"You know your country is in a terminal tailspin when an overwhelming majority of its citizens want both candidates for president to withdraw"

 

“It is silly to go on pretending that under the skin we are brothers. The truth is more likely that under the skin we are all cannibals, assassins, traitors, liars and hypocrites.”

— Henry Miller

Last Saturday a 20-year-old kitchen worker named Thomas Crooks, described as a loner nerd by friends, asked his father if he could borrow the family AR-15 semi-automatic rifle for some target practice at the local shooting range. Dad handed him the gun and sent young Tom on his way. But Tom bypassed the shooting range and drove 45 miles north from Bethel Park to Butler, Pennsylvania, where Donald Trump was presiding over an outdoor rally. Along the way, Crooks stopped to load up with 50 rounds of ammo and buy a five-foot tall ladder. 

Crooks arrived at the scene in Butler after the Secret Service and local cops had swept the area. He used his ladder to climb to the roof of a small warehouse about 450 feet from where Trump was speaking. The warehouse was outside of the primary security area under the supervision of the Secret Service and had been handed over to local police and sheriffs, those heroic figures so often valorized as the “sovereign leaders” of rural America by MAGA. Three police snipers were inside the building Crooks used as his shooting perch, but none of them were on the roof.

Several rally-goers told the local police they’d seen a man (or man-child) walking the perimeter of the site and then climbing onto the roof with a gun. Butler County Sheriff Michael Slupe said one of his deputies climbed to the roof and encountered Crooks, who saw the officer and turned toward him, pointing his AR-15. Rather than confront Crooks, the deputy dropped to safety. A few seconds later Crooks started firing. One of his eight shots nicked Trump’s ear (no stitches needed) and others hit three people at the rally, killing one and seriously wounding two. Crooks was then shot and killed by the Secret Service’s “counter-sniper team.” He was wearing a T-shirt with the logo from Demolition Ranch, a YouTube channel featuring gun and demolition porn.

Trump, dribbles of blood streaked across his face, was marshaled off the stage by the Secret Service, while pumping his fist and shouting, “Fight! Fight! Fight!” Trump was taken to a local hospital, where his ear was swabbed, and he was quickly sent on his way. Trump spent much of the next day playing golf.

As for Trump’s would-be assassin, Crooks didn’t seem overtly political. His politics were the politics of the gun. He searched online for the names of Biden and Trump, equally, it seemed and was likely to have pulled the trigger on the first one who entered the sights of his AR-15. There was just a dime’s worth of difference between them as far as he was concerned. Crooks is the next variation on Kyle Rittenhouse, a fucked up white kid, working a dead-end job in a shabbily run nursing home, who ventured forth bound for glory with a semi-automatic rifle in the Republic of the Shooter.

+++ 

+ Crooks fits the profile of every young, alienated white mass shooter since Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold walked into the lunchroom at Columbine looking to settle scores with anyone who’d bullied, laughed at or ignored them in gym class–only now the semi-automatic rifles can be bought more easily, openly carried nearly everywhere and amped up to full-auto with a bump stock.

+ Laura Bassett: “A white Republican man shot a white Republican man because of critical race theory?”

+ One of Crooks’ classmates at Bethel Park High School told the New York Times that as a freshman Crooks became a frequent object of ridicule by bullies at the school. “Those other kids would always say, ‘Hey, look, at the school shooter over there. They would tease him about his poor hygiene, body odor. He was an easy target.”

+ The family of Trump’s would-be assassin Thomas Crooks is listed in a 2016 Trump campaign database as gun-owning Republicans who live a “gun-owning lifestyle.” The Trump campaign targeted them for pro-gun messaging. When the FBI searched the Crooks’s home, they found more than a dozen guns.

+ There’s no question that the Trump shooting will increase the power of the very same “Deep State” institutions so many MAGA people fear and believe were behind the plot to assassinate him.

 

+ FDR not only survived an attempted coup plotted by Wall Street tycoons in 1933 but he was also shot at while riding in an open car in Miami during that same year. One of the errant bullets killed the Mayor of Chicago, Anton Cermak.

 

+ Nixon after George Wallace was shot in 1972 at the Laurel Shopping Center parking lot in suburban DC: “We must all stand together to eliminate this vicious threat to our public life. We must not permit the shadow of violence to fall over our country again.” There’s no originality to American politics anymore. The same trite banalities are recycled over and over.

