If one wants a clear mental picture of how these people think, look no further than The Atlantic, this published post shooting is exactly the problem in America, and wouldn't be surprised to see The View and others come out with similar shows on Monday. Vile, despicable, and clearly part of the problem.

This is who they are, what they think, what they say about us, not only behind our backs when we walk by, but now, right out in the open.

The link is to a MSN copy of the article, but for those who don't want to click, the article is posted.


Link

The Gunman and the Would-Be Dictator Opinion by David Frum



When a madman hammered nearly to death the husband of then–House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Donald Trump jeered and mocked. One of Trump’s sons and other close Trump supporters avidly promoted false claims that Paul Pelosi had somehow brought the onslaught upon himself through a sexual misadventure.

After authorities apprehended a right-wing-extremist plot to abduct Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, Trump belittled the threat at a rally. He disparaged Whitmer as a political enemy. His supporters chanted “Lock her up.” Trump laughed and replied, “Lock them all up.”

Fascism feasts on violence. In the years since his own supporters attacked the Capitol to overturn the 2020 election—many of them threatening harm to Speaker Pelosi and Vice President Mike Pence—Trump has championed the invaders, would-be kidnappers, and would-be murderers as martyrs and hostages. He has vowed to pardon them if returned to office. His own staffers have testified to the glee with which Trump watched the mayhem on television.
Now the bloodshed that Trump has done so much to incite against others has touched him as well. The attempted murder of Trump—and the killing of a person nearby—is a horror and an outrage. More will be learned about the man who committed this appalling act, and who was killed by the Secret Service. Whatever his mania or motive, the only important thing about him is the law-enforcement mistake that allowed him to bring a deadly weapon so close to a campaign event and gain a sight line of the presidential candidate. His name should otherwise be erased and forgotten.

t is sadly incorrect to say, as so many have, that political violence “has no place” in American society. Assassinations, lynchings, riots, and pogroms have stained every page of American political history. That has remained true to the present day. In 2016, and even more in 2020, Trump supporters brought weapons to intimidate opponents and vote-counters. Trump and his supporters envision a new place for violence as their defining political message in the 2024 election.

Fascist movements are secular religions. Like all religions, they offer martyrs as their proof of truth. The Mussolini movement in Italy built imposing monuments to its fallen comrades. The Trump movement now improves on that: The leader himself will be the martyr in chief, his own blood the basis for his bid for power and vengeance.

[Christopher R. Browning: A new kind of fascism]

The 2024 election was already shaping up as a symbolic contest between an elderly and weakening liberalism too frail and uncertain to protect itself and an authoritarian, reactionary movement ready to burst every barrier and trash every institution. To date, Trump has led only a minority of U.S. voters, but that minority’s passion and audacity have offset what it lacks in numbers. After the shooting, Trump and his backers hope to use the iconography of a bloody ear and face, raised fist, and call to “Fight!” to summon waverers to their cause of installing Trump as an anti-constitutional ruler, exempted from ordinary law by his allies on the Supreme Court.

Other societies have backslid to authoritarianism because of some extraordinary crisis: economic depression, hyperinflation, military defeat, civil strife. In 2024, U.S. troops are nowhere at war. The American economy is booming, providing spectacular and widely shared prosperity. A brief spasm of mild post-pandemic inflation has been overcome. Indicators of social health have abruptly turned positive since Trump left office after years of deterioration during his term. Crime and fatal drug overdoses are declining in 2024; marriages and births are rising. Even the country’s problems indirectly confirm the country’s success: Migrants are crossing the border in the hundreds of thousands, because they know, even if Americans don’t, that the U.S. job market is among the hottest on Earth.

Yet despite all of this success, Americans are considering a form of self-harm that in other countries has typically followed the darkest national failures: letting the author of a failed coup d’état return to office to try again.

One reason this self-harm is nearing consummation is that American society is poorly prepared to understand and respond to radical challenges, once those challenges gain a certain mass. For nearly a century, “radical” in U.S. politics has usually meant “fringe”: Communists, Ku Kluxers, Black Panthers, Branch Davidians, Islamist jihadists. Radicals could be marginalized by the weight of the great American consensus that stretches from social democrats to business conservatives. Sometimes, a Joe McCarthy or a George Wallace would throw a scare into that mighty consensus, but in the past such challengers rarely formed stable coalitions with accepted stakeholders in society. Never gaining an enduring grip on the institutions of state, they flared up and burned out.

