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That’s exactly why she used that excuse, to look absurd. If you are responsible for the former President being nearly assassinated, better to have it believed that it was due to stupidity than to something more nefarious. Same thing with showing up to the hearing completely unprepared.

I don’t care if she wasn’t the most qualified person to head the SS. Doesn’t matter. No one with 30 years experience in security could be as inept as she is coming across unless it is an intentional act to appear that way.

One big asset is her relative youth compared to a nearly 80-year old opponent.

But up until the debate Dems had been telling us that age was a great asset since it brought great wisdom! Of course they get amnesia quickly about such things.

Bottom line, it doesn't matter who runs under the D banner, the media will always do their best to drag the D across the finish line. Just that Biden was no longer draggable and they knew it (which is why CNN played the debate down the middle, they wanted Biden out).

A half-sentient Dem + big money (they raised 47m overnight if i remember rightly) + mainstream media cheerleading + all the vote fraud = don't get complacent. They always say to campaign as though you're 5 pts down. So i don't see anything wrong with what Hume said. We have to stay motivated and thinking we've got this in the bag is no way to stay motivated.

Good points. Additionally, the article relies heavily on Crooks being “not a great shot”. From what i understand Crooks was described as a terrible shot when trying out for a HS rifle team. But that was years earlier and not making the team could have motivated him to get better. And of course dreaming about assassinating Trump would further motivate him to get better.

So we have no idea how good of a shooter he was that day. Odds are though that he felt pretty confident he could hit his target. After all, he wanted to go out in a blaze of glory (as he in his sick mind imagined would be the case if he took out Trump).

Nothing makes sense about what happened that day if viewed through the lens of Securing the Former President. If viewed through the lens of NOT Securing the Former President then everything suddenly comes into focus. Let’s put on our detective caps and consider whether a suspect (let’s call the suspect DS) had the motive and the means to place the would-be victim (let’s call him PT) in grave danger by removing safeguards meant to keep him from harm.

Motive: It is well known that DS hates PT and believe he is a threat to their power. They (either directly or through allies) have accused PT of being a friend of Putin and even have called him a Hitler. They have tried to bankrupt him and imprison him for the rest of his life. Given how they have treated and talked about PT, it’s safe to say that few convicted killers have had stronger motives and many have had much weaker ones.

Means: They have essentially been putting a huge bullseye on him for years now, fomenting hate even while knowing that there are many psychos out there. A few years ago a psycho was motivated to attempt an assassination of a Supreme Court justice who wasn’t nearly as hated as PT is (thanks to DS fanning the flames of hatred for nearly a decade now). Moreover, for a long time there has been a parlor game where people are asked if you had a time machine and could go back and kill Hitler in his youth, would you? The expected answer is yes, you should kill him so as to prevent many other people getting killed. Therefore having your cohorts compare PT to Hitler is tantamount to calling for someone to assassinate him. Even if that someone isn’t political or doesn’t hate PT, just the thought of being hailed a hero by those who do could be enough to essentially create a hitman to carry out DS’s desire to eliminate their nemesis. A hitman with no tangible connections to DS and who would happily do it for free. So all that remains is creating a hole large enough in PT’s security that even an amateur could exploit it.

Suspicious activities (leading up to event): In weeks before the event a threat from a foreign adversary against PT became known to DS. Presumably his security would be increased and would be the best of the best. The opposite seems to be the case. Someone with a far lower risk level was apparently given better security that day and PT was given worse than usual security despite the elevated threat level against him.

Suspicious activities (day of event): A potential threat was spotted well in advance of the event that day. PT should have been kept in a secure location until this person was detained. This did not happen. Also a prime location for carring out an attack was left unguarded. Other security measures were oddly missing, such as drones surveiling the area. Local law enforcement tasked with traffic control got closer to the gunman than the people charged with protecting PT did.

Suspicious activities (after the event): DS has not been forthcoming. Instead DS seems to be actively stonewalling the investigation. In short DS has acted like a guilty party would. Even lying about the most important factor that nearly led to PT getting killed by claiming that the location in question wasn’t properly guarded because it was too dangerous to do so. This was either an outright lie or DS has very low IQ. While DS might not be Einsteins, they can’t be that dumb. A guilty party though might well try to act dumb and incompetent to make themselves appear unable to have orchestrated something of this nature.

Conclusion: Highly suspicious. DS appears to have their hands all over this. Whether they will ever be held responsible though is very unlikely unless someone talks.

This is stupid hyperbole. It wasn’t a one in a million shot or anywhere close. Maybe one in a hundred is believable. Probably more like a 1 in 5 chance. One in a million is winning the lottery type odds and yes, someone usually wins, but only because a million (or whatever) people are buying lottery tickets each week. One guy buying a single ticket each week for even up to a 100 years will almost certainly never win. So if a guy makes what’s estimated to be a 1 in a million shot on the first try, then something was obviously wrong with the estimation and the underlying assumptions that went into it.

