The rejoinder to recent “unfiltered” sputterings of Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump…

Hey!  Look who’s behind Hillary Clinton at a campaign rally!

And while Seddique Mateen didn’t kill anybody, he’s kind of a weird guy for a candidate to associate with. Though he has condemned what his son did as an act of a terrorist, he also has praised the Taliban and claimed to be president of Afghanistan, has condemned homosexuality and even said that Pulse, the gay nightclub where his son gunned down 49 people, was partly to blame for the shootings. And yet, there he was, sitting behind Clinton and clearly visible to TV cameras.

There are two possibilities here. One is that Clinton’s campaign staffers were, to coin a phrase, “extremely careless” in whom they let on the risers behind her while she spoke. That’s basically the campaign’s story: They say that it was an open rally for Democrats, and that anyone could show up. (Mateen is a Democrat who has endorsed Clinton.) So they just didn’t know. “The rally was a 3,000-person, open-door event for the public,” said the campaign. “This individual wasn’t invited as a guest, and the campaign was unaware of his attendance until after the event.”
This is hard to believe. Campaign events are tightly scripted — the parts that show on TV even more so. That just anyone who wandered up might be seated right behind the candidate where whatever they did would be on TV is unlikely.

So.  What is the answer?

The other possibility is that they knew and were OK with it.  As the “Hillary PR Team” Twitter parody account said, “Seddique Mateen is just one of the many Americans who have lost a loved one to police violence and realize Hillary will stand up for them.”
Well, maybe. But what other message could they have wanted to send? Nothing that they want to stand by now, I guess, since they’re claiming they didn’t know he was there.

Can you please finish the thought, dark as it may be?  It basically makes some sense, Hillary Clinton’s claim… they vetted whoever sat in as to whether they were an immediate threat, carrying weapons, and nothing else… you have to do a zoom in lense to spot the faces in the crowd.
I suppose the meta-narrative may be a certain naivete — she can’t handle the optics here, she can’t handle the emails?

This is what Senator Jeff Sessions, big Trump supporter from Alabama, blasts away at media bias in not focusing on this one…

Even when Secretary Clinton was in the midst of her worst week — as it was revealed by FBI Director James Comey that she mishandled classified information, and later when the Taliban-supporting father of the Orlando mass killer sat behind her in her recent Orlando speech […]

Meanwhile, onto Donald Trump’s latest…

“Hillary wants to abolish — essentially abolish the Second Amendment. By the way, if she gets to pick, if she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks. Although the Second Amendment people, maybe there is, I don’t know,” Trump said.

Secret Service are aware and have spoken with Trump and…

Cue the defense.  Obama used a violent metaphor and quote from popular culture, “bring a gun to a knife fight”… Hillary Clinton and the “RFK” precedent…

Clinton got a bit of flak on that score and was frankly in some ways in the same sort of flailing Trump’s campaign is in, Obama’s is clear in context… um…

And then we go back to some conservative rural Congressmen suggesting Bill Clinton better not show up in their neck of the woods because… oh boy… and, all right here it is…

During an interview in 1994, then-North Carolina Republican Senator Jesse Helms said President Bill Clinton “better watch out if he comes down here. He’d better have a bodyguard.” The Senator was referring to Clinton’s ability to lead the military and said the President would need protection if he visited North Carolina’s military bases. Helms later said the comment was a “mistake.”

Interesting, the next item is what I thought about when I heard– without any of the details– of the flak regarding Trump.  The phrase “Second Amendment remedies”, used by one Sharron Angle in running to deal away the “Harry Reid problems”.

The one thing for Donald Trump.  It diverts from his problems with babies, and perhaps with his newly revealed economic program solves a problem in showing to Republicans that he is, after all, a Republican after all.

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