Scandals, failed assassinations and political rhetoric: Both sides go high and low

It is a bizarre campaign filled with bullets and blame-shifting.

It’s also a campaign packed with gossip and unproven accusations, exaggerations and falsehoods. 

Just ask your dog or cat.

TRUMP BLAMES KAMALA RHETORIC FOR 2ND ASSASSINATION ATTEMPT AS DEMOCRATS BLAME HIM FOR HAITIANS IN OHIO

To have two attempted assassinations against a presidential nominee within six weeks is absolutely chilling. There should be no debate whatsoever. Joe Biden, having made a friendly call to Donald Trump – who said he "couldn’t have been nicer" – should order the Secret Service to protect Trump as if he were president now. 

That means the agency would have shut down his West Palm Beach golf course while he played. This should happen immediately. Golf courses are inherently hard to protect because they are large, flat surfaces with almost no place to take cover. A Washington Post editorial agrees with me. Forget the bureaucratic nuances, this is nuts. Had a sharp-eyed agent not spotted the barrel of a gun sticking through a chain-link fence, the shooter, who has a long criminal record, might well have succeeded. 

Trump may have nine lives, but we don’t want him losing any more.

Unlike his call to tone things down after the near-miss in Butler – which didn’t last long – Trump went on the offensive, telling Fox Digital that the Florida gunman "believed the rhetoric of Biden and Harris, and he acted on it. Their rhetoric is causing me to be shot at."

It’s true that the Democrats have constantly described Trump as a danger to democracy, a would-be dictator who tried to steal an election and would never allow another one. The hostile media have played a prominent role here, routinely likening Trump to Hitler or Mussolini.

Trump, for his part, has called his opponents a danger to democracy as well, saying they have weaponized law enforcement against him for partisan reasons. 

KAMALA STAYS ON OFFENSE, TRUMP WENT TO PERSONAL ATTACKS, ABC MUCH TOUGHER ON FORMER PRESIDENT

And Democrats have tried to flip the script, trotting out a long list of inflammatory comments by Trump since he started running in 2015.

In my view, the media have moved on too quickly from the second assassination attempt. But why waste time on a senseless search for "motive," except for political talking points? Anyone who tries to kill a presidential candidate for the notoriety is by definition a crazy person.

JD Vance says that since nobody has tried to kill Harris and Trump has survived two attempts, "I’d say that’s pretty strong evidence that the left needs to tone down the rhetoric, and needs to cut this crap out."

Vance has been vindicated in another way. I don’t know why Trump brought up the thoroughly debunked tale about "they’re eating the dogs, they’re eating the cats" after an influx of 15,000 legal Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio. Even Republican Gov. Mike DeWine calls that a false "piece of garbage."

Trump’s running mate has also spread the story, and was accused of prompting the bomb threats that have shut schools and other facilities there for days – something for which no public figure should be blamed.

Now we learn that all those calls came from another country in an effort to boost friction in the Ohio town.

DEBATE CHALLENGE: THE PRESSURE’S ON KAMALA AS SHE AND TRUMP TRADE FLIP-FLOP CHARGES

Meanwhile, I had no intention of bringing up unsubstantiated online rumors against Laura Loomer, the far-right conspiracist who thinks 9/11 was an inside job, because I don’t think a self-described Islamophobe should get more oxygen.

But now she’s hit back on her Rumble podcast:  

"The media now is accusing me of, you know, having an affair with Donald Trump. Such a salacious lie, so malicious, so disrespectful to Donald Trump and Melania Trump! They’ve taken it so far!

"And, you know, if I was a leftist journalist, if I was a Democrat, my God, the media would be up in arms if the Republican media was doing this to a, you know, a left-wing journalist–

"My God, they’re misogynist. They’re bullying a woman. They’re trying to, they’re trying to Monica Lewinsky her!"

And then she smeared Kamala Harris, saying she had performed oral sex on Willie Brown to get to the top. This was before Brown was San Francisco mayor and the two openly dated for a couple of years in the 1990s, a decade after he had separated from his wife.  

So much of our politics now turns on charges and countercharges of misinformation and disinformation. So I find the latest blast from Hillary Clinton almost inexplicable.

Yes, she’s promoting her fourth memoir, and in her first interview, with Rachel Maddow, the former first lady, senator, secretary of state and presidential nominee attacked free speech.

She called for criminal charges and civil penalties against Americans "engaged" in spreading "propaganda."

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What? Who decides where to draw the line between aggressive advocacy and propaganda? Do we want one administration’s Justice Department to make these calls against politicians, activists and journalists aligned with the other party?

It will never pass, but even as a bit of messaging, what an assault on the First Amendment right to free speech.