Yes, i think some have selective memory of what FNC used to be like. Remember Shep Smith? Alan Colmes? Right now there’s only one show i avoid at all costs, the one with Neil Cavuto. But that’s okay since i just switch over to Fox Business and Larry Kudlow.

All in all i think today’s FNC lineup is actually pretty good and maybe as good as it’s ever been. Especially since back in the day we didn’t have much of anything on the weekend, but now we have the weekend morning crew (Will, Pete, Rachel) and Mark Levin on both Saturday and Sunday nights.

Also, his walk seems to be a bit different. More toned down. Like he might still be in shock, or have a totally different outlook on life. Which makes sense after Saturday

My initial thought when i noticed this was when he got slammed into by the SS that maybe he got banged up a bit (hurt his hip perhaps). As for the different look in his face, taking painkillers and/or losing not an insignificant amount of blood (Gutfield said on the Five that Trump showed him the wound and it's still bleeding a bit) could also come into play there.

It is weird but then again this was a weird guy and very much a loner type. My impression is that he was heavily into gaming and so was probably interacting with other gamers all the time. Therefore no need for instagram or tiktok or the like.

I’m guessing that gaming was what he lived for basically. Moreover i’m also guessing that it altered his grasp on reality, perhaps to the point where the gaming world felt more real to him than the real world. So i’d be interested to learn what type of games he was playing. Wouldn’t surprise me if they had elements of sniping at bad guys in them (and to him Trump = Hitler = very bad guy who deserves to be taken out).

He probably daydreamed that he would be hailed as a hero.

I'm pretty much to the point of asking not whether it was sabotage or mere incompetence, but just how much of it was planned out. Remember when Peter Struk (sp?) told Lisa Page about an insurance policy if all else failed? Well once again all else failed (ie, lawfare). So did they decide this time to deploy a more lethal fallback plan? Such as leaving an opening for some would-be assassin to saunter in and take out Trump, while at the same time having agents in the field slow-walk the capture of the Person of Interest and not inform Trump's security detail to get him off the stage until the POI is caught?

If so, then i imagine the initial plans may have looked something like this:

Plan A
1. Take out Trump by any non-violent means possible (lawfare, removing him from the ballot, etc).
2. If plan A fails, proceed to Plan B as a last resort.

Plan B
1. Turn up the rhetoric on Trump by comparing him to Hitler and saying that he is a threat to democracy. This will greatly increase the odds of creating would-be assassins and having them show up at events. (This may have been planned or just happened organically).
2. Leave holes in Trump's security perimeter at every turn, such as not properly securing roofs within short range of the stage at rallies.
3. Use DEI to not only surround Trump with as many under-experienced or under-qualified agents as possible, but also agents who are more likely to be anti-Trump (such as transgender liberal types) so that we might be able to use one or more as cohorts.
4. If this plan works there is risk to us, but we can hide behind DEI hiring (we know conservatives will point to this) in order to explain away failures and bad decision-making. We ourselves can feign stupidity if need be (such as, say, pretending that we thought certain types of roofs were too dangerous to station officers on). This hopefully will give us enough cover. People will be highly suspicious of course, but our politicians and our media will be quick to ridicule them as crazy right-wing conspiracy theorists.

So she’s saying that would-be assassins will have free access to pitched roofs in order to take shots at presidents or carry out other terrorist attacks? I’m sure our enemies around the globe are happy learning this. They’re probably already informing the terrorist cells who have entered the US in recent years that our Death Star level vulnerability are slightly sloping roofs.

Furthermore, officials are saying they beefed up Trump’s security because Iran was plotting to kill him (as if that were anything new). But even if so, apparently the extra security was holed up inside the building instead of outside it or on the roof. Makes sense, right?

No, none of it makes sense. It’s all so stupid and especially seeing this about pitched roofs pushes me further into the ‘intentional setup’ camp.

Some here say that Cheatle is stupid. I highly doubt it. My guess is that she is a very smart person trying to sound dumb. But why would she do that? So that democrat politicians and democrat media will able to chalk it up to incompetence/naivety instead of something much more sinister? Is her ‘stupidity’ intended then as a shield for plausible deniability?

Simply put, there is no excuse for what happened and it is increasingly hard to believe that she and her SS planners really could be that incompetent UNLESS they tried.

Too many things make no sense from a security standpoint. But looking at it from a different angle, of wanting to create insecurity instead of security, and then the moves that were made (or the ones that weren’t made) suddenly make far more sense.

So has this sort of thing been happening at other recent rallies? Were other near-by structures left essentially unguarded? And would more have been left unguarded at future rallies if nothing had happened at this rally? Were they metaphorically leaving the backdoor unlocked hoping some useful idiot worked about Trump being Hitler would walk in and do what they couldn’t do via lawfare?

