If You Shoot Me, You Better Kill Me!
Thoughts On The Least Surprising Surprise Of The Year
I’ve subscribed to the New York Times for a number of years. I get access to all of their online stuff, and I’m notified by email about a lot of it. I can share a given number of ‘Gift Articles’ to Facebook, which can be read by non-subscribers.
Saturday morning I posted this article from the day before, detailing an accusation-filled Joe Biden rally at a high school gymnasium in Detroit, that looked an awful lot like a Trump rally.
This is a screen shot of my post, including my one-sentence comment.
“Remember, nothing fires up the base like hatred!”
It’s been a rough couple of weeks for President Biden as he’s been confronted with calls from many fellow Democrats for him to step down, and pass the baton to a younger more vigorous politician, more up to the task of winning the general election in November.
Many of my Democrat friends on social media have sprung to Biden’s defense. But they seem to miss the point. Calls from within the party for him to withdraw from the race, are not criticisms of his tenure, but a deep concern about his ability to beat Donald Trump.
If his rally in Detroit is any indication, his campaign has in fact been revving its engines, burning that most primitive of all our primate energies. Hatred is the high-octane fuel, if winning at all costs is your goal. Joe wants his party to know that he can match The Orange Terror’s flame-thrower of rhetoric from here to the finish line.
Or at least he did until somebody shot up a Trump rally in Pennsylvania the very next day.
I shit-canned my TVs in 2011, and rarely catch a glimpse of standard American television fare, but I do understand that much of the donation money Biden and Obama have been asking for with countless YouTube ads over recent weeks, goes into negative advertising.
And it wasn’t very long into radio coverage of the shooting, that Biden’s campaign said that they were “… pausing all outbound communications and working to pull down our television ads as quickly as possible.”
Why would you pull down your TV ads, if you didn’t think that they might have lapsed into the realm of incitement?
And if they did seem capable of inspiring violence, why would you have paid a lot of money to put them on the public airwaves in the first place?
Much has been made of The President’s poor performance in the first Biden v Trump debate. And much has been made of the fire-hose of exaggerations and outright falsehoods pouring forth from a steely-eyed Donald Trump.
But nobody seems to have been bothered by Mr. Biden repeating the internet myth of Trump having suggested ‘injecting bleach’ as a remedy for COVID.
The following is a direct copy paste from CNN’s own published transcript of that debate. This is Joes’ very first two paragraphs of the evening. In what was sold as ‘the most consequential debate ever’.
”BIDEN: You have to take a look at what I was left when I became president, what Mr. Trump left me.
“We had an economy that was in freefall. The pandemic are so badly handled, many people were dying. All he said was, it’s not that serious. Just inject a little bleach in your arm. It’d be all right.”
That is a lie that Biden has repeated often during this campaign. Always as close to the top of his comments as possible, lest he forget to frame Trump’s COVID response as near murderous in it’s ineptitude.
But he was also selling a version of this in 2020. In July of that year he said this at an appearance. "And when it comes to COVID-19, after months of doing nothing, other than predicting the virus would disappear, or maybe if you drank bleach you may be okay, Trump has simply given up,"
PolitiFact fact checked Biden’s claims, and traced it back to an official COVID briefing on April 23rd of that year. Trump’s comments were in the form of a question he’d asked of William Bryan, the undersecretary for science and technology at the Department of Homeland Security; after the secretary had presented a study about sunlight and disinfectants killing COVID on surfaces.
This at one of the daily COVID broadcasts where Mike Pence was supposed to be bringing educators and scientists to the American people, but which became long-winded blowhard sessions for Donald Trump.
After Secretary Bryant’s summation, Trump asked:
"A question that probably some of you are thinking of if you’re totally into that world, which I find to be very interesting. So, supposedly we hit the body with a tremendous, whether it’s ultraviolet or just very powerful light, and I think you said that hasn’t been checked, but you’re going to test it. And then I said supposing you brought the light inside the body, which you can do either through the skin or in some other way. (To Bryan) And I think you said you’re going to test that, too. Sounds interesting, right?"
