Then too, this deliberately forgotten attempt!

MONDAY, JULY 15, 2024

The plane crash on the South Lawn:  As of 2 o'clock, Baltimore's predicted high temperature for today stood at 100 degrees. 

Tomorrow, the predicted high is 101. Something like two weeks back, the resident chimp at the Fox News Channel referred to climate change as one of "the major hoaxes."

So it goes within the withered remnants of "our democracy." Conduct like that goes unremarked and unreported by Blue America's finer "news orgs."

In this somewhat sardonic new post, Kevin Drum has listed American assassination attempts of the past maybe eighty years. He lists the attempts that get discussed. He doesn't list the apparent assassination attempt which basically got disappeared.

The year was 1994; the jackals of the mainstream press were baying at the president's door. This was the start of a lengthy press corps war in which the group's enmity would eventually be transferred to Candidate Gore, then to Candidate Hillary Clinton.

Journalists and academics have buried news of that long war quite well. Also buried away and forgotten? The plane crash on the South Lawn!

To recall that sign of things to come, you can just click here. You'll be reading a retrospective report published by Politico in 2018.

Headline included, this is the way it began:

Stolen plane crashes into White House South Lawn, Sept. 12, 1994

Shortly before 2 a.m. on this day in 1994, a red and white, two-seat, propeller-driven Cessna 150 flew low over 17th Street in the heart of the nation’s capital, banked leftward in a U-turn near the Washington Monument, and headed toward the presidential bedroom in the White House.

Gliding just over the treetops, the Cessna passed over the fountain and the red cannas flowers blooming on the South Lawn, bounced off the grass just short of the mansion, crashed through the branches of a magnolia tree planted by President Andrew Jackson and came to rest in a crumpled heap two stories below the Clintons’ unoccupied bedroom. The impact immediately killed the pilot, Frank Eugene Corder.

Some 50 yards from the Oval Office, just around the corner from the Rose Garden, sat a tangle of metal, what was left of the plane’s nose, inches away from the barred office window of the White House physician and one floor below the State Dining Room. A twisted brown aircraft seat rested in the dirt just left of the wreckage.

As daylight broke, the Secret Service hung a tarpaulin over the plane to conceal its identification numbers.

Politico's report continues from there. (Mental illness may have been involved.) But was that an assassination attempt? 

You can teach it flat if you prefer. We'd more likely teach it round.

The Crazy was just getting started back then. It was being driven along by Newt Gingrich, but also by Rush Limbaugh. 

(The Fox News Channel didn't exist. Before long, Jerry Falwell had skin in the game.)

The Crazy was coming for the future. The mainstream press corps largely took part, but also maintained massive silence.

Today, we have a little chimp telling millions of viewers that climate change is one of the major hoaxes. As he leaps and flings his poo about, the finer news orgs in Blue America make a point of averting their gaze.

The Crazy was coming on strong at that point. But was that an assassination attempt?

A person could teach it flat or round.  On balance, we'd say that it was.