There was another attempt on the Assclown’s life a couple weeks ago, this one at a courtiers’ banquet by a guy named Cole Allen. It looks (from the reportage I’ve seen) like a serious attempt that failed – Allen didn’t get within sight of his targets, he got one shot off at a guard (and one report I saw doubted even that), and he wound up tripping on the carpet and getting piled on by goons.

It also looks like Cole Allen is multiple kinds of dumbass. Let’s count them…

 

The tactical layer:

Allen’s plan was to show up at the Hilton and dash in, trusting to good intentions and wishful thinking to keep security out of his way and unharmed. Once in the banquet hall, he planned to pick out targets in descending order of rank and terribleness (skipping over Patel for some reason)…

…in a room 30,000 square feet in size and full of thousands of panicky non-targets…

…with a pump-action shotgun. Eight shells, with an effective range that wouldn’t reach across the room.

He did have a pistol as well, so add one clip of .38, of unknown size, to depopulate the entire executive branch with. Who did he think he is, Deadpool?

Even the fool in 2017 who wanted to flip Trump’s limo with a forklift picked a better weapon.

 

The strategic layer:

Presumably Allen wasn’t just trying to express his outrage, like Matthew Livelsberger did; no, Allen was trying to accomplish something with his killing spree. A new president, maybe? One not tainted with Trump’s stupid-evil?

Let’s take a moment to contemplate the presidential line of succession…

Ewwwww.

Almost everyone on that list got there by licking Trump’s ass, and Johnson seems to do so as a hobby. You could argue that Grassley is a more conventional kind of fedgov stupid-evil, but to get to him on the list, Allen would have had to gun down at least three people. That’s at least two more people than he would have gotten even if the above tactical clusterfail had gone well for him…

So not only would the fedgov not be cleansed of Assclownish stupid-evil, there’d be a concerted effort to canonize anyone Allen killed as a statist saint, in the style of Charlie Kirk.

Benefit to decent people: none.

(Benefit to indecent people: not much. Even the inevitable righty attempt to try to blame Trump’s critics for the attack didn’t get any traction. And as for their attempt to convince “Christian nationalists” that it was some kind of anti-Christian hate crime… some of those fuckers already think Trump is the Second Coming, so it’s hard to tell if their idolatry has gotten any more fervent.)

Here’s where I sneak in a Transmetropolitan reference:

“That’s a Secret Service gig.”

“The SS started privately charging the president for coverage. You know how many attempts have been made on his life just this year?”

“Not enough.”

It’s a good line, but it wasn’t true, as Spider would learn later. And it isn’t true here, either.

 

The motivational layer:

Allen’s manifesto was released to the public (suspiciously quickly, but never mind). He spent a lot of words on his target priorities, and how the “turn the other cheek” thing didn’t apply, and how disappointed he was in the Secret Service that he was able to get within sight of the hotel, apparently. But nestled in there is the motive.

And it’s deluded.

I am a citizen of the United States of America.

What my representatives do reflects on me.

And I am no longer willing to permit a pedophile, rapist, and traitor to coat my hands with his crimes.

We don’t have “representatives,” numbnuts. We have rulers.

We are not responsible for our rulers’ crimes, or the crimes of the gov’s willing servants and mercenaries.

Even people who voted for the fuckers can (mostly) be forgiven, because voters were marinated for years in the Dems and GOP both bullshitting about who was the lesser evil, and that’s on top of a lifetime’s worth of propaganda about how our only choice as “citizens” is whether it’ll be a left or right boot on all our necks.

Hell, on some days I’m even willing to forgive (some of) those governmental servants and mercenaries, because (again) they’ve had a lifetime’s worth of propaganda about how service to rulers equals service to the people.

As for the rest of us, we may be tax cattle, but we aren’t also sin-eaters. Statists can keep lying about that – and they will – but their sins are still their own.