“[T]he Trump campaign seriously expects people to believe that Democrats are the “party of violence,” which is among the most ridiculous claims Team Trump has ever made.”
—-MSNBC columnist and producer/constributor to “The Rachel Maddow Show,” Steve Brenen.
I’m not going to dignify that “It isn’t what it is” piece of flagrant hyper- partisan gaslighting with a rebuttal or a debunking. If it isn’t obvious why that statement is deranged, there’s not much an ethics blog can do for you. (You might need a brain transplant.)
The statement, which just came to my attention, knocked a related post out of line by its sheer defiance of reality and the writer’s evident confidence that his addled readers would accept it. Wow. I would hope that you could count on the fingers of one hand the number of people who could both read and would be that incapable of critical thought. The real number is in the millions.
I was going to write about bitter, old, foiled but still raging ethics villain Hillary Clinton, who told fellow ethics villain Maddow yesterday that Donald Trump was a “danger to our country and the world” less than 24 hours after the second attempt on Trump’s life this year. Heck, it’s just self-defense to try to kill someone or something —you know, like Godzilla—that’s a danger to the country and the world. Everybody knows that!
“Americans need to understand that they have to take Trump both seriously and literally,” she told the ever-smirking Maddow. “He has said what he wants to do. He and his allies with Project 2025, his desire to be a dictator, at least on day one, all of that is in the public record. And I believe that more Americans have to be, you know, willing to endure what frankly is discomforting and to some extent kind of painful, to take him at his word and to be outraged by what he represents. We can’t go back and give this very dangerous man another chance to do harm to our country and the world,” she added.
I have considerable sympathy for Hillary, as I’ve written here before. I can’t imagine what it must be like to lose the Presidency after winning the popular vote, and to become a historical footnote like Samual Tilden because of one’s own stupid choices (like her super-secret server and the decision to stonewall about it rather than just to say, “Yeah, that was wrong. Sorry.”) It would have been nice if she had the character to take those metaphorical lemons and make yummy lemonade, but she has chosen to use them to make acid bombs (and book deals) instead. Too bad.
It also is too bad Hillary can’t elevate her conduct above even lower forms of Democrat Party life like Biden and Kamala by avoiding outright anti-Trump Big Lies, but she’s not up to that either. She actually resorted to that hoary claim that Trump promised to be a dictator because he told Sean Hannity that he would “only be a dictator on Day One”, when he would “dictate” that we close the border and “drill, drill, drill.” That one’s right there next to the “fine people” lie and the others.
I expect better lies from Hillary. Bill needs to coach her.
Other thoughts…
1. Imagine: a major party Presidential candidate is the target of a second assassination attempt in less than six months, and the news media and the opposition party immediately blame him for it. These are angry, vicious, ugly people who have lost all sense of right, wrong, decency and proportion. I can’t imagine anyone wanting to be identified with sickies like this, much less vote with them. Of course, many of these same people turned themselves into human pretzels trying to explain the “root causes” that led to the destruction of the Twin Towers, as well as excusing, indeed endorsing, violent demonstrations after an over-dosing lifetime thug died while resisting arrest under the unforgiving knee of a bad cop in Minnesota.
2. What kind of person watches MSNBC? How did they get that way? Can they be helped? Do you know many people like that” What do you say to them?
3. Democrats really will say anything and do anything to keep the democratic process from electing Trump President. Anything. I have to conclude that majority of progressives really want him dead.
4. That fact alone is a good enough reason to vote for Trump, as bad as he is.
5. I predicted that this would be the end result of a Democratic Party strategy that stooped to…
…and I thought it was obvious at the time. And intentional. That was the moment I realized that one of our major parties had tipped to aspiring totalitarianism.
6. If this strategy works, I really don’t know what can be done about it.
Ethics Alarms 
“Bill needs to coach her.”
When the Clintons got elected (Remember? Two presidents for the price of one?), I remember thinking it was kind of cool people of my Baby Boom generation were going to be in the White House. Boy, was I ever a dope. Honestly, I think the current state of affairs can be attributed to the Baby Boom generation taking over politics and the American academy. What a tragedy. We appear to have wrecked the country in about fifty years. Way to go, gang.