Trump is different. His abuses have been ratified by powerful constituencies. He has conquered and colonized one of the two major parties. He has defeated—or is on the way to defeating—every impeachment and prosecution to hold him to account for his frauds and crimes. He has assembled a mass following that is larger, more permanent, and more national in reach than any previous American demagogue. He has dominated the scene for nine years already, and he and his supporters hope they can use yesterday’s appalling event to extend the Trump era to the end of his life and beyond.

The American political and social system cannot treat such a person as an alien. It inevitably accommodates and naturalizes him. His counselors, even the thugs and felons, join the point-counterpoint dialogue at the summit of the American elite. President Joe Biden nearly wrecked his campaign because he felt obliged to meet Trump in debate. How could Biden have done otherwise? Trump is the three-time nominee of the Republican Party; it’s awkward and strange to treat him as an insurrectionist against the American state—though that’s what Trump was and is.

[David Frum: Biden’s heartbreaking press conference]

The despicable shooting at Trump, which also caused death and injury to others, now secures his undeserved position as a partner in the protective rituals of the democracy he despises. The appropriate expressions of dismay and condemnation from every prominent voice in American life have the additional effect of habituating Americans to Trump’s legitimacy. In the face of such an outrage, the familiar and proper practice is to stress unity, to proclaim that Americans have more things in common than that divide them. Those soothing words, true in the past, are less true now.

Nobody seems to have language to say: We abhor, reject, repudiate, and punish all political violence, even as we maintain that Trump remains himself a promoter of such violence, a subverter of American institutions, and the very opposite of everything decent and patriotic in American life.

The Republican National Convention, which opens this week, will welcome to its stage apologists for Vladimir Putin’s Russia and its aggression against U.S. allies. Trump’s own infatuation with Russia and other dictatorships has not dimmed even slightly with age or experience. Yet all of these urgent and necessary truths must now be subdued to the ritual invocation of “thoughts and prayers” for someone who never gave a thought or uttered a prayer for any of the victims of his own many incitements to bloodshed. The president who used his office to champion the rights of dangerous people to own military-type weapons says he was grazed by a bullet from one such assault rifle.

Conventional phrases and polite hypocrisy fill a useful function in social life. We say “Thank you for your service” both to the decorated hero and to the veteran who barely escaped dishonorable discharge. It’s easier than deciphering which was which. We wish “Happy New Year!” even when we dread the months ahead.

[Adrienne LaFrance: Thoughts, prayers, and Facebook rants aren’t enough]

But conventional phrases don’t go unheard. They carry meanings, meanings no less powerful for being rote and reflexive. In rightly denouncing violence, we are extending an implicit pardon to the most violent person in contemporary U.S. politics. In asserting unity, we are absolving a man who seeks power through the humiliation and subordination of disdained others.

Those conventional phrases are inscribing Trump into a place in American life that he should have forfeited beyond redemption on January 6, 2021. All decent people welcome the sparing of his life. Trump’s reckoning should be with the orderly process of law, not with the bloodshed he rejoiced in when it befell others. He and his allies will exploit a gunman’s vicious criminality as their path to exonerate past crimes and empower new ones. Those who stand against Trump and his allies must find the will and the language to explain why these crimes, past and planned, are all wrong, all intolerable—and how the gunman and Trump, at their opposite ends of a bullet’s trajectory, are nonetheless joined together as common enemies of law and democracy.

Anyone remember when Katie Couric had a cow about calling Clinton an ex-president. “There’s no such thing as an ex-president.” I guess that’s only for democrat presidents.

she's been off the rails lately with her pissing match with Shapiro, but here she makes some good points

https://x.com/CensoredMen/status/1812545151769653520

^^^ Diversity hire is more important.

quote:

Originally posted by steve495:

The dots indicating the shooter’s position are in the wrong place in those pictures. He was on the other end of the roof and possibly that tree block the counter sniper’s view of the shooter. There’s pictures several pages back the show the shooter’s body laying on the roof. Judging by the counter sniper’s shot placement, the shooter was DRT.

quote:

He was on the other end of the roof and possibly that tree block the counter sniper’s view of the shooter.

Then who took him out, if the SS guy didn't have a clear view? Or, he just shot through the tree and prayed for the best?

Possibly. Those are fake trees in those pictures. Who knows what the actual view was.

