The things they've said.
The attempted assassination at the White House Correspondence Dinner has spawned some interesting events and narratives.
One thing is that apparently Trump called several prominent reporters who were at the event that night, and expressed concern for their well being. That's outright remarkable given his generally abusive self centered public persona.
He also made a statement about needing to come together.
That's true, but at least one politician interviewed about it had a very difficult time not expressing skepticism.
Already, I'd note, Trump fans have yelled out about how Democratic and left wing rhetoric cased this. Well, bull.
There is a lot of hostile verbiage directed at Trump, and much of it is due to the horrible things he says all the time. Just a few weeks ago he noted how he was glad a public figure was dead.
Trump brought American political rhetoric into new territory when he very first started to run for the Oval Office. Republicans who complain about the language directed at him, and some of it is vile, need to look in the mirror.
Ballroom fixation
Amongst comments made by Trump were those stating this is proof we need his expensive ballroom, which is tied up in litigation.
The logic of that would be that the ballroom, if built, will have expensive security features. Where it fails in logic is that the dinner event was a private one, not a state function. Unless everything a President accepts an invitation to is held in the ballroom, things like this would not be prevented.
But here's another, and frankly radical, thing to consider.
Maybe Presidents need less protection, not more.
At one time there was a tradition that members of the public could wait in line at the White House to shake the President's hand on New Years. That ended in 1932. Now it would be unthinkable.
The only thing that's changed since 1932 is us. If the President's under constant threat, and of course there were three Presidents that were assassinated prior to 1932, that's because of us or some other factor.
One thing that's clearly changed is that the President is treated much more like a king now than he was in '32. Air Force One is the very symbol of that.
These trappings ought to be stripped away. If a President needs to fly somewhere, on official business, the Air Force has airplanes. There doesn't need to be a designated special one. Nor does there need to be a Marine Corps helicopter dedicated for the President. If he's just flying to a resort to golf, he can by a commercial airline ticket.
Maybe part of the overall problem is that they're given too much and separated from the people they are supposed to serve.
A big dumb ballroom emphasizes that.
It actually is true that prior Presidents lamented their being a lack of entertainment space. Well, too darned bad. Rent a hotel room.
And I'm not in favor of a giant bunker on the White House grounds either.
Maybe if a person is more like everyone else, they'll think twice about things that harm people. I don't want them exposed to violence, but making things so they can inflict it video game style is not a good thing, and elevating the President above the people isn't either.
And now you know. . .
how thousands of other people live every day. With one exception, when I listed to interviews of people from the press who had been at the event, things were not too surprisingly focused on themselves. The one exception was somebody who pointed out that they had excellent security but that most people don't, and that a lot of people live in fear of their family members, including children, being killed every day.
That's an excellent point.
Trump said something about this being just part of the price of holding office, which is easy to say for somebody who has a taxpayer funded security team. It shouldn't be part of the price of holding office, and exposure to violent death shouldn't be something you have to endure just because you live in this country.
Anti Christian?
When I went to Mass yesterday there was a Sheriff's truck parked in front of the Church. That's not a parking spot. When I went in, there was a uniformed sheriff's officer in complete kit. That's unusual.
I wondered if something was going on. Maybe not. He went to Communion like everyone else, so maybe he was just on his way to work.
Trump claimed that the shooter had been a Christian than apostatized and that was part of his motivation. We'll see. If so, it's ironic, as there's no visible evidence of Trump taking Christianity seriously.
What our enemies must be thinking.
It's been long believed that Iran has sleeper cells in the US. If they do, they haven't activated them in the current war. They either don't really have them, or they're holding back as it provides them with an advantage.
I can see where the latter might be the case. The old joke, dating back to World War Two, was that Hitler was the best general the Allies had, and that same may apply to Trump. He might be the best general the Iranians had.
That we went into the war with Iran with no clue what we were doing, and what our enemy was actually like, is to plain to excuse away. We have no idea whatsoever what we're doing and have no way out of the war. It's going to wreck the global economy. At this point, and we're at the sixty day mark, Trump legally has to submit the question of continuing the war to Congress, which will have to determine, as a practical matter, if we're going to engage in a full scale ground invasion of the country or surrender and leave Iran stronger than it was.
