After A While, It Gets To Be A Bit Much - “Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action.” - Ian Fleming
These:
And this:
”Hanlon’s Razor tells us that we must “never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.” However, when the stupidity that allegedly characterized the United States Secret Service (“USSS”) becomes impossible to accept, people will start to follow Sherlock Holmes’s dictum: “When you have eliminated all which is impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”
The initial story was a simple one: A lone gunman sneaked onto a roof and managed to get off some shots, wounding three (including President Trump) and killing one, before a Secret Service agent took him out with a perfect headshot. That sounded reasonable.
However, in the ensuing time, a lot of strange—I mean really strange—facts have emerged. Some of the most obvious ones that I can list off the top of my head are as follows:
The gunman, who graduated from high school only two or three years ago, was known then as a terrible shot.
The gunman had no social media presence at all, a striking anomaly today.
People repeatedly warned the police that they saw a man with a gun on a shed near Trump’s platform, but neither the police nor the USSS reacted.
The USSS [and local cops] had been aware of the shooter’s bizarre behavior for at least 30 minutes before the shooting itself but did nothing.
Security allowed a ladder to be positioned at the shed without responding to that fact.
Snipers had the shooter in their sights before he shot anyone.
The administration kept Trump’s USSS team understaffed.
Trump’s existing team, which had presumably learned to work together, was suddenly disassembled so that Jill could make an appearance at the same time as Trump’s rally.
The USSS put the shed outside of its security perimeter even though (a) it was 125 yards away from Trump, which would work even for a mediocre marksman, and (b) it had a perfect sightline to Trump.
USSS Director Kimberley Cheatle said agents weren’t actually on the shed because the roof was sloped. Using passive voice, she explained, “the decision was made to secure the building from the inside.” [Oddly enough, US Secret Service snipers were situated on other quite obviously sloped roofs at the same venue - Cheatle’s stated reasoning seems inconsistent]
As Cheatle noted, there were USSS agents inside the shed, even though the roof was the perfect firing platform.
The feds were instantly able to identify the shooter by his DNA, which is peculiar because he’d never been arrested, so there’s no reason that his DNA would have been in law enforcement records.
Despite the above cascades of failures, Director Cheatle has not been fired and has refused to quit. That in itself is truly weird.
As I said, that’s just the weirdness off the top of my head. I know there’s more.
When you think of those multiple failures and judgment calls, it calls to mind what Ian Fleming wrote in Goldfinger: “Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action.”
What saddens me is that it’s impossible at this point in American history to discount these theories and, instead, to say that people ought to focus on the facts and remember that, sometimes, “a cigar is just a cigar.” Here, that “cigar”—i.e., the obvious [suggested/preferred/safe] answer—is a lone wolf who almost got lucky.
But given what we know about the D.C. bureaucracy, whose members view Trump as an existential threat to the power they wield, it’s hard to say “stupidity,” “DEI,” and/or “luck” adequately cover Saturday’s events. We’ve seen the government in action against Trump, whether it was covering up Hunter Biden’s hard drive or promulgating the Russia collusion hoax.” https://coldfury.com/2024/07/17/a-tle-of-two-razors/
Incompetence and stupidity and lack of physical training only go so far to explain this. “Recommendations and findings” won’t stop deliberate action, which is what this is resembling more and more as time goes on. Lawfare didn’t work, the classified documents case having been shot out of the water several days before the shooting, the various actions by the Department of Justice and other agencies obviously weaponized against Trump, the Russiagate hoax used to sabotage his Administration, the letter from 51 officers in the “intelligence community” before the election - a community which has a history of carrying out political assassinations - abroad, and here with JFK in 1963, and then this attempted assassination - it’s beginning to look an awful lot like official policy, and a lot less like a random shooter.
Agreed that applying Bayesian probabilities, the chance of luck is highly improbable.
But from here in Japan, my more critical thinking and socially savvy Japanese friends agree with me. This whole thing was staged. Security agents allowing Trump to stand up and pump his fist for a photo-op before knowing if it was safe? Especially with Trump's intimate familiarity with Wrestlemania, that alone should have been enough to raise some eyebrows.
Just a Bayesian guess, but it was probably a co-ordinated effort by both "sides" of the corporate nation-state herding the naively patriotic with a Hollywood / kabuki-show slight of hand. That being said, my same Japanese friends feel the same about their own corporate nation-state. With the ruling LDP's nearly complete control of the mainstream media here (ranked 70th in the world for freedom of press by Reporters Without Borders), Koike's win in the mayoral race for Tokyo was a foregone conclusion. Important, because her tenure and influence over domestic policies will most likely eclipse that of Prime Minister Kishida.