THE UNWASHED MIDWESTERN UNITED STATES, January 14 2024 (IntellectualDandruff.com)-

The barbarians are at the gates! Crisis ensues. Shots ring out, and a nation is in turmoil. We here at Intellectual Dandruff, I your Intrepid Reporter, did not expect our first post to be about the assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump at a campaign stop in Pennsylvania yesterday, but here we are. One dead, two injured which is the real tragedy.

The Right rocked to their very cores. All our fears realized? Are we under attack? Or is this the work of a madman? Implausibility reigns. Or at least enough bepuzzlement to make us feel almost as confused, shocked, and disappointed as the English feel tonight after watching their boys lose to the Spaniards in the Euro 2024 final. The English invented Football. Americans did not invent political assassination. The Egyptian pharaoh Teti is thought to have been the first political assassination, 2300 years or so before Jesus came around. Both American politics and English football teams delight in disappointing, however. It’s what each is truly good at.

This is not meant to make light of the situation. We’re not Trump supporters here at ID. We have a prefrontal cortex after all. Like you we too lived through the disastrous four years of DJT’s administration. He drained the swamp and replaced it with leeches of the highest order. Men and women for whom morality and ethics are as distant as that championship trophy is to the Three Lions this evening. While many in the camp of the Progressive wish Former POTUS- FPOTUS? Future POTUS? – DJT would gracefully go away and take Jared with him, his strain of virulent Populism exists because it speaks to people. It’s got a rhythm and too many Americans can dance to it. He’s not going anywhere. And you would not want him erased by way of the bullet. The political lack of expediency in assassinations cannot be underscored enough. Did the civil rights movement die out in Memphis on April 4, 1968? Did any of the politics of the Democratic party die out in Dallas in ’63? Ideas cannot be killed, and we’ve already seen that there’s more where DJT came from. Lesser copies to be sure, imitators at best. Mere approximations and estimations, faint mimeographs of the man, but there are many who wish to be anointed the putative sovereign, and flattery will get you everywhere with Trump.

It should be remembered that what comes around goes around, especially in the snake pit that is the District of Crime. DJT being felled by an assassin’s bullet now puts house money on the odds that other politicians will suffer a similar fate.

The calls for peace and rationality have been coming across all sorts of media since Saturday night. The nation will survive. The rhetoric and venom of the pundits and commentors will multiply, aiming at anyone, thing, or place they can, regardless of the logic it does or does not make in doing so. That’s their jobs and they were going to do it anyway. They need little ammo for the discharge of their duties. Our country has seen bleaker times and will see darker futures. It’s good the assassin missed, but not because of any sanctity of life or because of any belief that no man or woman should die for their political ambitions (no matter how offensive). That’s what the ballot box is supposedly for. It’s good because someday, I don’t want to read about a good man, a great woman gunned down because of their policies.

I am an optimist, I guess.

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