 

+ Trump was shot with a 5.56×45mm bullet, commonly called a Five-Five-Six NATO round– the standard cartridge for NATO rifles. No way the US stays in NATO if he’s reelected.

 

+ One of the principal victims of the Trump shooting appears to be the Biden campaign, which stood down in the aftermath of the shooting, as if they were conceding the election to Trump.

 

+ I’ve never seen a party go from 8 years of sustained hysteria over a coming political apocalypse into a state of near-catatonic passivity faster than the Biden Democrats…

 

+ Biden waited hours to make any kind of statement on the shooting. Then when he did, he botched it, saying “There’s no place for violence in American politics. In America, we resolve our differences at the battle [sic] box. You know, that’s how we do it, at the battle [sic] box, not with bullets.”

 

+ A few hours after it was reported that Biden said he’d be willing to step down on the medical advice of his doctor, the White House announced that Biden had tested positive for COVID-19, the latest victim of the pandemic he said, “I, and I alone, ended.”

 

+ Biden’s doctor sent out the following note on the president’s condition…

 

+ A “non-productive cough with general malaise” sounds like not only a description of Biden’s health but his entire campaign.

 

+ Before the COVID diagnosis (or at least its public announcement), Biden had met with Hollywood mogul and Biden advisor Jeffrey Katzenberg in Las Vegas, who warned the president that the patience of big donors in the party “is wearing thin, and their cash soon will, too.”

 

+ Yes, you are. But this is not a recognized defense against complicity in genocide.

 

+ At a raucous meeting last weekend with House Democrats, Biden shouted down Rep. Jason Crow, the Colorado Democrat, who asked him about the importance of “national security” to Democratic middle-class voters. According to an account by Julia Ioffe in PuckNews, which was not disputed by the White House, Biden blustered:

 

“First of all, I think you’re dead wrong about national security. You saw what happened recently in terms of the meeting we had with NATO. I put NATO together. Name me a foreign leader who thinks I’m not the most effective leader in the world on foreign policy. Tell me! Tell me who did the Pacific Basin! Tell me who did something you’ve never done with your Bronze Star like my son!!…We’ve got Korea and Japan working together! I put AUKUS together! Anyway…Things are in chaos and I’m bringing some order to it. And again, find me a world leader who’s an ally of ours who doesn’t think I’m the most respected person they’ve ever…”

 

“It’s not breaking through, Mr. President to our voters,” Crow calmly insisted. “You oughta talk about it!” Biden blurted. “On national security, nobody has been I better president than I’ve been. Name me one. Name me ONE! So, I don’t want to hear that crap!”

 

+ As for the weird line about Biden doing “something you’ve never done with your Bronze Star, Crow, a Democrat from Colorado who sits on the Foreign Affairs and Intelligence committees, is a former Army Ranger, who served three tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan and was awarded a Bronze Star for his actions during the Battle of Samawah. Biden, like Trump, received five deferments from the draft during the Vietnam War.

 

+ There’s something psychologically twisted about Biden diminishing the meaning of his son’s bronze star to promote his own lofty achievements in foreign policy, which largely consist of a nuclear submarine deal with Australia, an internecine bloodbath in Ukraine and a genocide in Gaza.

 

+ Biden’s rant was downright Nixonian in his hubris and sense of self-importance, though in more garbled syntax than Tricky Dickie ever used, even after a few glasses of wine had twisted his tongue…

 

+ Later that day, Chuck Schumer had a one-on-one meeting with Biden in Rehoboth, where the Senate leader told Biden it would be in the “best interests of the country, the party and Biden” if he withdrew from the election. Schumer’s office didn’t deny the report and told ABC New’s Jonathan Karl, the senator relayed “the views of his caucus.” ABC also reported that House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries delivered the message, followed by Obama himself.

 

+ Was it Biden’s assertion earlier this week to the NAACP that “I know what a Black job is: it’s the Vice President of the United States!” that was the final straw for Obama?

 

+ Ezra Klein: “It’s not just that Schumer told Biden he needed to step aside. It’s that Biden didn’t step aside, and so now the meeting is being leaked to build pressure and signal to others that they can act.”