I'm watching Fox News; press conference with (I believe) head of USSS.
She looks insecure, not confident and in charge.
Deflects any questions about the assassination attempt.
Strong contrast with last night's presser with PA state troopers, governor, etc.

PedoJoe speaks from the Oval Oriffice at 2000 EDT tonight.

I thought after the debacle he wasn’t doing work after 2000. Maybe we’ll get to see him as vacant as ever.

quote:

Originally posted by trapper189:
Possibly. Those are fake trees in those pictures. Who knows what the actual view was.

According to this satellite photo, there is no obstruction.

https://twitter.com/OAlexander...twcon%5Es2_&ref_url=

quote:

Originally posted by car541:

quote:

Originally posted by tleddy:
The rifleman is subject to ROE (Rules of Engagement) and cannot fire unless a “Green Light” authorizes him to fire.

Not really true.

car541 explained it well in a few sentences. The “green light” thing might apply in a protracted situation in which a sniper could make an effective shot, but for some reason is considered inappropriate, such as a negotiator’s belief that the BG could be talked into surrendering. But then as a situation deteriorates and it’s believed, for example, that hostages are about to be killed, then the sniper would be told that a shot was authorized.

And I consider a meaningless movie drama statement like “green light” to be worse than useless. If someone is told to use deadly force when possible, it needs to be stated in as clear and unambiguous terms as possible. Plus, ultimately the decision to kill someone is the officer’s and the officer’s alone. At best he/she would be told, “Negotiations have broken down. The hostages are in deadly danger. You may shoot to neutralize the suspect when possible.”

If an officer heard gunfire from inside a classroom and when entering saw a man shooting students, would we expect him to say, “Hey, you: Hold on while I ask my chief if I can shoot you”? There was at least one incident that was highly criticized in the LE sniping community in which a sniper was told to not shoot until the chief arrived on scene. As a result the bad guy killed a hostage because the sniper followed his orders to wait.

And not that it really matters, but my effort on Google Earth came up with about 160 yards from the shooter’s position (as shown on Sky News from Australia) to the approximate location where President Trump was. I wonder where the other estimates come from.





And although it is somewhat low, the building the killer was on had a peaked roof, and the shooter was behind the peak. One photo I saw seemed to show that he shot from or was lying in the prone position at one point. That could have made him hard to see, and his rifle not visible at all until he brought it up to shoot. Speculation, though, so I will be looking for more information.

I pulled this from a different website. Not sure what proper attributions are needed here. I can provide a link to the page if appropriate.

BTW, there are comments in the other website that allege a LEO went up the ladder to the roof and spotted the shooter. He apparently retreated when the shooter pointed his rifle at him. Not sure what happened after that. No confirmations. Just something I caught while skimming a couple dozen pages.





I'm having some difficulty reconciling these two images for where the shooter is on the roof... Where is the person who took this picture located?

quote:

Originally posted by 12131:

quote:

Originally posted by trapper189:
Possibly. Those are fake trees in those pictures. Who knows what the actual view was.

According to this satellite photo, there is no obstruction.

Put the dot for the shooter on the right end of the roof and there’s a tree between him and the counter snipers. I really apologize that I can’t find the picture now, but it showed the shooter’s body on the other end of the roof with his rifle right next to him.

Using the picture above, I’ve added the poorly drawn gray line starting at the one end of the yellow line where the shooter’s body was and going to where the counter snipers were. There’s a tree in between.

quote:

Originally posted by trapper189:
Put the dot for the shooter on the right end of the roof ....

That is what the drone(?) footage provided on the Sky News report clearly showed. When facing the building he was at the far right end, not the left as many people have assumed.

quote:

Originally posted by sigfreund:
That is what the drone(?) footage provided on the Sky News report clearly showed. When facing the building he was at the far right end, not the left as many people have assumed.

Well, he was registered on the far right, but identified with the left.

Maybe this aerial shot shows better. He was a bit more to the right, but maybe just cleared that big tree.

quote:

Originally posted by sjtill:
I'm watching Fox News; press conference with (I believe) head of USSS.
She looks insecure, not confident and in charge.
Deflects any questions about the assassination attempt.
Strong contrast with last night's presser with PA state troopers, governor, etc.

i saw some of that...horrible, she really copped an attitude. Also the guy in the vid above said the SS really aren't supposed to talk about it, they aren't part of the investigation, they are under investigation.