Image by Koshu Kunii.
Some kid took a shot at an ex-president the other week and apparently, we’re all supposed to feel bad about it. The same news jackals who cobbled together half a career on pretending to be outraged every time Donald Trump tweets something racist are now pretending to be concerned that someone would even dare to shave that fascist baboon’s ear with one those AR death machines they usually love to howl about. Why, even rival politicians, just finished telling packed churches full of old Black ladies that Trump is on the cusp of reanimating the corpse of Andrew Jackson if they fail to vote for a demented dinosaur who used to shoot pool with him, automatically switched gears and called for calm.
All I can say to these censorious theatrics from the fear mongering class is you can all kiss my fat, Queer, Irish ass. A man does not cease to be a dick the moment the chickens come home to roost. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t advocate firing fucking rifles into crowds of people, and I think it’s tragic that some decent seeming people got shot just for attending a rally, but I am not about to watch my language just because a baby killing rapist has made himself a magnet for the bullets he sells.
I honestly don’t even get why this is so fucking shocking. The only shocking thing is that it didn’t happen sooner. Aside from the fact that Donald Trump is an overprivileged loudmouth who goes out of his way to jam his tiny orange pecker into the eye of anybody with their arms tied behind their back, the man was an American president and the last time I checked, that was still a criminal title.
If you don’t fucking believe me then just ask Iran, Guatemala, Indonesia, Brazil, Greece, Chile or any of the other 40+ governments that ours has overthrown over the last 80 years. Or maybe you should go ask the ghost of Patrice Lumumba or Salvador Allende, who were actually successfully murdered with American presidential approval just for being fairly elected in a third world democracy. And this ain’t just some ancient history lesson either.
On any given day, the American war machine slaughters entire families in Somalia with glorified toy planes, trains fascist goons in the Donbass to lob ATACMs at tourists in Crimea, sends truckloads of tank shells to verified hospital bombers in Israel, teaches Kenyan police officers how to hook jumper cables up to peaceful protestor’s junk, facilitates sanctions on starving earthquake survivors in Afghanistan, and illegally occupies Syria’s oilfields so they can’t rebuild schools that ISIS leveled with our rocket launchers.
And every single one of these crimes and a thousand more comes with the stamped approval of the highest office on earth, the Presidency of the United States of America. So, when I tell you that any motherfucker who has ever held that office is a goddamn mafia don, I am not being hyperbolic or engaging in inflammatory rhetoric. If anything, I’m underselling the danger and Donald Trump spent four years engaging in that institutional danger with all the hopped-up giddiness of a crackhead on Christmas.
This is a man who took Barack Obama’s drone strike arcade and somehow buried that previous war-criminal-in-chief’s high score in one term. We’ll never have the exact number of civilians killed because that orange bastard also made the death toll a state secret but in just four years the Trump White House openly declared 205 drone strikes in Yemen, 196 strikes in Somalia, and broke the twenty-year record in Afghanistan two years in a row, with 7,362 bombs dropped in 2018 and 7,423 in 2019.
This murder spree included a drone strike in the Khost province in 2019 that wiped out an entire family on their way home from the maternity ward and another massacre the same year in Nangarhar that killed 30 farmworkers and injured 40 more. So, when does that sick bastard kiss their helmets and comfort their widows and orphans? And when does the media who only shuts up about Trump when he’s killing children or being killed by them call for a pause on demonizing the Taliban or the Houthi rebels?
Let’s also not forget that Donald Trump is an assassin in his own right and one with much better aim than Thomas Crooks. This is the man who had Iran’s top general, Qasem Soleimani, wacked in an extrajudicial execution along with 9 others at a busy international airport in Bagdad and he still brags about it at every fucking rally. He was probably warming up to make jokes about the leaders he’s assassinated when Crooks Reservoir Dogged his ear. So, what makes this ex-president any different than his own would-be killer?
The ex-president is all powerful. America’s despots and murderers are the most powerful despots and murderers on the planet and that makes them special. That makes them above the law or even serious moral scrutiny and even a mass media apparatus that despises Donald Trump for soiling this illusion of omnipotence with his shameless decorum is committed to protecting the sanctity of his untouchable status in order to preserve the power it represents.
This is why, even after whacking the leaders of his own client states in the Dominican Republic and South Vietnam, the Fourth Estate insisted that we all get traumatized when someone popped off JFK. This is why, after a summer packed full of racist police riots, the political class only really lost their shit when a bunch of diabetic boomers tore up the Capitol Building on January 6.
The sanctity of American power must be preserved at all costs. Otherwise, who would pay those idolatrous scions of the self-proclaimed free press in speedboats to lick boots? They might be forced to slum it with their brethren in the North Korean news corps instead.
So, a killer shooting another killer and a gang launching a riot at another gang’s clubhouse have to be rendered unspeakably shocking. Otherwise, people might use their God given common sense to recognize that the only thing that makes powerful people any different than the rest of us is that powerful people have constructed a propaganda empire designed to fool us into believing that the rules don’t apply to them.
But they do, and if petty psychopaths like Mr. Crooks or Lee Harvey Oswald or that QAnon Shamen serve any real purpose it’s that they remind us that every mammal is made of meat and every building can be burned down. If the masses were left alone by the propagandists to figure this out for themselves, truly shocking things might occur. The most heavily armed nation on the planet might all aim their AR-15s at Washington at once and demand their money back. The nation’s swelling homeless population might just decide to crash at the White House and keep it.
Even worse, the next time some draft-dodging pussy in presidential robes demands that some kid from the sticks go kill other poor people in some far away country, that GI might tell him to go fuck himself and wouldn’t that just be so goddamn offensive?
So, I’ll say it again, just one more time, so even the censors in the cheap seats can hear me loud and clear; Every American president is a killer and every killer lives and dies by the same sword. If saying this out loud makes me so damn dangerous then why don’t you just fucking shoot me. Or maybe you’re just not presidential enough to be that big of a hypocrite yet.
The post The Hypocrisy of Condemning Political Violence in a Violent Empire appeared first on CounterPunch.org.
