Disingenuous Democrats

At least the cretins publicly wishing the would-be assassin had better aim have the virtue of being honest, which is more than can be said for Biden

President Biden explaining the existential threat to the nation that he now is relieved to find out is still with us.

I suppose it was inevitable.

In a Facebook comment following the attempted assassination of Donald Trump, a now-former staffer for Congressman Bennie Thompson named Jaqueline Marsaw wrote “I don’t condone violence but please get you some shooting lessons so you don’t miss next time oops that wasn’t me talking”. As indicated by the “former”, Thompson fired her when the post became public.

During a concert in Australia earlier this week, Kyle Gass, the less renowned half of the comedy/music duo Tenacious D was asked on stage by his partner Jack Black to “make a wish” for his 64th birthday. Gass joked “Don’t miss Trump next time.” Two days later Black cancelled the rest of their tour saying he was “blindsided” by the comment and that he “would never condone hate speech or encourage political violence.”

Within an hour of the shooting, a Canadian professor named Dr. Karen Pinder tweeted out “What a glorious day this could have been!” and “Damn, so close.” She’s now under investigation by her employer, the University of British Columbia.

Cassandra Olson, a “behavior facilitator” in a South Dakota middle school, posted on Facebook “Shoot, if only he would’ve had his scope sighted correctly.” Olson is no longer employed by the school.

The list of expressions of sadness at the missed opportunity to finally put an end to the supposed Trump threat goes unsurprisingly on and on. There are always people willing to say provocative and outrageous things in the wake of tragic, unfortunate and serious events. Some people even make a living doing it. But frankly, apart from the abject stupidity of these people for making these feelings known publicly, I actually have more respect for their honesty than I have for all the disingenuous politicians condemning the very violence that, if their pre-shooting rhetoric was to be believed, they must surely have actually welcomed.

Congressman Bennie Thompson himself is a particularly egregious example. Just a few short months ago, to great fanfare, he was the primary sponsor of a bill the sole purpose of which was to remove Secret Service protection from Trump. What exactly did he expect such a removal to do, make an attack on Trump less likely? Now he sacks an employee for hoping for the exact outcome that Thompson himself was trying to facilitate, all while issuing statements of faux-concern saying “I am glad the former president is safe”. Give me a break.

The fact is that the reaction of Democratic leaders to the shooting reveals most of them to be, one way or another, utterly disingenuous and discredited. Are we really expected to take their pearl clutching seriously in light of all of the rhetoric that preceded the shooting? The entire Biden campaign strategy, and indeed Democratic rhetoric aimed at Trump going back years, was to convince voters not just that Donald Trump is a bad candidate from a bad party with bad policies, but rather that he and his supporters represent a unique and existential threat to the nation itself.

Biden set the tone of his 2024 campaign in his infamous Philadelphia speech on September 1, 2022, the entire theme of which was the dire threat that Donald Trump and the “extremist MAGA Republicans” posed for the nation. It is worth remembering this speech in light of Saturday’s attempt on Trump’s life, and the wounding/killing of three of his “extremist MAGA” supporters.

Claiming that he had a “duty” to tell the nation the “hard” truth, “no matter how difficult, no matter how painful”, Biden said that these were not “normal” times and that “Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our Republic.”

He claimed that “there’s no question that the Republican Party today is dominated, driven and intimidated by Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans”, and that this reality “is a threat to this country.”

He charged that “MAGA forces…promote authoritarian leaders, and they fanned the flames of political violence that are a threat to our personal rights, to the pursuit of justice, to the rule of law, to the very soul of this country.”

He called the J6 riot at the Capitol a “MAGA failure” of “insurrectionists who placed a dagger at the throat of our democracy” and said it was “preparation for the 2022 and 2024 elections”.

He approvingly cited the assertion that Trump and “the extreme MAGA Republicans” are a “clear and present danger” to our democracy, and, warning that American democracy is not guaranteed, he said that all citizens are “called by duty and conscience” to “confront” these extremists.

Just think about what he is saying. Confront how, exactly? What kinds of action can we expect or allow a person to take in the face of such a “clear and present danger”? How exactly are “insurrectionists” - who are violent by definition - to be “confronted” unless through a violent response? Isn’t shooting the person who is holding “a dagger at the throat” of a loved one a normal, even a heroic, response to such a situation?

And this was not just a one-off, hyperbolic speech. Characterizing Trump and his supporters as literal - not just figurative, but literal - enemies to the nation has been the entire tenor of the Democratic approach to Trump since his election in 2016. The thinly veiled subtext of the whole Russia Collusion hoax, hatched by Hillary Clinton’s campaign and kept alive for three years by congressional Democrats, their loyalists in the intelligence community, and their mouthpieces in the media, was that Donald Trump was literally an asset of Vladimir Putin. And people believed it. Some are still do.

The unstated but unavoidable implication of the casual claim that Trump is an “insurrectionist” is that he is a literal enemy of the nation. Nancy Pelosi has been calling Trump a “clear and present danger” to the nation since 2021. After laying down the gauntlet back in Philly 2 years ago, Biden’s speeches have routinely been littered with the suggestion that Trump and his supporters are a “threat to the brick and mortar of our democratic institutions”. And for those of you who might be tempted to dismiss this all as par-for-the-course political exaggeration, Biden himself keeps telling us, with that irritating tic of his, “That’s not hyperbole, man”.

So we are supposed to believe all that, and we are supposed to be horrified by the shooting, and glad Trump is still alive and well? Talk about cognitive dissonance. It’s worse than when James Comey calmly explained how Hillary Clinton had broken the law, and then expected people to believe that “no reasonable prosecutor would bring charges”. Huh? No one in their right mind could believe all the things the Democrats have said about Trump and then also believe that Trump escaping the assassins bullet was something about which to be thankful. (OK, OK…Biden isn’t in his right mind, so there is that.)

Even the New York Times seems to recognize the problem. In an article headlined For Biden, How to Cool the Temperature without Freezing His Campaign, it notes that:

For months, the message from the White House and Wilmington was as stark as it was simple: This year’s election amounts to an existential choice between a defender of democracy and a destroyer of democracy. Nothing less than the future of America is at stake.

…and then wonders how Biden can continue this message in light of his call to “lower the temperature” on the rhetoric. Of course, the NYT being the NYT, it has to get its digs in on Trump, and never quite articulates the full contradiction, but the implication is there. Biden’s reaction to the shooting simply isn’t reconcilable with his campaign rhetoric.

To be very clear, my point here is not that the rhetoric of the Democrats is to blame for the attempted assassination of Trump. I have no idea what the shooter’s motivations were, and regardless of what they were, blame rests entirely with the shooter himself. Even if he was unhinged enough to actually believe all of the nonsense the Dems have been spewing about Trump, and to have acted on that belief, that is on him and him alone.

My point is simply that, if one is to take their pre-shooting rhetoric seriously, then their post-shooting condemnations cannot be taken seriously. Any America-loving person who actually believed that Trump was the enemy of the nation, the “existential threat”, that the left has been making him out to be for the last 8 years, would at the very least be indifferent to, and more likely would welcome, someone trying to take him out and put an end to this dire threat. On the other hand anyone who actually believes that Democrats are genuinely horrified by the attempt on Trump’s life and are glad for his safety, as most of them claim to be, must conclude that the Dems have been lying about their sense of Trump as an enemy of the nation for the last 8 years. Take your pick.

I hope, and strongly suspect, it is the latter that is the case. But one way or another, Biden and his fellow Democratic leaders can’t avoid the conclusion that they are disingenuous hypocrites, and they should be dismissed as exactly that.