennedy, George Wallace and Ronald Reagan. In their line of work,  failure should really not be an option, but it too often is.

In her magnificent, 500-page deep dive 2021 book, Zero Fail: The Rise and Fall of the Secret Service, three-time Pulitzer winning Washington Post investigative reporter Carol Leonnig cited pratfall after pratfall and concluded that  the “elite, hardworking band of patriots” responsible for protecting presidents from JFK’s fate morphed into “a frat boy culture of infighting, indulgence and obsolescence.” 

Decades of Disasters

“The Secret Service’s tradition of drunken debauchery goes back to at least November 1963, in Dallas, when some agents apparently got so hammered in a gin joint just hours before the fateful motorcade that they could barely walk, much less leap to the president’s defense,” Chris Whipple, the eminent examiner of modern White House operations wrote in his New York Times review.  “More recently, on a trip to Cartagena, Colombia, to prepare for Barack Obama’s visit in 2012, 11 members of his Secret Service advance team were shipped home after a night of boozing and cavorting with prostitutes.”

Whipple continued:  “Time and again, in Leonnig’s telling, rather than taking a bullet for the president, the Secret Service has dodged one. No place on earth is supposed to be more secure than ‘Crown,’ as the White House is code-named. And yet, in September 2014, a 42-year-old man wearing Crocs and carrying a knife clambered over the fence, then lumbered across the North Lawn and into the East Room before he was tackled by an officer. Three years later, another ‘jumper’ strolled unchallenged up to the eastern entrance. A multimillion-dollar system of sensors, canine patrols and human agents had gone kaput.”

And so forth and so on…and on, through its agents too-chummy relations with President Trump’s staff and their post-Jan6 coverups.  Over the years, investigation after investigation has cited its I’ll-cover-your backside-if-you-cover-mine culture and urgent need for more resources.

In sticking around after the Secret Services’ perplexing security lapses in Butler, Pa., where the Trump’s security detail allowed the unhampered, AR-15 toting  assassin a clear shot from a shed roof top 150 yards across the fairground, Cheatle failed us all, not just the once and quite possibly future president and his devoted partisans. Inevitably,  social media lit up with MAGA-driven suspicions that it was somehow a failed inside job—”deep state” and all that, no matter (or maybe because) that the 20-year-old assassin, Thomas Matthew Crooks, was a registered Republican.

And no wonder: “Not long before shots rang out, rallygoers noticed a man climbing to the roof of a nearby building and warned local police, according to two law enforcement officials,” the A.P. reported. “One local police 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 Trump, and that’s when Secret Service snipers shot him, said the officials, who spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity to discuss an ongoing investigation.”

Not long after the wounded Trump was hustled out of the area,  a witness told a BBC reporter he saw the shooter crawling up a barn roof with a rifle and tried repeatedly to get the attention of police and the Secret Service to no avail. After the shot on Trump, a countersniper  “blew his [the shooter’s] head off,” the man said.=

“This was a catastrophic failure. It should never have been a remote possibility,” Jason Chaffetz,  a former chair of the House Oversight Committee, who produced a sweeping 2015 investigative report on Secret Service security failures, told The Washington Post. “We did all these investigations and did an extensive report so this would never happen again. It’s as if they paid no attention to the bipartisan recommendations,” which included significantly beefing up resources. 

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Only last week, Cheatle “expressed confidence in planning for the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee this week and the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in August,” the Post also reported. “She said the agency had been planning security for the conventions for the past year and a half, in Milwaukee and Chicago, working with police to prevent and mitigate threats, including foreign or home grown.”

Speaking to ABC’s George Stephanopoulos in a July 9 interview, Cheadle rightly said “we have to make sure that we are assessing the risk for both of those, as well as any other type of threat that may come at us, whether it’s a lone gunman, you know, an organized attack or an organized group.”

Somehow a strict review of Trump’s scheduled trip to Butler, Pa. got lost in the wash. 

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All in the Family

Cheatle got her job because the Bidens liked her when she served on his  vice presidential detail.  “We came to trust her judgement [sic] and counsel,” Biden said in a statement upon her appointment on August 24, 2022. “She is a distinguished law enforcement professional with exceptional leadership skills, and was easily the best choice to lead the agency at a critical moment for the Secret Service. She has my complete trust, and I look forward to working with her.”

The president famously refuses to fire people, no matter how bad their judgment and lies, from their sunny forecasts in Afghanistan, through the chaotic withdrawal from Kabul, their deadly timidity in Ukraine, to complicity in Israeli war crimes in Gaza.  His misguided loyalties now not only threaten his reelection, but the fragile state of our democracy.

Cheatle needs to do him a favor, and resign. Now.

 

[Benjamin Cole]

1 hour ago, Ty Carpenter said:

Do democrats hate Mt Rushmore or something? When did reps corner the market on the ole monument?

TC-

There is a D-Party proposal to add George Floyd to Mt. Rushmore. 

 

 

[Kirk Gallaway]

16 hours ago, Benjamin Cole said:

 

Even far leftie Cenk knows the truth.

Give credit where credit is due.

Trump, getting his the top of his ear shot off, missing death by an inch, and then defiantly rallying the crowd...was an inspiring, bravura performance. 

(Cenk talks about a deflected bullet, but I don't know why.) 

 

 

 

What was the point of this? Trump was told the assailant was neutralized and surrounded by SS. So he  uses the incident to get a photo op. There was no "courage "involved as Uygur said.

As usual Ben has no background  other than to call Uygur a "leftie".  To inform you Ben, Uygur is very down on Biden because of the genocide of the Israel Hamas War, but maybe doesn't know Trump simply says Israel should "finish what at they started" and wouldn't restrain Israel in any way. .

[Matt Allison]