Trump’s barely coherent musings continued:
"And then I see the disinfectant, where it knocks it out in one minute. And is there a way we can do something like that? By injection inside or almost a cleaning, because you see it gets in the lungs and it does a tremendous number on the lungs, so it’d be interesting to check that, so that you’re going to have to use medical doctors with, but it sounds interesting to me. So, we’ll see, but the whole concept of the light, the way it kills it in one minute. That’s pretty powerful."
When a reporter seized on Trump’s use of ‘injection’ in a question to Bryan, Trump jumped back in to clarify:
"It wouldn’t be through injections, almost a cleaning and sterilization of an area. Maybe it works, maybe it doesn’t work, but it certainly has a big effect if it’s on a stationary object."
Of course anti-Trump trolls quickly filled the Twittersphere with commentary that Biden picked up on for his later remarks about ‘drinking bleach’.
Four years later he’s upped the ante to ‘injecting bleach’.
Neither of these candidates can be bothered to fact-check something the other has been accused of doing or saying. Both repeat the worst possible iteration of what the other may have said that can then be fed to their base as raw meat. Each to make the other seem either moronic or evil or both.
There’s an old thought experiment that I once wrote an essay about. It’s a sort of cocktail-party litmus test that I used to hear liberal friends talk about. I call it ‘The Baby Hitler Test’. In it, one very non-violent death-penalty opponent asks another “If you were transported back to the beginning of the 20th century to a crib containing an infant Adolph Hitler, would you kill him?”
This little question birthed a million interesting conversations about morality. Ones that I witnessed usually came to the conclusion that if you KNEW that this baby would - as a grown man - kill millions of innocents in the cruelest manner, you would then be morally required to smother him in his bassinet.
If you Google ‘Trump Is Hitler’, and then click ‘images’, this is the first group from a collection of pictures that must number in the thousands. You can get an awful lot of mileage out of an accusation if you have ten years to milk it.
We don’t know yet what inspired a 20-year-old to go all John Wilkes Boothe on the man who thinks he’s the modern-day Abe Lincoln. But if I sincerely believed that one man and one man only, was determined to - and capable of - putting an end to American Democracy, it’s conceivable that I too might climb to the roof of an industrial building and fire toward the noise.
Of course we know that Trump will milk this for all it’s worth. Within seconds after missing death by inches, he was back to his habitual branding. Now he’s the guy who can’t be stopped! More than ever, the man of destiny.
Is there any question that he’ll get a bump in the polls out of his high-speed ear-piercing? Here’s what he posted to Truth Social this morning:
God alone saved him!
By tomorrow afternoon his macho fan-boys will be printing T-shirts with that picture of him, face streaked with blood, fist thrust defiantly heaven-ward. With text reading:
’If You Shoot Me, You Better Kill Me!’
Mark my words.
I actually remember watching that April 23 COVID briefing live, and later being amazed that the only thing people remembered was the bleach talk. That was ALSO the briefing where then-CDC director Robert Redfield revealed the results of their research on where COVID-19 could survive. Indoors without ventilation the virus could survive for something like 20 hours+ or so. Outside, in full ventilation with a breeze, it could only survive for less than 2 seconds -- that was literally the number -- 2 seconds. I remember it well.
The media and certain west coast governors laughed at Trump for being so stupid and not listening to science, and then proceeded to keep beaches, parks, tennis courts and hiking trails closed.
Let that sink in.
Good read Dave. In my early years after college I worked at the NC Department of Corrections for 5+ years. An excellent criminal justice professor in a class I took gave participants a great lesson in facts/laws being shaped by one’s perspective, regarding our thoughts on capital punishment. He said, ‘If someone raped and murdered your daughter I imagine all of you would be for the death penalty. If, however your son was accused of the same crime you might plead for a different outcome’.