And by the way, I was thinking the Harris campaign might as well be running on this being the dawning of the age of Aquarius. Everything that comes out of her mouth might as well be another verse of “Imagine.” A pathetic echo from a horrid past that’s ruined the present.
Baby Boomers got the idea somehow that what they thought was right and what everyone else thought was wrong was wrong. It’s polluted everything since.
Of course the Democrats are the Party of Violence. The riots of 2020 were only 4 years ago. The Congressional baseball game shooter was only 3 years before that. Attacks against Jews by leftist allies are ongoing. Left-wing activists openly train “protesters” in tactics of violence.
Maxine Waters openly encourages her supporters to harass Republicans in the streets. Democratic pundits openly exhort others to “punch a Nazi”, where “Nazi” means anybody who disagrees with them. Leftist academics describe right-wing speech as violence, even “silence is violence” – which of course justifies actual violence in “self-defense”.
Police know this. Despite the Talking Class deploying the language of violence any time three or more conservatives gather in one place, police expect right-wing protesters to be peaceful. That’s why there were so few police guarding the Capitol on Jan 6, 2021. Nothing happened that day that wouldn’t have happened at any given Left Wing protest had the police presence been so anemic. It never is, of course, because the police know that when the Talking Classes start spouting off about “peaceful protest” for Left-Wing causes, it’s time to go to Battle Stations.
Nice compendium, DL. Thanks.
And of course, there’s Hillary Clinton doing her undergrad senior thesis on Saul Alinsky.
Jack: “Imagine: a major party Presidential candidate is the target of a second assassination attempt in less than six months, and the news media and the opposition party immediately blame him for it.”
that’s cuz it’s unprecedented. They didn’t even try a second attempt on Bobby Kennedy, JFK, or Teddy (he would have beat them senseless).
Seriously, how often do you get 2 assassination attempts in one guy, much less within a 6-month period?
almost never
-Jit
The last Democratic President or Presidential candidate to have a gun fired at him was RFK, over 50 years ago. Since then there have been shots taken at three Republican POTUSes: Ford (twice), Reagan and Trump (twice).
And that was a Palestinian Anti-Zionist, now considered members in good standing of the Leftist coalition.
As far as I know, only once before. Gerald Ford had two assassination attempts against him within three weeks of each other, both in California. Can we say it was divine providence that he wasn’t shot?
I don’t know about Lincoln. It is not hard to believe there were multiple plots to assassinate him, starting in February/March, 1861. Really, if one was willing to sacrifice oneself it probably wouldn’t have been too hard any time during our first century.
Even today, if a would be assassin was willing to give his or her life, my guess would be that a clever person would have a decent chance of success.
But judging from Trump’s escape in July, Bismarck’s observation still holds.
Here is one thing that puzzles me. What if they succeed? It isn’t like the Republicans would just give up and cede the election. Depending on when it happened, either someone else would be nominated or Vance would be the candidate. Don’t you think that the Republican would have an excellent chance at beating Harris at that point?
Do they want J.D. Vance as president over Trump?
The democrats desperate attempts to murder Trump makes me wonder about those polls claiming Trump and Harris are running mostly even or with Harris in a slight lead. Perhaps those polls are phony and they know the only way to keep from losing is to eliminate Trump. Who would have thought murdering your political opponent could ever happen in this country?
Besides the commonly known examples of democrat violence noted by DaveL, above, it’s statistically demonstrable that democrats commit the majority of murders in the US. You’ll be called a racist if you notice that or lay out the numbers, though.
