Homage to Luther Baldwin

It’s normal to tell the President to drop dead, especially when he sucks this bad

I won’t spend much of your time on this. Because you are sane, intelligent, and aware of current events (and I’m not just saying that because you subscribe), you already know that Karoline Leavitt and the other MAGA minions have been saying that the guy who very unsuccessfully stormed Saturday’s White House Correspondents Dinner was driven to do so by the Democrats and the mean things they say about Donald Trump, and that we better be nice to Trump from now on because if anything happens to him we’ll be guilty of secondhand assassination.

And you know it’s bullshit. (Though, to be fair, even Hakeem Jeffries knows that much!) So I don’t aim to convince you on that score. What I hope to show is that, while the electorate has made some wacky judgement calls in the past few years, this incident and their related smear campaign are unlikely to lead to the censorious result the Trumpniks desire (let alone a wave of sympathy for the old bastard), because this is still a free country and its inhabitants like it that way.

First, they’re overselling this because they have nothing to sell. It’s not even like Butler PA, when someone fired at the stage and Trump got streaks of red on his face and pumped his fist and later walked around with a dry napkin on his ear. This is more like the nuts who have been showing up outside the White House for decades now, threatening to kill the guy inside and getting swiftly taken down by the Secret Service. Yet Trump’s spokespeople are talking about it as if he’s lying in the ER riddled with bullet holes and with his remaining strength directing the disbursement of his fortune to widows and orphans.

To connect this not-even-close-to-assassination to harsh words by his opponents, his propagandists are stretching like Plastic Man. You probably have your own favorite examples, but as often I give you Rod Dreher (who claims that liberals are “maniacs who want to kill or maim the rest of us”) and Erick Erickson:

We’re on multiple assassination attempts of the President of the United States. Progressives seem split between them being false flags, and upset that they failed... The Left manufactures right-wing ties to shooters, including claiming the political assassinations in Minnesota were by a rightwinger...

Yes, like Trump Erickson is actually trying that bullshit about Melissa Hortman’s assassination.

The other day, Hakeem Jeffries held a press conference and called for “maximum wa[r]fare” against Donald Trump. On Saturday, a progressive tried to kill Donald Trump. And now, Hakeem Jeffries is attacking anyone asking him questions about what he meant by “maximum warfare.”

Jeffries meant that he wants his party to beat the Republicans decisively in elections, Ham-Face. Everyone knows that. It’s like Erickson never saw an election campaign before.

Which brings me to another key factor: Normal people know this is all bullshit. The Prestige Press wrings its hands over “rhetoric” with sucker polls (“Do we all have a responsibility to tone down political rhetoric?”) and feeble attempted gotchas on Democrats like Dana Bash asking Rep. Jamie Raskin about the Democrats’ “heated rhetoric.”

It’s a joke because the person the Democrats are allegedly unfairly attacking with mean words is Donald Trump.

I’m not even going to cite the many, many examples of Trump’s eliminationist rhetoric because at this point it’s ridiculous. But I will guarantee you nobody besides the brain-poisoned third of Americans who still worship Tubby actually feels as if he’s been unfairly outgunned rhetorically by, of all people, the Democrats. And even those chuds are probably rubbing their hands in anticipation of Trump’s next expression of contempt for the dead and gleeful announcement of impending war crimes and mass murder. So miss me with this lower-the-temperature wheeze.

Finally, let me say I am aware that people talk unkindly about Trump, and even indicate that they would be delighted to learn of his demise. To which I say: So what? I remind you of the most celebrated arrest in the time of John Adams’ Alien and Sedition Acts — generally considered one of the Republic’s worst offenses against both the spirit and the plain language of the First Amendment.

Luther Baldwin and his buddies were drinking in Newark, New Jersey one fine day as President Adams proceeded from Philadelphia to his home in Quincy, Massachusetts. The city fathers shot off a cannon in tribute. One there observed, “there goes the President and they are firing at his ass.” Baldwin replied, “I would not care if they fired through his ass.” Baldwin was arrested, charged with sedition, found guilty, jailed and fined. Shortly thereafter the voters turned Adams out in favor of Thomas Jefferson — who as President gave a Baldwin a pardon and an apology.

Don’t tell Tubby and his minions because they will doubtless try to get the pardon revoked and Mike Johnson to put the Acts back on the books. How dare Baldwin use such heated rhetoric! Someone might get ideas!

Being bullies, they can’t grasp the difference between a conspiracy to commit actual violence and the way ordinary folks talk about the powerful assholes from whose depredations they suffer and for whom they have abundant and justifiable contempt. Well, like Satchmo in the little number up top, I rejoice that I live in a land free enough that I can say that I wouldn’t piss on our pustulent, pig-eyed, lying, depraved, degenerate Chief Executive if he were on fire.

Yes, I realize that, by declining to piss on Trump while he is on fire in this hypothetical, I would be showing depraved indifference to human (if barely) life. Come and get me, coppers!