More and more i fear that the answers to these questions are yes.

I think several things feed into the conspiracy theories:
1. Can the SS really be THIS incompetent? So much so that a 20 year old with no special forces training could sneak into the perimeter, get up on a roof, and take several clear shot at President Trump? Even though he was spotted well in advance of the actual shooting?

2. It isn’t necessary that they (whoever was behind this) were anticipating someone would come up on that particular roof at that particular event, but rather they may have intentionally been leaving holes in security at multiple Trump events in the hope that at some point something like this would eventually happen.

3. Couple that with the amped up talk about Trump being a threat to democracy and comparing him to Hitler and they would know that the chances of a useful idiot trying to take him out would be much greater than ever before (i’m not saying that the Hitler talk was planted by them, just that it allowed the planners to think they had a decent chance of this kind of trap ‘triggering’ at some point).

4. Lawfare didn’t work. And it isn’t a big leap to go from wanting to bankrupt and imprison your opponent for the rest of his life to be willing to take his life when the lawfare didn’t deliver the ‘kill shot’ to his candidacy that was hoped for. (Ironically, as with the assignation attempt, it merely grazed him and only made him stronger going forward).

5. Although their actions and statements might look stupid (intentionally so most of the time) the people behind such an attempt are actually not stupid. They don’t want to be directly tied to an assassination attempt of course. Therefore they have to do it in a roundabout way and simply hope they get lucky at some point. Leaving their enemy vulnerable like Trump was, especially at a time in the campaign when he was highly likely to be targeted, was probably as good a plan they could come up with and still have plausible deniability in the form of seeming to be incompetent.

Myself, i don’t completely buy into it. Originally i was like maybe there’s a 10% chance of sabotage going on. But each day that goes by and we learn more about what happened, that percentage has gone up in my mind to where it is now probably at about 50% chance or slightly more. It MUST be looked into. Such incompetence at this level should never happen, DEI notwithstanding. So when it does, you have to ask yourself if it was intentional.

Yeah. I have a sneaking suspicion that if Joe or Jill had been giving a speech there that day, that they’d have had someone up on the roof at least have had armed guards watching the building from all sides (not to mention a drone or helicopter in the air as well).

The head of SS said that the roof was slanted and therefore much too dangerous to station someone up there. Putting aside how weak & ridiculous that sounds, but if that’s the case then the counter snipers should have had orders to shoot and kill the moment they spotted someone up there since he won’t be one of their guys. And of course they should have had eyes on and around that building regardless.

SS is supposed be best of the best. Even if that is not the case, they should at least be competent. So how could they not have gamed out every possibility and how to react instantaneously to any threat? It boggles the mind. Either the SS is completely incompetent or the higher ups intentionally allowed vulnerabilities to creep into Trump’s protective shield, hoping some useful idiot (inspired by “threat to democracy” propaganda) would take advantage of these vulnerabilities at some point.

Lawfare failed (or at least didn’t deliver the kill shot to Trump’s candidacy that they were hoping for) and so this was their next move? For if you are willing to imprison your opponent for the rest of his life, then what else would you be willing to do if that didn’t work?

Also apparently one of the drugs he was abusing can cause paranoia. My guess is that Murdaugh developed a paranoia centered aruond both Maggie and Paul, perhaps in part because they were the people he was around the most (ie, convenient targets for the paranoia to latch on to) but also due to the boat accident at least in regards to Paul.

But having said that, Murdaugh using paranoia as an excuse for lying to the police on the night of the murder doesn’t ring true to me. Mostly because paranoia is similar to narcissism in that there is an abnormal focus on oneself, though instead of self-love there is a nebulus fear of being harmed in some way. Yet after seeing people close to you killed, a normal reaction would be to go into shock and for your emotions to become numb for a period of time. Thus knocking aside paranoid feelings (or any feelings of self-preservation) at least until the shock wears off. Yet Murdaugh’s focus turns immediately to protecting himself.

That reminds me of what Nancy Grace said this morning on Fox, pointing out that Murdaugh testified that he felt paranoid about the police learning he was at the kennel which is why he lied. But why would saying he was at the kennel trigger paranoia? Wouldn’t it be normal for him to be at the kennel on any given day? And on the night of the murders when he ‘discovered’ the bodies, he (if innocent) wouldn’t have known when they were killed. 10 minutes earlier? 20 minutes? 30? An hour? So why would that have triggered any warnings UNLESS of course he knew that saying he was the kennel a couple hours earlier would put him there not only at the crime scene but also at the approximate time of when the murders occurred.

However i disagree with her on one thing. She thought it was a mistake for Murdaugh to testify but after the witnesses came forward saying that was his voice on the video, i think he and his team knew they had no shot of getting a hung jury unless they did something to shake things up. And the only thing that might shake things up would be for him to testify. A sort of Hail Mary pass, hoping that it might connect with one or more of the jurors who might let a sense of empathy towards him override rational thinking.

