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Notes -
Trump just tweeted "He who saves his Country does not violate any Law."
I know that Belisarius thinks I'm a far-leftist (lol), but I think that a fair reading my post history will show that I am what I present myself as, more or less a classical liberal who hates both the left and the right.
I've spent a lot of time and energy both online and offline defending Trump and Trumpism from the often hysterically-phrased accusation that it is fascist, a huge threat, etc. I feel a bit like an idiot now, to be frank. I still hate the woke and am somewhat glad that Trumpism rose up to halt the woke's authoritarian tendencies... but lord, more and more I wish that it had been almost anything other than Trumpism doing it. The argument that Trumpism is fundamentally a classical liberal force is becoming more and more absurd almost by the hour, in my opinion.
Accelerationists (the three or four actual ones for whom it's not just a funny pretense) must be rubbing their hands raw with glee right now. Things are moving very fast.
As much as I appreciate some of what Trumpism is doing to upend stale norms and wokism, at this point I, and probably many other centrists are starting to think "shit, maybe the hysterical libs had a point about these people". And if politics is making me start to side even slightly with literal Redditors, you know that things are bad and crazy.
My biggest mistake, I think, was to extremely overestimate libs and the left. I really thought they would manage to blunt Trumpism's worst impulses and there would be a sort of stalemate like there was during Trump's first term. But libs and the left seem to be missing. Turns out that there is no deep state waiting with sharp fangs and CIA assassins to stop the orange man as soon as he tries to actually do anything that hurts the Blob. Instead, there are only old tired bureaucrats and the occasional protester wearing a pussy hat.
Whoops. Well, so much for that. I was wrong. And this shit is starting to be a bit genuinely alarming. I think I am, actually, getting tired of "winning". I wanted the woke to be defeated by classical liberals, not by a rage-filled vengeful gaggle of right-wing revolutionaries.
Jesus Christ. So unless the spooks succeed they don't exist, even if the last year has just been incident after incident proving they exist. Even if we now have plenty of evidence of the deep state and espionage shenanigans, the media said this is different so let's get scared for America again! Progressive politics just let a large swathe of California burn to the ground and the media told us blaming politicians was the height of rudeness, but Trump said something typically hyperbolic, that is both appealing to red tribe sensibilities and and agitating to blue tribe sensibilities so let's all lose our minds like msnbc suggests! Bel is right, you can call yourself a centrist, but the only answer you will accept is the progressive status quo.
Edit: fixed a link
I just assume that if the deep state actually set up a shooting to assassinate Trump, they would probably succeed at killing him. It's hard for me to believe that they would manage to get a shooter within fairly easy range of him, yet the shooter would miss. The lone wolf theory seems way more plausible to me. In any case, if the deep state has had 10 years in which to kill Trump and they haven't done it, then they are fairly irrelevant as a political force, which is part of my original point.
As for the progressive status quo, I don't know where you are getting that from. I disagree with progressives on a range of issues, including HBD, policing, and the economic consequences of socialism. The average progressive would certainly not classify me as a fellow progressive if exposed to my unfiltered political ideas.
We live in one of two worlds:
The Secret Service was genuinely trying to protect Trump and were so clownishly incompetent that people in the crowd were warning them about a guy with a gun going up onto the roof but still let him take his shots. Men With Guns are supposed to be their forte, this is the one thing they're not supposed to let happen. Why wasn't there a drone or something providing overwatch? How hard can it be?
The Secret Service/Deep State was trying to kill Trump and chose some MKUltra victim who wasn't a good shot, as opposed to something like a drone or a precision mortar strike which would at least be reasonable for them to heroically fail to intercept. Intercepting drones is hard.
Either way they don't come off as very capable.
The way I look at it, Trump is:
The Secret Service might be good, but they are not perfect. It's not surprising if they just genuinely slipped up after almost 10 years of protecting Trump.
I don’t see incompetence when the crowd is literally walking up to the SS and telling them they see a guy with a gun on a roof and they don’t do anything. It’s just not possible that a group of people trying to protect someone have multiple people report a man on a roof with a gun and just don’t do anything.
If you've ever tried to manage people in a large and complicated setting like a concert, a mass causality event and so on you know it's extremely hard to triage these sorts of things and get them to the right people. Even something as self-contained as running a single patient trauma or a two pilot aircraft can result in poor communication and distribution of information.
Consider how easy it would be to mentally write this off as "oh yeah that's one of the police sniper teams."
Now if you have one organization that should have a plan for how to handle "tips" like this and not fuck up like this it should be the secret service - but that's incompetence not malice.
The standard way to launder malice is by appointing incompetent underlings for the task.
Are doctors appointed to patients randomly?
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