Intemperate Remarks In A Divided Country May Lead To Disastrous Consequences

A week ago, Joe Biden said that "it's time to put President Trump in a bullseye":

from this:

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Perhaps the shooter saw that and acted upon it, took the vile campaign rhetoric for real - and put not only President Trump but also his supporters in a bullseye, and came within a centimeter of killing President Trump. Biden came within a centimeter of initiating a cascade which could have led to a second American civil war. I think it was divine providence which saved us from that. Some of my ancestors were in the thick of the first American civil war - one of my great-grandfathers raised a regiment of Confederate irregulars in Liberty, Missouri, in 1855. Amongst the soldiers in his group were Cole Younger and his brothers, Frank James, and later, his younger brother, Jesse, and William Quantrill. "Bloody Bill" Anderson was thought to be too crazy to join, he regularly scalped his victims and nailed them to fences and walls, but it was not a peaceful group. His opponents, the Jayhawkers in Kansas, were equally as violent, they raided Osceola Missouri in 1861, shot every male over the age of 13, raped every woman they could find, and then looted the town, and burned what was left to the ground. In 1863, when William Quantrill and his band raided the Abolitionist capital, Lawrence, Kansas, they did the same to that place - their battle cry was "Remember Osceola!". The leader of the Osceola raid, James Lane, sought refuge in the pit of his outhouse, up to his neck in shit for 12 hours, instead of standing his ground - an apt reward for a coward - he escaped with his life but not his honor. And Quantrill did this without the help of my great-grandfather, who had been commissioned a Lieutenant Colonel in the Confederate States Army in 1861, while Quantrill and his group were denied parts in that Army, on moral grounds. My great-grandfather was captured by the Federals in November 1861, after leading a number of successful raids, and was paroled by President Lincoln in February 1862 - but he remained an unreconstructed Confederate to the end of his days, serving as Probate Judge from 1865 to 1892, when he died at age 73. The anger and bitterness lasted for generations - I can remember my grandmother cursing the "goddamned Yankee carpetbaggers" 100 years later, in the late 1960s. Civil war is nothing to mess with - definitely not to get elected to political office - and in the US the way things are these days, it might not take much more than an assassin's bullet to start one.