The fact is that the Democratic establishment and it’s brainless followers have convinced themselves that Trump is the biggest danger to this country. The biggest danger to this country isn’t that Russia, china, and Iran are getting ready to make even more aggressive moves against our allies and against us. The biggest danger to this country isn’t that our military has become dangerously weak. The biggest danger to this country isn’t that our cities are becoming ungovernable. The biggest danger isn’t that our economy is tanking and will continue to tank as long as the price of fuel remains high. As far as they are concerned the biggest danger to democracy here is this one man, with racism a close second, racism meaning anyone who dares to disagree with them.
they’ve tried multiple times to put him in jail, but so far they have not succeeded. They’ve tried to bankrupt him, but so far they have not completely succeeded. Now there have been two attempts on his life within 3 months. Of course they won’t own up to being involved if they were and these weren’t just wackos acting alone, but their responses that someone like Trump brings this on himself, the same is back in school if the other students bullied you, you got blamed for being a magnet for bullying and told you must have done something to piss them off.
I will tell you right now, where I work, almost everyone else is a Harris voter through and through. Most of them would vote for a ham sandwich if it had a D next to it. During the Trump administration, if you simply said good morning, some of them would say things like “it’s not going to be a good morning until we get rid of Trump.” A lot of them have said that he needs to be in jail, but if that can’t happen, then he’s got to go some other way. Others have said that Crooks would have deserved a medal of honor if he had been successful.
This is some 19th century stuff or pre-World War I stuff. That’s when Uruguayan president Venancio Flores could be dragged from his carriage and stabbed to death. That’s when the king of Portugal could be gunned down just going from the train to the Palace. That’s when Michael Collins and his gang of proto-terrorists were killing detectives and intelligence officers because a traitor passed them information. All of this was done to effect political change that someone or several someones thought wasn’t coming fast enough or wasn’t coming through the regular channels. Those who want to effect change quickly can always find excuses for using extralegal means.
As yet, the other side has not struck back using the same methods. However, I’m beginning to think that day is coming. Actually, I think that day is overdue. It should have come in 2020, but the pandemic blunted it. It should have come in 2022 when it looked like a pro- abortion Kristallnacht was on the horizon, but it didn’t come when that fizzled. I think this time out may be it. If Harris wins in an obvious cheat, I think the right’s cup will at least be full, and we’ll be headed for civil war 2.0. if Trump wins and the left responds with violence, and you know they will, then it’s time to crush them. Enough is enough, and this is too much.
P. S. I remember the shooting up of the Congressional baseball practice. As I recall, only one person got caught justifying that act of political violence, at least that hit the news. How many more were smart enough not to express that thought but still today think that it would have been great if that had become a bloodbath for the Republican party and eliminated, among others, then congressman Ron DeSantis?
Hillary’s server wasn’t an “oops, sorry” offense. She set up an unencrypted e-mail server and she ran the State Department through it. Not only that, she had her staff cut the classified markings off documents and e-mail them through the server. She had people e-mailing her current NSA briefings through that server. Foreign intelligence agents were killed after they were exposed on that server. Clinton accessed the server while in Russian government buildings, giving the Russians the username and password to the server, which was never changed. Every intelligence service in the world was able to read every e-mail going through the state department because if they didn’t hack the server, their hacked routers would just copy and forward all the e-mail traffic to and from the server as it moved through the internet because it was all unencrypted. The only people who didn’t know what was going on in Clinton’s State Department were the American people and Congress.
This was worse than dating a Chinese spy while a member of an intelligence committee in Congress. It is worse than hiring spies to work as IT staff for Congress. It is worse than a Governor having a Chinese spy on their staff.
The point is that “Oops, sorry” would have worked. “Server? What server?” was stupid, but typical Clinton “deny, deny,deny” strategy.
Also remember that Trump was being charged with mishandling classified documents even though they were still sealed in boxes after being cleared by the Archives but this was OK because you couldn’t prove it was intentional.
Not to take anything away from MR’s damning synopsis, but I wish I’d archived a lengthy EA post (~seven or eight years ago) by an obviously tech-savvy commenter who positively eviscerated, in meticulous detail, the myriad unethical/illegal efforts HRC went to in order to skirt protocol.
PWS
Additionally, I remember reading somewhere at the time that the password on her server was “password”.
Well, it looks like we may need to make that 3 attempts.