Dave Simpson: The One Thing We Aren't – Surprised

There's so much low-hanging fruit this election season that we better pick some quick before it falls on the orchard floor and rots.

- Most of us are shocked, appalled and sickened by two assassination attempts on Donald Trump. But the one thing we shouldn't be is surprised.

After all, those who oppose Trump with a peculiarly vociferous venom have tried virtually everything else to drive a stake in his heart.

They responded to his election in 2016 with vows to "Resist," and made good on the threat.

Some of the very people who now call on Republicans to pledge to accept election results doubted his election, and protested his election by the hundreds of thousands.

Some wanted the attorney general to wear a wire to entrap the new president in a crime, just the first in a long line of back-stabbing mutineers.

They claimed he colluded with Russia, but a $36 million investigation showed there was no actionable evidence of that. One cock-and-bull story had him hiring prostitutes to urinate on a bed in Moscow.

They impeached him over a phone call to Ukraine, but that came up puny in the Senate.

An anonymous staffer wrote a letter to The New York Times, explaining that his cut-throat staff was doing its best to undermine his agenda.

Then they impeached him again, claiming his call to march "peacefully and patriotically" to the Capitol was an attempt to overthrow the government. Some coup. No firearms. No military. And the only directly-resultant death was of a demonstrator, shot by a cop.

FBI agents searched his home – a first for an ex-president – for classified documents, even as Joe Biden had stacks of classified documents next to the Corvette in his garage.

And, another first, they brought over 90 felony charges, of dubious merit, against a former president, in four jurisdictions.

After all that, many of us asked, "What's left? Killing him?"

Sadly prescient. And there are still 43 days left until the election.

Let's just hope the Secret Service gets its unexpectedly incompetent act together before some nut kills the former president.

It's Fracktacular - The land under our place near Cheyenne was fracked several years ago, and contrary to the claims of skeptics, flames have not shot out of our faucets, and we haven't had one earthquake.

When we bought the land 10 years ago, the former owners kindly included the mineral rights. We didn't think much of it until an offer was made to lease our rights, and the payment paid for my riding mower. When that lease expired, a second one netted an equal payment.

"Cool," we said.

It took a long time for a well to be drilled – way across the railroad and I-80 from us, where we couldn't even see it. Then they fracked it, and we started getting checks for our tiny share of the oil and gas they were extracting from beneath us.

So far, the only downside is the trouble of taking a check to the bank every month. It's not a lot of money – less than $200. Beer money. But nice.

So we scratch our heads when we see Vice President Kamala Harris saying years ago that she was dead set against fracking, and would stop it if elected, but today wondering repeatedly where on earth we got the crazy notion that she was against fracking.

Our advice, having been fracked: Try it. You might like it.

Landslide Landon - And lastly, Rep. Landon Brown, who calls himself "Wyoming's Gold Standard," said in 2022 that Donald Trump was "unfit to serve" as president.

I thought that might be a problem for Brown this election year, in a state that voted almost 70 percent for Donald Trump in 2020.

But it turns out Brown considers Kamala Harris even more problematic, and now supports the previously unfit Donald Trump. He must figure Harris is even less fit.

And it worked. Barely.

Brown fended off a primary challenger by a mere 17 votes.

According to historian Robert Caro, after a narrow victory, Lyndon Johnson was known for a time in Washington as "Landslide Lyndon."

From now on, I think we should refer to Wyoming's Gold Standard as "Landslide Landon."

Dave Simpson can be reached at: