Cops in South Korea say the sick asshole who stabbed losing 2022 Democratic presidential election candidate Lee Jae-myung in the neck during an appearance in the city of Busan last week had plotted the attack for months with the express aim of preventing Lee from challenging incumbent conservative President Yoon Suk Yeol again in 2027, the New York Times reports.

Busan police chief Woo Cheol-moon told reporters Wednesday that the 66 year-old would-be assassin, who was identified only by his surname, Kim, had asked a friend to forward an eight-page manifesto to media just prior to the attack. Cops were able to intercept it, but Woo shared some specifics about Kim’s motive: Frustration over the slow progress of criminal investigations into Lee and a fear that the Dem could be elected president in 2027 given Yoon’s squeaker of a win in 2022.

Democrats in South Korea are legitimately the center-left party just like the Democrats in the United States cultural differences aside. We note that here because the parties in both Japan and Australia known literally as the “Liberal Democrats” are in fact the right wingers. Then there’s that Lee – who was released from the hospital on Wednesday and appears to have fully recovered – has been accused of staging suicides to cover up his corruption and all that kind of shit. And that, after the stabbing, Yoon’s fanboys claimed online that Lee had been stabbed with a “paper knife” or “wooden chopstick” or that the attack was simply “fake news,” while Lee’s fans accused cops of withholding details on Kim in order to minimize the potential fallout ahead of parliamentary elections in April.

All of this is to say it maps very neatly onto how you would expect such a story to have gone down here at home – or really have gone down here – that Lee is the Hillary of South Korea while Kim is a mix of the MAGAbomber and David DePape, that even an act of violence by a radicalized right winger has to be a false flag or a cover-up aimed at discrediting conservatives ahead of a midterm.