Relatable Terrorism

 

Saw a Bluesky post yesterday morning alleging that the "exchange of fire" at the Washington Hilton Saturday night between the Secret Service and Metro Police and whoever and the Californian wouldbe assassin was all from one side, with the one Secret Service officer saved from serious injury by his bullet-proof vest having been hit by friendly fire when another of the cops was pulling his gun from its holster and it misfired.

Can't find the post any more, and it may have been deleted, possibly with good reason, because that bit about the misfiring doesn't sound right at all—but it's remarkably difficult to find reporting that contradicts the basic outline, that there was no actual exchange, in spite of most of the newspapers using the word, the gunman (Cole Allen, 31, of Torrance) never having gotten a shot off or even tried, as he was too busy running, presumably to get into the ballroom, but maybe at this point wanting to escape, so that the friendly fire story is mostly true; and a couple of the sources basically say so, delicately: Reuters

Closed-circuit TV footage released by Trump on Truth Social showed the suspect running rapidly through a security checkpoint, momentarily catching security personnel off-guard before they drew their weapons.

No shots were fired at the gunman who got through two checkpoints before being brought down.

"You know, he charged from 50 yards away, so he was very far away from the room. He was ​moving. He was really moving," Trump said after the gala ​dinner was canceled.

And VINNews ("VIN" short for "Vos Iz Neias" or "What's New" in Yiddish)

A volunteer at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner said a gunman appeared to prepare a weapon in a service area before gunfire broke out near the ballroom entrance, according to media reports.

The witness described the suspect moving from a little-monitored area toward the event space moments before shots were fired, triggering panic as guests and staff fled. The witness said numerous shots rang out, though that account has not been independently verified.

So he readied his shotgun in the service area and then tried to run right though the checkpoint and magnetometers, with no time to shoot, which makes some sense; the security forces shot (ineffectively, wounding one of their own but not badly), then caught up with him, tackled him, apparently stripping off his shirt (I suppose looking for additional weapons) and tying his hands behind his back, and left him on his belly while they moved on to emptying the ballroom of the dignitaries and other partygoers.

He is Rizz

Seeing a lot of headshaking over the President's Easter message,  which gives up the traditional "Happy Easter, even to the haters and lunatics" in favor of what I suppose he considers the true Churchillian leader-at-war tone and doesn't mention the holiest day of the Christian year at all:

It does look like decompensation in the personality disorder, like a complete loss of self-control, or at least an acceleration. I don't think he's introduced "fuck" into his written public communications before (though he's certainly been uttering it in rallies as far back as 2022, not to mention performing a mime blow job at a rally days before the 2024 election, which did not wreck his chances of winning), and Laura Loomer is going to wonder what he means by offering praise to Allah, and the 25th Amendment talk is certainly getting louder out here where you and I hang out, but I'd note that Vice President Vance and Speaker Johnson, the central figures in an invocation of the 25th, aren't listening to us, or as far as I can tell to Trump either (you can be sure if Johnson is asked what he thinks of this particular Truth, he'll say he hasn't had time to look at it, presumably because he's so busy preventing government from functioning).

But there are a couple of signs that the performance is more calculated than crazy.

One is the TACO maneuver hidden inside it: that 48-hour deadline is a 24-hour step back from the 48-hour deadline he issued on Saturday, if I'm reading that Truth right

“Remember when I gave Iran ten days to MAKE A DEAL or OPEN UP THE HORMUZ STRAIT. Time is running out - 48 hours before all Hell will reign down on them. Glory be to GOD!,” he wrote on his Truth Social platform. (Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty)

(And Hell shall reign forever and ever! Hallelujah! How Eastery was that?!) 

Though it's impossible to figure where exactly that 10 days would have started, and the tell-tale "two to three weeks" surely meant, as usual, that he had no idea himself:

Trump on March 21 originally gave Tehran a 48-hour deadline, but then extended it, saying he wanted to give talks a chance to succeed.

Iran has rejected a 15-point US plan presented to it through Pakistani mediators but on April 4 left open the possibility of further negotiations.

In an April 1 televised address, Trump also suggested peace talks -- either directly or indirectly -- were still possible, but he also threatened to bomb Iran "back to the stone ages" and "hit them extremely hard over the next two to three weeks."

Then, though he certainly sounds a bit linguistically wilder than yesterday, with the Hormuz Strait becoming the "Fuckin' Strait" and the crusader's Glory to GOD turning into I don't know whose praise to Allah (our own M. de Norpois, NYT's David Sanger, says the language is "unusually vivid"), he may be using a technique he's used since Roy Cohn days, reacting to a public setback by not retreating but doubling down; here, I think, confronting the anger his war has caused among the Known Nothing Buchananites of his base, like Marjorie Taylor Greene with an appeal to the more important part, the nihilist bros who love him because he's a comedian, the podcast audience, the Beavises and Butt-Heads who really pulled him across the finish line in the battleground states in 2016 and 2024, though not in the plague year 2020. Those dudes are going to love "Fuckin' Strait".

I don't know that it will make the difference, though—I kind of think it won't, all things considered, between the gas prices and the advent of what looks like a real war, on its way to becoming either a quagmire or an ignominious US defeat as the Fuckin' Strait remains closed or a toll road where everybody ponies up the toll, from Japan to the Gulf states (whose natural gas US needs right now desperately for fertilizing the spring planting, though our own natural gas is sufficient most of the year), plus the stink of corruption everyone is starting to become aware with associated with the abusive management in DHS and DOJ. Trump can fire all the clowns in the cabinet from Pete Hegseth and Tulsi Gabbard to Kash Patel, but he can't stop the rot until he fires himself and the multibillion-dollar presidenting business in which his major clients, Saudi Arabia and UAE, call the shots alongside Putin and Netanyahu. We'll see what happens, as the man says, in two or three weeks, but I think he's lost the chance, as he did in 2020, to win his base back with rhetoric alone..