We look to our leaders to set good examples - and to tone down the political hate-speech - first

Former President Donald Trump came within an inch or less of being assassinated as he spoke at an outdoors re-election campaign rally in Pennsylvania on Saturday, as a bullet fired from a would-be assassin’s rifle from a rooftop about 130 yards away grazed his right ear. 

If Trump had not been turning his head a little as the rifle was shot at him, he would have been struck in the head by the bullet and likely killed.

A person attending the Trump re-election rally was killed by one of the assassin’s bullets. Some other people were injured by the assassin’s bullets.

A U.S. Secret Service counter sniper expert shot and killed the would-be assassin within seconds of the shooting.

Everyone is horrified by the assassination attempt on Trump’s life but no one is surprised that it happened.

Such is the sorry state of national politics and the eroding rule-of-law in this country.

Trump, current President Joe Biden, Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and many other politicians, are all calling for the vicious political rhetoric to stop and for all Americans to take a step back and to refrain from turning political differences into full-blown hatred and hate-speech directed towards those who have different opinions.

It’s too bad that it’s taken the near-assassination of the former president and the current leading Republican Party presidential candidate for our leaders to call for cooler heads and more-responsible campaign speech.

Long gone, it seems, are the days that the U.S. president was always at least respected by American citizens.

It started with the 24-hour, seven-days-a-week, political pundits on TV mixing news with opinions and it spread to social media outlets with no one being held responsible for spewing lies and other hate-speech, spawning the evil environment in which “any means goes so long as my political point of view and my political candidate is the winner in the end.’’

And then recently, when President Biden said on national TV that it was “time to put Trump in the bull’s-eye’’ it was clear that political hatred and hate-speech had become the norm for the politicians themselves.

Republicans and Democrats don’t just disagree, they HATE each other and we’re all conditioned to hate people in the other, inferior political party. That is just wrong.

It may be too late to expect that the appeal from our political leaders to turn down the heat on the political rhetorics could be heeded, especially since our political leaders seem to be about the best at spewing it.

Nonetheless, such inflammatory remarks must be called out when we read them or hear them.

Our leaders must be good leaders and set good examples, or they must be voted out of office.

The recent barbaric assassination attempt on the life of Trump shows everyone that our country has learned nothing really in the last 43 years since the attempted assassination of President Ronald Reagan.

This is yet another reason why we need term limits for members of Congress in the U.S., in my opinion. 

The professional politicians’ hunger for power, and their need to stay in power, is never quenched, it seems, nor is their quest for more wealth, leading them to win-at-all-costs actions.

Also, political hate-speech and political lies expressed on TV or social media won’t stop until libel and slander laws are passed to address that on the internet and stop it.

Until there is more accountability and punishment for the whole range of unlawful things going on in our national government, expect more of the same in the coming days - just as soon as everyone forgets that one American was killed at a rally in Pennsylvania and Trump was almost killed, too.