“Cocked and Loaded” is a) the name of Andrew Dice Clay’s breakthrough 1992 tour, the one for which he wore his soon-to-be-signature huge-collared leather jacket; b) a 2006 album by the industrial metal band Revolting Cocks; c) a malaprop for the actual military phrase “lock and load”; and d) the latest Twitter fodder all but gift-wrapped by President Donald Trump for pundits, comics and pickers of low-hanging social media fruit.
Or e) all of the above. Ding ding ding.
This morning, Trump used the bizarre, probably mistaken, certainly mangled, wording in a series of tweets that attempted to explain his last-second decision to halt an air strike against Iran in retaliation for shooting down one of our drones this week.
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The four-tweet string, beginning with a swipe at Barack Obama (see the tweets below), read, in part: “On Monday [Iran] shot down an unmanned drone flying in International Waters. We were cocked & loaded to retaliate last night on 3 different sights when I asked, how many will die. 150 people, sir, was the answer from a General. 10 minutes before the strike I stopped it, not proportionate to shooting down an unmanned drone.”
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Aside from serious questions about the likelihood of a scenario as described (the president hadn’t been provided a potential casualty report prior to being “cocked & loaded?”; and “Did President Trump just reveal national security deliberations on Twitter?”), the phrasing unleashed the expected barrage of social media wisecracks and amazement.
“‘Cocked and Loaded.’ Michael Wolff just got off the phone with his publisher,” tweeted frequent CNN contributor Michael Weiss. Quipped documentarian Jeremy Newberger: “Amazingly, cocked and loaded is also the Secret Service’s codenames for Eric and Don Jr.”
Joking aside, the explanation that Trump was aiming for “locked and loaded” – meaning a gun’s round has been chambered and is ready to fire – is likely. On Aug. 11, 2017, Trump proved the phrase was in his vocabulary, tweeting: “Military solutions are now fully in place, locked and loaded, should North Korea act unwisely.”
Here are some of today’s cocked, locked, loaded and fired tweets:
And these oldies but goodies began to resurface:
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