Self-appointed assassin Ryan Routh seems to have "more in common" with both Iran and Trump's political enemies than we care to admit

As the American Presidential race gets even nastier, are we missing something?

I’ve been regrettably out of commission for the past month because of a unexpected and extremely complicated turn of events with global implications that has forced my family to hunker down and become absorbed in the exigencies of the moment. 

We are fine, and no need to worry about us, but I haven’t been able to write this column until now.  I’m finally back at the keyboard.

Ironically, things seem to have become as crazy at the planetary level as they are in my own personal spaces.  The global situation from Beirut to Kyiv, permanently on a short fuse, is about to explode again.

Or at least a lot of pagers in Lebanon already have.

And there’s our own filthy, nasty, and detonative domestic politics that is always one spark, or Sarajevo-like incident, away from a chain reaction that will make everything quickly go blooey.

Consider the new fashion of gunning down the candidate you hate.

Routinely framed by right and left as an apocalyptic battle for the preservation of American democracy, the Presidential election that is now only six weeks away has been rocked by a second attempt on the life Donald Trump within only two months, while the alleged assassin apparently wrote a letter urging the public to continue his efforts to murder the former chief executive and offering $150,000 to “whomever can complete the job”.

Meanwhile, the Presidential campaign fight between Trump and Kama Harris has morphed into a stylized, theatrical version of Extreme Championship Wrestling with lots of baiting, taunting, and gross exaggeration that avoids virtually all serious issues.

As renowned Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan recently quipped, “if you’re an undecided, unsure or wavering voter it looks like Awful vs. Empty.”

As numerous analysts on both ends of the spectrum have noted, voters know Trump and what he stands for, but Harris in Newman’s take appears to have made the conscious decision that the secret to winning in November amounts to “coming across as wholly without substance”.

In an era of toxic politics Harris when Democrats and Republicans have their weapons cocked are behaving toward each other like the Gangs of New York, Harris is content to coo that “the vast majority of us as Americans have so much more in common than what separates us”.

Noonan wryly notes: “that isn’t the answer of a candidate trying to be forthcoming and using her limited time in an attempt to be better understood. It is the sound of someone running out the clock”.

At least half the country – ironically, the more educated - seems to go for this inane drivel, while the other half clamors for raw meat to be tossed into the ring.  It is less a silver lining in the clouds than an unidentified aerial phenomenon that can trigger all sorts of wacky reactions on the ground.

I have published here and elsewhere extensively about the corruption and imbecility of our ruling knowledge class that controls the federal government, universities, financial system, and mainstream media.  In all honesty if they themselves had any substance, let alone dignity, they would vote Democrat over Republican (as they predictably do) by acknowledging it was a Hobson’s choice and apologize for doing so while holding their noses.

But the fact that they go gaga over somebody, no matter her race or gender, who is a pure Rorschach blot who constantly says the opposite of what her actual political track record shows while strategically refusing to give a substantive answer to any meaningful question, tells us we’re truly in trouble.

If as a member of the establishment you are bent on intentionally stoking wild conspiracy theories that might even be true, that’s the kind of candidate you clamor for.

Hillary showed her cards at the outset, and was narrowly defeated in 2016.  Kamala hopes to close the teeny, tiny margin of “undecided” voters in 2024, by zeroing in perhaps on the same kinds of lonely and confused souls who are willing to send by email their banking login credentials to a “Nigerian prince” who promises to hand over his inheritance to them.

No matter who wins on Nov. 5, the craziness that took place between election night 2020 and Inauguration Day on January, 2021 is apt this time around to be mild by comparison.

The real game hasn’t even started, and no one has sung the National Anthem yet.

But let’s get back to the Middle East.

Consider the following seemingly “random” news items from recent weeks as well as recent years.

Ryan Routh, Trump’s would be assassin, has expressed a fondness for Iran and has even encouraged the Iranians among others to assassinate him. 

In his now infamous letter Routh also wrote: “I am man enough to say that I misjudged and made a terrible mistake and Iran I apologize. You are free to assassinate Trump as well as me for that error in judgment and the dismantling of the deal”.

A Pakistani by the name of Asif Merchant was actually arrested a little over two months ago by the FBI in an Iranian sponsored plot to kill Trump.

The feds have been warning as far back as 2012 that there are Iranian sleeper cells poised to wreak havoc should any serious conflict break out in the Middle East and draws in the United States.

Researchers for the Program on Extremism at George Washington University warned in 2022 that the Iran-backed global terrorist organization Hezbollah, now locking horns with the Israeli defense forces in southern Lebanon, has penetrated American institutions at startling and dangerous levels.  They observe:

While groups like the Islamic State and Al-Qaeda have dominated headlines for years, other terrorist organizations such as Lebanese Hezbollah (or simply Hezbollah) have developed a significant support base in the United States. From fundraising rings to weapons procurement and more, Hezbollah’s influence spans across the country, even if the group’s activities rarely make the front pages. While Hezbollah has not executed a successful terrorist attack in the United States, the group still attempts to develop the operational capacity to do so, and continues to use the United States as a financial and logistical hub to support its activities and operations around the world.

Meanwhile, the Biden administration and the “good vibes” gamers of Harris’ Presidential campaign have decided that leaning ever harder on the Jewish state to make peace with those who are bent on its annihilation is somehow the only reasonable recipe for forestalling Armageddon. 

For example, counterterrorism experts Reuel Marc Gerecht and Ray Takeyh write dryly that “democrats and the American left have achieved what Iranian revolutionaries once would have dismissed as impossible: Tehran sees exploitable divisions between America and Israel”.

They add that “the search for peace and regional stability, the oft-heard aspiration of U.S. policy in the Middle East, now means, when translated into Persian, giving Tehran the bomb”.

And so Iran soon will be just like us insofar as they can incinerate both Tel Aviv and New York.

I’m breathlessly waiting for Harris herself to announce that Americans and the Iranian mullahs, who routinely jail, flog, and even kill young women for not wearing their hijabs properly, “have so much more in common than what separates us.”