 

+ It’s gotten so bad that Biden now has trouble even reading off the Teleprompter. During his Vegas speech to the NAACP, he squinted at the screen and still misread text promising a 5 percent cap on rent increases for a cap on rent increases larger than $55.

+ This week a desperate Biden suddenly endorsed imposing term limits for Supreme Court justices, but not for himself, even though he’s 82, and has served 6 terms in the US Senate, two as vice president and one as president…

+++

+ In 1988, Biden suffered two near-fatal brain aneurysms that he says “changed him into the man he wanted to be.” That “changed man” treated Anita Hill dismissively (1991), wrote the most racist and punitive crime law in US history (1994), wrote a counterterrorism bill that expanded the federal death penalty against people who hadn’t committed murder and became a model for the Patriot Act (1996), proposed cutting Social Security (1995), voted against gay marriage (1996), backed the gutting of welfare (1996), voted to repeal Glass-Steagel, setting the stage for the financial crisis (1999), voted for the Patriot Act (2001) and the Iraq War (2002/3), voted against bankruptcy protections for students (2005) and armed a genocide (2023/4).

+ You know your country is in a terminal tailspin when an overwhelming majority of its citizens want both candidates for president to withdraw.

+ According to a new AP poll: 70% of the country wants Joe Biden to withdraw from the presidential race, including 65% of Democrats and 77% of independents. 57% of the country wants Donald Trump to withdraw…

+ This is the real Biden, equating the assassination attempt on Trump to college kids protesting genocide–not the guy in Detroit on Friday night reading the Sanders/AOC wish list like a political hostage on camera.

+ Dan Berger: “Is Trump the first US presidential candidate to run unopposed?”

 

+ Biden had a full-blown delusional episode this week during his kid-glove interview with Speedy Morman: “By the way, I’m the guy who did more for the Palestinian community than anybody. I’m the guy that opened up all the assets. I’m the guy that made sure the Egyptians opened up the border to let goods through.” The interview aired shortly after Israel dropped 5 US-made 2000-pound bombs on a Palestinian refugee camp in a humanitarian safe zone that killed 100 people, half of them children, and wounded 300 others.

+ Around 4 in 10 voters (38%) say they are less likely to vote for Biden because of his handling of the war in Gaza, according to a Century Foundation/Morning Consult poll taken in July.

 

+ Many progressives hope that Harris, if she becomes the candidate by fiat of Democratic party elites, will use polling like this to call for a dramatic shift of US policy on Israel. But even if she was inclined to make this rhetorical change, it’s complicated, as long as Harris remains Veep and Biden president.  See the experience of the hapless HHH, who couldn’t unshackle himself from LBJ on Vietnam and recruit the alienated youth vote he needed to defeat Nixon. How can Harris openly revise or critique the policies of the very government she’s still second in command of? It’s why one of them needs to resign or her possible campaign is likely doomed before it even launches.

 

+ Sports journalist Bob Costas: “Biden had a chance to be seen by history as a statesman and a patriot. He spared the nation a second Trump term, he could have gone out in a gracious fashion. Now, we can no longer indulge his delusions.”

 

+ Much of the nostalgia for the good old Biden of yesteryear is political hokum. He’s always been a scheming politician with very conservative political instincts. Only months before the 1980 elections, Biden publicly attacked Jimmy Carter for being soft on crime. In his four years in office, Carter had managed to reduce the federal prison population by 25 percent. Biden, seeking to advance himself as a conservative Democrat, saw an opening and zeroed in on Carter’s lenient drug policies, saying, “I’m trying to alarm the policymakers. I’m saying that business as usual won’t work.”

 

+ Biden to Black Entertainment Television (BET): “When I originally ran…I said I was gonna be a transitional candidate, and I thought that I’d be able to move from this just pass it on to someone else. But I didn’t anticipate things getting so, so, so divided. And quite frankly, I think the only thing age brings a little bit of wisdom. And I think I’ve demonstrated that I know how to get things done for the country, in spite of the fact that we couldn’t get it done. But there’s more to do, and I’m reluctant to walk away from that.”…

 

+ “In spite of the fact that we couldn’t get it done.” [...]

Percent satisfied with their Party’s presidential nominee:

R’s (Trump): 71%
D’s (Biden): 33%
D’s in 2016 (Clinton): 54%...

 

Politics on the Verge of Nervous Breakdown - CounterPunch.org