I am not a conspiracy theorist, nor do I play one on TV. Yet.

I am not a conspiracy theorist, nor do I play one on TV. I tend to look at events as chains, rather than constructs. But as a stage director, playwright, and novelist, I know all about constructing timelines as plot points to make a story work. A chain of events was set into motion with the SCOTUS immunity ruling and I'm beginning to think we are living in a bad John le Carré or Robert Ludlum novel. They may write great novels, but this isn't one of them. This is real life twisting into some grotesquerie that will replace our republic as we know it. Yeah, there are enough dystopian books to keep us all busy for years, but you gotta admit, some are hitting closer to home these days than others. And when you arrange them just right, that space in the middle is Project 2025. These are the books that always scared me the most, even more than Robert Ludlum  and his anti-hero, Jason Bourne. 

These days, it's getting harder to tell the villains from the anti-heroes and the martyrs from the actors without some kind of scorecard. And what's really fascinating is how our elected officials and government appointees manipulate the performers and performances. Insanity is when you do the same thing over and over and over....but expect different results. I would posit Feckless is NOT insane, because he keep spouting the same bullshit (I won this election or that January 6th rioters are wrongly imprisoned) expecting the lies to be true. 

SCOTUS basically set up the mechanism for all of Feckless Loser's court cases to be dismissed. Every legal action taken since January 6th, 2021 is now under scrutiny. Already, convictions of the seditionists are being reviewed. CNN explained that succinctly:

The ruling rejects a decision from a federal appeals court in February that found Trump enjoyed no immunity for alleged crimes he committed during his presidency to reverse the 2020 election results. The decision says presidents have immunity for official acts but not all acts are official, and lower courts must decide which acts qualify for each.

Feckless Loser viewed this as a major win for him....which it was. But as we all know, shit rolls downhill.

This image shows the location of the shooting site, about 400 feet.GOOGLE EARTH/CBS NEWS

Meanwhile, back in Pennsylvania, a 20-year old took a potshot at Feckless Loser. Thomas Matthew Crooks used his father's AR-15 weapon to kill one rally attendee, injure two others, and graze the former president's ear. The shooter was on a roof about 410 feet from the stage. Bystanders saw him and yelled to the police that he was up there. The Butler County sheriff said a police officer confronted the gunman on the roof, but fell before Crooks turned the gun on the former president.  

The Washington Post reported:

Crooks began firing two minutes and two seconds after the starting point of the newly published video, which begins with a man’s voice saying that people were pointing toward the roof, according to a Washington Post analysis of footage from the event. The shots began 86 seconds after the first audible attempts to alert police, according to the analysis, which synchronized several clips based on the sound of Trump’s voice over the public address system as he addressed supporters at a farm show grounds in Butler County, PA

[Follow the Washington Post link to see a video showing the gunman pointed out by spectators] 

By now, Feckless Leader's triumphant fist wave has been seen around the world.

Now, comes the fun part. Feckless as martyr. He thinks that God saved him. Sure. He said, 

By luck or by God, many people are saying it’s by God I’m still here.

You know that within days, he'll be saying the bullet grazed his brain and his recovery is a miracle. He will be modest and humble as accepts the attributes of a would-be martyr. 

From J.D. Vance ( who is now vice presidential nominee):

Today is not just some isolated incident. The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs. That rhetoric led directly to President Trump's attempted assassination.

From Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.): “

Let’s be clear: This was an assassination attempt aided and abetted by the radical Left and corporate media incessantly calling Trump a threat to democracy, fascists, or worse.

From Chris LaCivita, adviser to Trump’s campaign:

Well of course they tried to keep him off the ballot, they tried to put him in jail and now you see this …

Donald Trump Jr.:  

[It’s] not the time to be conspiratorial...there’s definitely questions...that need to be answered. We’ll let other people do all of that. I fear for him anyway, because you know, these attacks have been going on for quite some time. And that’s not just physical attacks, but it’s the verbiage that’s been going on about him — when we were ‘traitors’ and ‘criminals’ and ‘the greatest threat to democracy ever.’ 

All over the world, conspiracy theories abound. I myself suggested President Biden reinstate Seal Team Six since nothing he could do as president is actionable, as Feckless had previously pointed out and SCOTUS confirmed. This is to be expected when the GOP prides itself on cockamamie theories and QAnon buddies. Did you really expect something different?

Aileen Cannon

Meanwhile, back in Florida, this morning, Aileen Cannon, well-known purveyor of outlandish and unsupported judicial decisions, threw out the documents indictment in Florida based on a rather odd reading of the standard methodology used to appoint a Special Prosecutor. While shocking, horrifying, and completely from outer space, it should not be a surprise that she always rules in Feckless Loser's favor no matter what the case. 