The Iranians maybe gambling on the latter, and it'd probably be a good gamble.
Anyhow, assuming they have sleeper cells, they've really shown restraint. Yesterday proved that a dedicated group of men could have breached security and completely decapitated the American government. We participated in doing that, which is beyond the Pale in war normally, in this war. On the basis of turnabout is fair play, it's amazing they haven't tried it. Maybe they just didn't think it'd work.
They know now it would have, although presumably the administration won't be dumb enough again to put the complete administration together in one room.
The others who must be looking are Russia and China, China in particular. But not at that, but at the war itself.
We've pretty much burned through our war reserve of missiles. If war came with China, we couldn't fight it.
Tone Deaf
Once a week now we get identical sized flyers from Chuck Gray and Reid Rasner promising to support the demented octogenarian that put us a war that's going to completely wreck the economy, and whose wrecking a lot of other things.
Maybe that still works in Wyoming. Trump has a lot of fans here. But as prices get higher and higher, and we sluff into a summer that's going to be hot and dry, with a tourist industry that's going to fall flat on its face, I wonder.
For the first time, actually, I got a sort of nervous "what do you make of the assassination" from somebody whose a huge Trump supporter and knows I'm not. I think he was looking for reassurance of some sort. I gave analysis. That probably isn't what he was looking for.
Proof of Devine Providence?
Franklin Graham was quick to come out with what I was sure would occur. Trump's survived three assassination attempts and that is, he suggested, proof that God wants him in power.
Adolf Hitler survived over 40 assassination attempts. There are five known plots on Stalin's life.
A person should never dismiss something being the Hand of God, but we shouldn't presume to know the mind of God either. Nor should we ignore, as the examples above show, the Problem of Evil.
On that, we can presume that God allows an evil to occur, but does not cause it, in order to bring a greater good out of it. While foreseeing the future is always risking, I could see that being the case here.
In spite of what Trump/Gray/Hageman/Barrasso/Rasner and others believe, or claim to believe, the ongoing use of fossil fuels is harming the world. This may actually accelerate their end.
Let me restate that, it is accelerating their end.
Countries all around the globe, including China, are rapidly phasing out fossil fuels for power generation. China is leaping into electric vehicles big time. Europe has, I believe, 2030 as the date for the end of the import of Russian oil.
The war is freeing the globe of US influence, something we'll regret and with it our steadfast refusal to look at reality. We're being put in our place, and the era of fossil fuels is coming to a rapid end.
The other thing, it seems to me, that Trump is brining about is the discrediting of American Evangelicalism. I.e., people like Graham.
Evangelical churches are particularly an American thing. They're strong in the US in a way they aren't anywhere else. Where they evangelize outside the US its nearly always where Catholics have made it safe for them to go. The latching on to Trump by them in a very public manner is hurting Christianity in general, but them in particular. Catholicism is already growing world wide and, while the story is only now being noticed, it's growing in the US. I suspect Trump is accidentally helping bring hte latter about.
On firearms.
On assassinations, one thing worth noting, although I won't detail it, is that so far the only assassin/would be assassin who seems to have had a clue what he was doing was the guy who shot Charlie Kirk, although even there it's clear that the shot being lethal was essentially accidental. There's very free access to firearms in the US, although I suspect that this will start being curbed back due to Trump, but that free access doesn't mean competence.
People who are really familiar with firearms are unlikely to go out and try to kill somebody. This is true of "military style" firearms. There's a group of firearms aficionados who like military style firearms, but aren't very likely to use them in any lethal fashion.
This may simply be because people know and like firearms know what they'll do, and are unlikely to be people who use them in that fashion. It's the people who buy them just because they're worked up about politics, on the right or the left, or who have an exaggerated fear of being attacked, who are the problem here. Fortunately, they're not all that likely to actually know how to use them.
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Labels: Abraham Lincoln, Antipathy, Catholic, Christianity, Civil War, Death, Donald Trump, Empathy, Introspection, Reconstruction, religion, Sic transit Gloria Mundi, The Practice of Law, Zeitgeist
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