The bomb threat Thursday on Capitol Hill was still active when rapidly balding Josh Marshall of the liberal Talking Points Memo blog decided to make this about — who else? — Donald Trump.
“In Facebook video, Capitol bomb threat suspect repeatedly invokes Trump and the fall of Kabul,” Marshall wrote on Twitter. “Attacks Biden and Pelosi. Says Trump will become President again after Biden is driven from office. Says Trump will then pardon everyone.”
As a reminder, Trump has not been president for seven months and counting. That’s not a problem for the Left. Even when Trump is six feet under, rotted inside-out and covered in worms, they will find a way to make the day’s news about him and the “rise of white supremacy” myth.
The guy involved in the bomb threat, identified by authorities as Floyd Ray Roseberry, live streamed the incident on Facebook. It was eventually cut off but while it was up, he said nothing coherent whatsoever about politics. He spoke as if he was talking directly to “Joe,” presumably President Biden, and he mentioned a “revolution” and said he had tanks of ammonium nitrate in his truck, which was parked near the Library of Congress.
He talked about wanting to go home to North Carolina and see his wife and how he’s angry at what Biden did in Afghanistan and also, notably, that he doesn’t care if Trump is president. “I don’t care if Donald Trump ever becomes president again. It doesn’t matter to me,” he said. And then, in a remark perfectly befitting a Biden cabinet pick, he said, “Black, white, lesbian, LGBT, it don’t matter, we’re Americans.”
Diversity is our strength, you know.
But for the sake of argument, let’s assume Roseberry is a completely sane, if a little angry, Trump supporter, motivated by politics. If that’s the case, I fully expect the national media to ask that we all take a look inside ourselves and pray that “both sides” consider how we contributed to such an ugly episode.
That’s not what the media will do, of course, even though it’s exactly what they did when a Bernie Sanders supporter and bloodthirsty Trump critic shot up a baseball field where he knew Republicans were practicing.
Recall that in the summer of 2017, James Hodgkinson, 66, made his way to a recreational ball park with an assault rifle. Before entering the field, he stopped to ask GOP Reps. Ron DeSantis and Jeff Duncan whether it was Republicans or Democrats who were practicing. When he got the answer he wanted to hear, he sprayed bullets on the victims for as long as he could. Five people were injured and Rep. Steve Scalise was hospitalized in critical condition after he was shot in the hip.
Hodgkinson’s Facebook page showed that he belonged to the groups “Terminate the Republican Party” and “The Road to Hell is Paved with Republicans.” One note on his Facebook said, “It’s Time to Destroy Trump & Co.”
In the face of all evidence that Hodgkinson was a Democrat animated to go on a shooting rampage by his own political frustrations, New York Times political reporter Glenn Thrush looked to Trump. “Any debate about civility in politics begins with Trump,” he wrote on Twitter. “No one has degraded discourse more, while embracing the fringe.”
In an effort to even the score between the GOP and Democrats, The New York Times editorial board chalked the incident up to “vicious American politics” and repeated the false claim that “the link to political incitement was clear” between 2008 GOP vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin and the 2011 shooting of then-Democratic Rep. Gabrielle Giffords.
The paper later removed that part from its editorial, admitting that there was “no such link.”
A bemused editorial in the Washington Post asked, “Who knows what mixture of madness and circumstance causes someone to pick up a gun and go on a rampage?” The Post then helped spread responsibility for the tragedy among everyone, saying that it should “cause a gut check about what passes for political discourse in this country.”
And a willfully-clueless Scott Pelley of the CBS “Evening News” ended one of his broadcasts, remarking on the shooting and unspecified “leaders and political commentators who set an example” for having “led us into an abyss of violent rhetoric.”
Or maybe Hodgkinson was a Democrat who bought into the media-generated hysteria about Trump being a racist foreign agent of Russia.
When it’s a psycho with ties to the Democratic Party, we’re all expected to carry some blame. Police said Roseberry surrendered after a few hours with no one injured and if he ends up being a politically motivated Trump supporter, I say we do the same with him.