Let's look at this morning's zany offering: 

Even if Judge Cannon is going after Special Prosecutor Jack Smith's appointment as unconstitutional, she has the added impetus to dismiss the case as the files were moved during the dunce's presidency. Despite almost decades of special prosecutorial appointments done exactly as Smith's was done, she is going after him. 

According Cornell Law School's Legal Information Institute:

A special prosecutor is a prosecutor who is independent of an office that would normally exercise jurisdiction in a criminal investigation—to avoid potential conflicts of interest or to facilitate subject matter area expertise. At the federal level, under 28 CFR § 600.1, a special prosecutor is referred to as a “special counsel,” and may be appointed by the attorney general to criminally investigate an individual or matter in cases where a Justice Department investigation would present a conflict of interest, or in other “extraordinary circumstances.” Under Supreme Court precedent in Morrison v. Olson, Congress may also appoint a special counsel through the passage of legislation. Notable special counsels in U.S. history include Ken Starr of the Clinton Whitewater investigation and Lawrence Walsh of the Iran-Contra Affair.  

[I've left their links in because they are interesting enough to follow.]

Cannon used a decision by Clarence Thomas to justify her ruling. From The Intercept:

To rule as she did, Cannon had to sidestep longstanding Supreme Court precedent about independent prosecutors, which she decided was not precedent at all but instead mere “dictum” that need not be followed. This was precisely the path outlined by conservative Justice Clarence Thomas earlier this month in a decision regarding Trump’s prosecution for his role in the January 6 insurrection, where the constitutionality of the special counsel’s appointment was not even at issue.

 

None of the other Supreme Court justices signed onto Thomas’s concurring opinion, but Cannon cited it three times....

 

In United States v. Nixon, a 1973 decision, the Supreme Court rejected former President Richard Nixon’s attempts to stonewall a grand jury investigation into the Watergate break-in. The Supreme Court unanimously ruled that Nixon had to comply with the subpoena of a special prosecutor, who had been appointed in compliance with the Constitution, federal law, and regulation.

 

For decades, the Nixon ruling has been understood to affirm the constitutionality of independent prosecutors and special counsel who are appointed by the attorney general to handle certain politically sensitive cases. In 2019, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals reaffirmed this understanding when it shot down a challenge to Robert Mueller’s appointment to investigate Russia’s attempts to interfere in the 2016 presidential election.

 

The D.C. Circuit specifically rejected arguments that a key section in the Nixon decision was “dictum.”

After all, SCOTUS already granted presidents superpowers never before exercised in America. Even if Cannon, a Feckless appointee, had not ignored the accepted practice of assigning a Special Counsel and declared open warfare on the Department of Justice, she had in her back pocket that the files were moved when Feckless was president, and therefore, it was within his executive power to store classified material in an unsecured bathroom. Ergo, the indictment could still be thrown out. 

Now, let's look at the chain of events:

But take a moment to time 86 seconds. That's a long time for inaction. Take a moment to review the raised fist Feckless gave the crowd after he rose from the platform. Take a moment to think like John le Carré. Or David Balducci. Or Tom Clancy. This could be one of their plots. The nefarious gang wants to make sure the candidate is quasi-deified. He can only do that if he escapes certain death. They find someone squeaky clean who needs a whole bunch of money. They hire him, knowing they're gonna kill him. Maybe he knows they're gonna take him out, and instructs them to pay his family. Or maybe he doesn't know. But the guy already has access to the assault weapon, goes off to buy 50 rounds of ammo (not very much, really) and positions himself as instructed. A cop gets up on the roof, but conveniently falls before the shooter can fire at him. He turns, fires, then deliberately misses the president, but manages to hit bystanders, killing one. Okay, plausible. The plot continues to unfold, the shooter is dead, the target is victorious in his miraculous escape, and no one ever knows about the deal. The convention takes place where he's hailed as blessed by God himself, and a saved martyr to their cause. Two days later, all the charges against him evaporate because a judge hands down a totally wacko decision which will probably be overturned, but NOT before the election. The Democrats are vociferously blamed, the general population is totally turned off, and it's the lowest voting turnout ever, thereby ensuring the miracle candidate's election. 

Like I said up top, I don't do political thrillers. This chain jumps off the page at me. All I could see was the shooting (no pun intended) script and the scene breakdown. It's positively delicious. It's plausible. doable, and for those KoolAid drinking Maganuts, perfect in every way. It's tidy. It's simple. There's lots of blame to go around....from the sitting president, to the county sheriff's department, to the secret service...no one from the opposition remains unscathed. But...

It's too staged. It's too pat. It's not messy enough.

Forgive me for being the cynic in the room (NOT) but something isn't right here. Maybe in a few days, I'll have a better sense of what's wrong, but right now I cannot put my directorial finger on it. That said, every instinct I have says this stinks like bad fish. 

The Wifely Person's Tip o'the Week

This week marks 14 years since 

I wrote the first episode of this blog.

This one is Episode 730.

Am I done yet?