As cliche as it may sound, my theory is that Murdaugh has a Jekyll and Hyde thing going on. Namely, the Hyde (or monster side of him) was created/strengthened by his addictions and further strengthened by the stress originating from the aftermath of the boat incident involving his son Paul.

If this is so then it stands to reason that he might come to view the Hyde side as not really him, but instead something artificially created by painkillers and by a catastrophic event not of his own making but externally wrought by the actions of his son (which in turn might be why he wanted to kill his son, as the source of his whole life and reputation suddenly falling apart).

Therefore when Murdaugh testified something to the effect of "I would never intentionally hurt Maggie or Paul", what he really was saying is that at the time of the murder he (his body) was merely a puppet to this monstrous side of him that had taken over. (And on that note it would have been interesting if the prosecutor had jumped in and asked "You say you didn't intentionally hurt them, Mr. Murdaugh, but did your raise the gun with your arm and did you pull the trigger with your finger?").

Oh and one more thing. Murdaugh had prefaced the above statement by apologizing to his wife and son, which sounded extremely odd and almost like an admission of guilt. To me this was him acknowledging that he (his Jekyll persona if you will) held himself at least somewhat responsible for the killings even though he believed that he was being controlled by this other persona.

Just some general thoughts based off of some of the discussion here.

Regarding the dog, i think it’s likely he slept on the 1st floor even if his owner’s room was on the 2nd or 3rd floor. Also keep in mind that this was a party house (noisy) and apparently the girls were on the phone all the time, such as that very night with them calling the BF at close to 3am. So it probably wasn’t uncommon to hear them laughing and talking loudly, maybe even playfully shouting or screaming at times. Therefore it’s reasonable to think that the dog (and the other 2 roommates) learned to tune out most noises coming from upstairs.

Conversely, we don’t know what the acoustics were like in that house. Could be people on the 1st floor couldn’t hear much of anything happening up above, and that goes doubly for those sleeping inside a bedroom with the door closed.

As to the killer. It’s interesting that he probably entered from the back. If you see pictures of the house, it is kind of a strange layout since if entering from the front you find yourself (as expected) on the 1st floor....but from the back you instead find yourself on the 2nd floor. Was the killer just fortunate that the dog wasn’t on the 2nd floor (if indeed the dog was downstairs) or did he already know that? And if he knew, then perhaps he avoided going downstairs since that would obviously alert the dog who would start barking and thus put the killer in danger of having the cops called or s/o pulling a gun on him.

A few other odds & ends:

I don’t buy that the girls were nervous about s/t and therefore tried to call the BF. If they were nervous, they would have made sure all the doors and windows were locked and probably would have had the dog sleep upstairs with them as well.

As to the 911 call. Again i think the layout of the house comes into play here. The friends arriving at the house probably entered from the front and thus didn’t notice the blood dripping down from outside which i think was toward the back of the house. Still, the roommates at least should have seen bloody shoeprints leading away from the rooms or something of that nature.

Plus didn’t they go into the rooms or did the killer lock the bedroom doors behind him? And did he also remove his shoes so as to not leave bloody shoeprints? If he did those things, he must have watched a lot of CSI or similar shows and is a cold, calculating monster.

More likely though i suspect that the person calling 911 was in a state of shock which led to a poorly worded call. And/or perhaps this person reooiled at coming right out saying “they are dead”, instead using “unconscious person” in a euphemistic sort of way, or else somehow hoped against all hope that they were still alive.

I remember Wallace during the Mueller hearings would often say around noontime that this testimony or these witnesses are devastating to the President and he doesn’t see how he can survive politically. But of course that was before the Republicans had a chance to cross-examine the witnesses and by the evening the “devastating” bombshell would inevitably turn out to be a dud (much to his disappointment i’m sure). And so it’s no surprise that once again he jumps to a biased conclusion instead of waiting to see how everything plays out.

Oops, they omitted a key word in the 2nd paragraph which i’ll helpfully supply in CAPS:

“a broad coalition of CORRUPT top government and industry officials is declaring that....”

It’s not so much the “abandoning their base” part that bothers me. It’s the intentionally joining in on the mainstream media and Big Tech effort to sabotage the President that i view as unforgivable if not outright criminal.

In my opinion we need to support a media company owned by a true conservative patriot. I don’t know much about Newsmax in that regard, but i believe One America News fits that bill and that’s who i hope emerges in the aftermath of the Fall of Fox.

I never watched his show that much. Mostly just Fox & Friends and The Five, plus some weekend shows. But i did think he displayed real courage by not backing down to cancel culture and i respected that. At the same time though i never got the feeling he was a guy who had Trump’s back.