Shots fired

I wasn't aware of the hubbub at the White House Correspondents' Dinner in real time, but I saw a couple of headlines soon afterward. Like a lot of other people, I immediately thought there was something fishy going on. After all, nothing from this POTUS, this White House press room, or even the current crop of reporters assigned to that press room can be taken at face value, if trusted at all.

Once I got some more detail on what happened, though, it became clear to me that this was not a staged event. I mean, Felon47 and his coterie of criminals are sure behaving like it was—turning immediately to use it as justification for stupid shit they want to do and as a vehicle to demonize people they don't like—but if they were going to stage an(other?) assassination attempt, it would be for the cameras. The would-be gunman here didn't even get to the proper floor of the hotel, let alone the room his would-be target was in, before he was apprehended.

No, the one thing this regime understands is conning people. I have no trouble believing that they might try to stage something like this—they absolutely would do that, but the whole point would be to get it on video. Even still photos might do; they turned the shrapnel graze from Butler, PA, into a viral internet meme and capitalized on that to great success, sadly. So if they'd staged this, the would-be shooter would have been taken down in the ballroom of the Hilton, on television, maybe even after firing off a shot (or a blank) into the ceiling. And the alleged perp's manifesto would not say what this guy's statement actually said.

The guy's statement read, "I'm no longer willing to permit a pedophile, rapist, and traitor to coat my hands with his crimes." Even if the regime was creating a strawman assassin figure they would not refer to Felon47 or his minions as any of those things, because they're true.

The best thing to come out of the whole affair was this clip from 60 Minutes, wherein Nora O'Donnell reads that to Felon47 directly and he responds with so many tells. It's a clip destined to go down in history right alongside Nixon's "I am not a crook."

First, he calls O'Donnell (and by extension the staff of 60 Minutes) "horrible people," then he denies being a rapist (he is, a judge said so), and then—this is great—O'Donnell says, "oh, you think he was talking about YOU?" and he won't even let her say that, he interrupts her to keep denying he's a rapist and pedophile, in the exact manner and tone we've heard many times before that suggests, yeah, he is those things, this is a favored way of lying on camera. Then, unbidden, he brings up Epstein and says he was "totally exonerated" of wrongdoing which is blatantly untrue! Whether he's guilty of crimes with Epstein or not, no court anywhere has exonerated him of anything, but he just keeps saying it because of the Hitlerian/Roy Cohnian strategy of repeating the lie so often that people start to think it's true, and every time he says that it's a tell.

Then there's that weird reference to O'Donnell and her "friends on the other side of the plate." I don't know what kind of insult he meant to hurl there; other side of the aisle, maybe, implying that it's a partisan thing? But the accusation of "you and your friends" being "the ones involved with, let's say Epstein" before trialing off is another classic move from him: Accuse your opposition of your own malfeasance. It's a tell. Then capping it off with "you should be ashamed of yourself, reading that," interrupting O'Donnell clarifying that those were the would-be gunman's words, not hers, so he could call her a "disgrace" and "disgraceful."

All of it screams, "YES, I AM EXACTLY WHAT THE GUY IMPLIED I WAS, AND BY BEING HOSTILE AND DEFENSIVE AND PERFORMATIVELY OFFENDED BY A WOMAN REPORTER BRINGING IT UP I AM REVEALING DEEP INSECURITY AND FEAR THAT THE RUBES I RELY ON TO STAY IN POWER WILL FIGURE IT OUT. ALSO THAT I AM DEEPLY MISOGYNISTINC."

Also, I did note that though he objected to the reference to a "pedophile" and "rapist," he did not object to being called a traitor. Obviously, he has a lot more experience being called the other things, he's been those things for many many years, and he's only been a traitor for a relatively short time. He's not used to disputing that one. Yet.

We need Congress to step up. Since the Republicans refuse to, they need to get out of the way or get voted out so others can. Impeach, remove, and prosecute, as soon as possible.