As for the shutting down of the straight; be assured that this is just an mild annoyance in the great scheme of things, this too will pass. All the Administration has to do is to try and do a reasonable job of managing public perception without revealing their cards to Iran. Remember, the vast majority of the media absolutely hates Trump and everything he does, Trump knows this and he’s going to figuratively stick his thumb in their eye whenever he can. It doesn’t matter what Trump does, the vast majority of the media is going to attack him for it and hope he fails. By the way, the Strait of Hormuz is an international strait and international law guarantees transit passage for peaceful ships.

You should seriously consider that the things you’re viewing as mistakes might actually be planned tactical maneuvers in an effort to reach the end goals. War is chaos and plans must shift, but what cannot shift is the end goal. How you get to the end goal can shift all over the place.

Truly understand and respect the facts surrounding what you wrote, “They are much better trained and have much more experience. In every possible way, they are better war planners than I will ever be.” So sit back, relax, pay attention, watch it unfold instead of attempting to be an armchair quarterback with 20/20 vision.

Taking aside that this aged like milk, I’m only responding because you touched on one of my favorite topics, the 25th amendment: “Nor do I think removal under the 25th Amendment is a possibility, not with the sycophants Trump has brought on board.”

The 25th amendment is a smart person’s stupid talking point. It was brought in after President Harrison died 31 days after taking office in 1841 and when Woodrow Wilson had a debilitating stroke in 1919. While congress managed to muddle through those cases, there was a concern that the muddling they did wasn’t actually constitutional, so the 25th was devised. The 25th was supposed to give clarity on succession, and control against dead people or vegetables.

And you can see that in the process:

In order for section 4 of the 25th to be invoked, JD Vance would have to decide that President Trump was unable to discharge the duties and powers of his office, and to deal with that, he would have to gather a majority of the Cabinet and go to war with Trump.

He would have to produce a letter to that effect, and deliver it to Steve Scalise and John Thune. That would be enough to actually remove Trump from office for about 34 seconds. That’s how long it would take Trump to scribble furiously on a cocktail napkin that no, he wasn’t incapacitated, crumple it up, and fling it at the faces of Scalise and Thune. Then he would be President again.

That is, unless Vance and the Cabinet leaders wrote a letter to Scalise and Thune within four days that basically says: “No, I really mean it, this dude is cray cray”. And that would start a process – Both houses of congress would be required to assemble within 48 hours and hold a vote in both the house and the senate. Removal of the President would require a two-thirds majority vote in each, and if that couldn’t be achieved, Trump would continue to be President.

You might notice that it’s harder to remove a president under the 25th than it is to impeach a president. Impeachment only requires a simple 50%+1 majority in the house and has the benefit of not requiring the VP and half of cabinet to go rogue. One could argue that impeachment requires a high crime or misdemeanor when the 25th doesn’t, but that didn’t stop the Democrats the first couple of times they tried to impeach. The reality is that these things end up ultimately as political popularity contests, and Trump is popular enough among Republicans that it doesn’t matter how many sycophants trump has in his cabinet, Dems just don’t have the votes.

And I’m not saying the cops should have let Knight “dictate” anything, but like it or not, he does get a vote — if he wants it to be violent, it probably will be. I think, however, that cops should try to avoid encouraging that kind of response. De-escalating that guy might not have worked, but they could have done more to try.

Instead, they went in hard, and now a couple’s wedding reception is ruined, a guy is dead, one cop got a concussion, and another has to deal with the aftermath of killing. And the city is being sued. It’s not a great outcome for a call about a drunk at a wedding. Maybe it was unavoidable…but maybe it could have gone better.

Daniel Knight had an obligation to society to behave with lucidity and self restraint. His death is a direct result of that failure. You attempt to erase that obligation of the individual by demanding that police allow the criminal to dictate the tone and level of force used.

That could be entirely subjective. Maybe it was always that bad and I just didn’t used to pay that much attention, or I used to ignore it.

But if it’s real, I’m tempted to think part of it has to do with the rise of online fundraising, where a larger number of people give relatively small amounts. Getting the attention of less politically interested doners requires short but alarming messages — Be Afraid, as you say. The Other Guy Will Kill Your Family and Everything You Love. Then again, we had the Goldwater Will Kill Us All “Daisy” ad sixty years ago.

Part of the problem, as I see it, is if the left labels every Republican candidate as the next Hitler, that will make it harder to recognize the real next Hitler when he comes along. The same, of course, goes for the next Karl Marx/Stalin/Mao.

That brings me back to Trump. And just because people say crazy things about how bad he is doesn’t mean he isn’t bad. He really does worry me more than any previous serious candidate. I’ve had a few run-ins with sociopaths over the years, and have been lucky to extract myself and my family from some bad (although non-violent) situations. Trump strikes me as a blatant sociopath, more so than any recent candidate.

Then again, perhaps he is simply worse at hiding it.

This is perhaps an underrated point, although maybe not how you considered it – It forces people to either own or abandon their rhetoric over the last few years: If you truly, genuinely believe that Donald Trump is the second coming of Hitler, and his second election will usher in a Naziesque administration that will usher in an authoritarian regime unlike any before seen… Well, you should be most upset that the shooter missed. Maybe secondarily upset that it’ll mean a bump in his polls.

There’s a particularly mealy-mouthed routine where people will have catastrophized Trump’s second term, projecting their head-cannon, all the worst things they can possibly think of, onto the man immediately before shifting back to “Well, yeah, I know I said all those things, but we really shouldn’t shoot people, thoughts and prayers.”

And was this always the case? I don’t know… I was born in ’85. Like you alluded, there was a whole lot more political violence in the decades before I was born than there was after, and I think we’ve gotten complacent in our expectation that politics are largely bloodless.

There’s this thing that’s done in politics where signals are sent out that lead to an instinctual response. Like how ducks know when to migrate or salmon know when to spawn, where people know when it’s time to Be Afraid. Not because there’s anything to Be Afraid of, but because fear is a motivator, it motivates them to vote, it motivates them to motivate other people to vote, it motivates donations, it motivates displays of support. That fear has ratcheted us up to a point where it’s emotionally exhausting to care about politics, it’s why I’ve taken a few steps back over the last few years, and frankly, I’m surprised it took this long to get here. The lessons learned from the Gifford and Salise shootings were far too temporary, and I’ve been saying for years that it’s only a matter of time before someone got shot.

Time after time, we are told a plethora of horrifying things that the other side is going to do, only for them to form government and have those fears go unrealized for another four years. And then at the end of those four years, the same people with a few more grey hairs will trot out the exact same set of fears to rile their people up again, only to be treated with the exact same level of seriousness.

I honestly don’t know what you do about it.

I’ve done that exact same thing. Started to reply on someone’s blog and it got so long I decided to turn it into a post. Of course, about half the time it never gets out of draft stage, because I don’t have as much time for blogging as I used to.

When you get something, feel free to drop a link to it here in the comments.

tl;dr version: I wouldn’t trust it as far as I can spit Saturn.

For the longer version, you’ll get info on that later. I wrote it here, then decided it was turning into a blog post.

And, since I already said I keep meaning to write a blog post on it, I’ve now cut all that and pasted it into my draft!