Month: July 2024

At a campaign rally this past Saturday, as you may have heard, former President Trump was fired upon by a sniper. Two bystanders were wounded and a third, Corey Comperatore, died.

Sometimes bad things happen and there’s no one to blame. “Hey, we did our best, but the attacker managed to get a few shots off before we could stop him. These things happen, y’know.”

Such is not the case this time. They did not do their best. If they had, the director, Kim Cheatle, would not be lying.

In an interview with ABC News, she said that the roof used by the sniper was left unsecured because “That particular building has a sloped roof at its highest point” and, therefore, there would be a safety issue. She’s lying.

Dear reader, I am ignorant of nearly everything, but one thing I know intimately is the slope of a roof. Before my retirement, it is safe to say that I climbed up onto people’s roofs nearly every working day for thirty three years. Usually I took a heavy drain machine up with me. Some were so steep, I had to throw a rope over the house and tie it to a truck bumper so that I could hold onto it in order to keep myself from falling off as I worked. (You gotta be tough to be a sewer man.)

We’ve all seen the pictures of the roof the killer used. Yes, it is sloped “at its highest point.” It is sloped at its lowest point, too. It is sloped as gently as any roof I’ve ever gotten onto. It presents no safety concern whatsoever. Every sewer man knows this with certainty.

Do you want proof? Just look at the counter-snipers whose photos appear in just about every video about this attack. You see two officers on a roof with their rifles in tripods. The roof is sloped at its highest point. (Okay, I’m mocking her. All sloped roofs are sloped at their highest point; if it wasn’t the highest point, it wouldn’t be a sloped roof.) Those counter snipers are Secret Service agents. They work for Kim Cheatle. Did the Secret Service have a safety concern with that sloped roof? Of course not. And they had no such concern with the roof used by the killer. Cheatle is lying.

Many retired Secret Service agents have been located by local news teams and interviewed on camera in the last few days. The public wants to know how this happened. The answer isn’t clear yet (Thursday night). But the agents all speak the same language and aver that, when they secure a site properly, nobody is going to get on a roof 130 yards away and shoot the President.

This failure is comparable to a good ol’ boy driving a pickem-up truck to Fort Knox, loading it up with 300lbs of gold (roughly $11 million) and driving off before anybody could notice and stop him. You must admit, that would be some record-level incompetence there at Ft. Knox.

The Scopes trial ran from July 10th to the 21st, 1925.

For a long time I’ve enjoyed studying the Scopes trial, an event that saw a convergence of legal theory and practice, Southern culture, libertarianism, the history of the Fundamentalist movement, and scientism.  The preeminent attorney for the defense, Clarence Darrow, cared little for free speech and nothing for the defendant, John Scopes; his goal in taking the case for no fee was atheism.  The ACLU, bankrollers of the show trial, were founded by Roger Baldwin, whose most famous quotation is “Communism is the goal.”  The handful of civic leaders in Dayton, Tennessee who volunteered to host the show trial cared nothing for the Bible, science, Communism, or atheism; they just wanted “to put Dayton on the map.”  In that, they succeeded like pepperoni pizza.  I think that it took O. J. Simpson to knock the Scopes trial out of first place.

John Scopes never even taught evolution; he just agreed to lie and say he did so that a trial could occur.  He didn’t participate in the trial.  He later said that his contribution was to provide a warm body to sit in the defendant’s chair.

I enjoyed teaching it in my college course on American church history.  I made a grave error once, however.  To demonstrate the antichristian propaganda that now perverts the history of the event, I showed the class five minutes of the film “Inherit the Wind.”  One young lady, on the final exam, gave me the movie version instead of what I had taught.

It was the first trial to be broadcast live across the nation and it captured the nation’s attention.  Likewise, the ridicule heaped upon it by the eminently talented reporter H. L. Mencken also became part of the nation’s memory.

If today’s descriptions of the event aren’t grossly twisted, they still tend to miss the key dynamics that explain the actions of the characters.  This is the challenge of historiography: the writer has to choose, out of millions of data bits, the things which he believes explain the events and their aftermath.  In this case, if he doesn’t understand Fundamentalism, Marxism, scientism, atheism, and the South of 1925, he’s going to get it wrong.  Oh, they all THINK that they understand, but, as I said, that’s the cigar butt in the punch bowl of historiography.

I highly recommend Summer for the Gods by Edward Larson.  His mastery of the material is stellar.

The world stands agog in reaction to Joe Biden’s debate performance last week.  His senility was on full display.  I am baffled, though by two things.

First: the left-wing commentators (sometimes called “mainstream,” in case you wonder about my terminology) seem genuinely surprised at Biden’s mental disability.  How do these people find their own ways to the bathroom?  All of us have known that the guy was non compos mentis since the 2020 campaign.  YouTubers posted video clips without end depicting him, for instance, finishing a speech and staring blankly, not knowing what to do, and having his caretaker (wife) gently turn him in the right direction and walk him off the stage.  How can commentators not know this for four years?

Second: I’m shocked at how the lefties scattered like a flock of birds in response to the debacle.  Nearly everywhere I searched for the next twenty four hours they were frantically repeating the message that Biden was obviously incompetent and had to be replaced.   In other words, they were producing, on their own nickel, video material for the Trump campaign by the truckload.  These people are professional liars and gaslighters.  (As an example, see how they reported the communist attack on the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.)  How can people whose career advancement depends upon their coordinated parroting of the party line break ranks and run, rather than look steadily into the camera and say in unison “There’s nothing to see here.  He has a speech impediment, that’s all”?

Now that they’ve had a few days to consult with one another, they’ve settled on the new message: the only problem was the failure of the CNN moderator to interrupt and argue with Trump.  Of course, that’s the responsibility of the debate opponent, but the lefties are counting on their audience’s biases to override any critical thinking impulses that might try to surface.  “Shame on the moderator for expecting Dementia Joe to frame a coherent answer.”

One thing I might agree with the lefties on is their insistence that Biden’s inability to finish a sentence won’t affect the election.  It seems certain that he wouldn’t lose the yellow-dog Democrat vote, because the alternative would be Trump, which is unthinkable.  The undecideds, though, are another story.  They all know now, if they, bless their hearts, hadn’t figured it out already, that Biden’s mind is gone and Kamala Harris would take his office almost immediately, and her own mind is hardly an improvement over Grandpa’s.  But, on the other hand, nobody has recommended Trump for the Mensa Society, either; so they might consider it a wash either way.

So here we sit, the greatest nation in history, trying to decide which morons to put in office.  The Dims are in quite a quandary since replacing Biden would entail replacing Harris, and she’s in line to be the first mulatta president in history.  So they’d be catching it in the shorts to try that.  They can’t nominate Harris in Biden’s place and then import Michelle Obama or Hillary Clinton, since a two-woman ticket has the chance of a snowball in Hattiesburg.  Gavin Newsom is getting mentioned a lot, but the nation has been ridiculing California for years now, so if Newsom became the candidate, well, the jokes write themselves.

In my opinion, the Dims just need to reboot and run two nice, nondescript functionaries — sort of like Mike Pence or Mitt Romney, people who don’t at all represent the wild-eyed lunacy that the Dim Party is known for; people who excite and inspire nobody.  That would be all it takes to defeat Trump.