Given: That Donald Trump Is mentally Ill

Ever growing opinion of medical professionals is that Donald Trump suffers from an incurable mental illness -- Narcissistic Personality Disorder -- that makes him a danger to America and the world as long as he remain in the Oval Office.

Today, I read that some psychiatric professionals want him to undergo testing. I think this is an important step in assuring Americans of the full state of his health. We have a highly suspicious medical report of Trump's physical condition that boils down to "bigly healthy," from his so-called personal 'physician,' Harold Bornstein.

Again, today we learn from this purported physician that Trump has been taking and is presently taking a medication purported to stimulate hair growth called finasteride, which is primarily designed to treat men with (benign) enlarged prostates. Common side effects of this drug are impotence and mental confusion.

Other prescription drugs he takes regularly are ". . .an antibiotic to control rosacea, a common skin condition that leads to redness, and a statin to bring down blood cholesterol and lipid levels."

Should Trump be subjected to psychological medical evaluation as well as physical evaluation, considering the exhibition of symptoms displayed by his behavior? If found to have a recognized mental illness that impedes judgment, impulse control, and reasoning abilities, should Donald Trump be removed from office?

He's fucked up. Of that there is no doubt.

>1 Limelite: Should he be removed? Yes, definitely!

>2 lriley: Lol. Well put.

Whoever found and continues to find the Clintons were and remain today mentally fit to serve in the office of president of the United States now comes off as a partisan hypocrite when pushing the initiative urged here, angling to eliminate by any available pretext a duly-elected official which he happens not to like and whose actions he disapproves generally.

The premise of this initiative is quite dangerously stupid. It invites a journey into territory where a weak and failing democracy shows itself even further capable of self-destruction by underming basic principles. Trump was elected under the longstanding rules of the electoral college. The correct remedy for those who object to this outcome is to

A.) NEXT TIME, PREPARE AND EXECUTE A WORTHY AND EFFECTIVE CAMPAIGN TO CONVICE YOUR FELLOW CITIZENS TO SUPPORT YOUR FAVORED CANDIDATE, GOD FUCKING DAMNIT!!!!!!!!!

B.) SCRAP THE ELECTORAL COLLEGE SYSTEM IN FAVOR OF AN UNDILUTED MAJORITARIAN VOTE AS ANY RESPECTABLE DEMOCRATIC SYSTEM REQUIRES--PREFERENTIAL VOTING AND RUN-OFFS BETWEEN THE TOP TWO VOTE WINNERS WHERE NO OUTRIGHT MAJORITY IS WON IN A FIRST ROUND WOULD BE MY OWN RECOMMENDATION.

What's being urged here is a "cure" which is far, far worse than the "disease."

I submit that, if one wanted to do so, one could always find a number of medical doctors prepared to certify that the president is or is not physically/mentally fit to discharge his or her duties. What then?

With this fucking idiocy, we move seriously closer to a Soviet-style system of phony democratic forms, operating in fact as cheap and ugly elite power struggles which completely discount genuine popular interests, needs and participation.

Fair political opposition is one thing. This is something entirely improper as it seeks to abusively turn procedures designed and intended for other circumstances to what are the short-sighted needs, as some see it, of the moment.

YOU LOST THE FUCKING ELECTION. THE REASONS, RESPONSIBILITIES AND FAULTS FOR THAT FACT PROPERLY LIE AMONG THE IDIOTICALLY-BLINKERED MORONS WHO FAILED TO SEE WHAT WAS RIGHT UNDER THEIR FUCKING NOSES.

GROW UP.

He undoubtably has Narcissistic Personality Disorder. It should be seriously questioned if he has Alzheimer's or Dementia.

>Whoever found and continues to find the Clintons were and remain today mentally fit to serve in the office of president of the United States now comes off as a partisan hypocrite when pushing the intiative urged here, angling to eliminate by any available pretext a duly-elected official which he happens not to like and whose actions he disapproves generally.

It says a lot about the propaganda efforts Richard Melon Scaife funded in the 1990s that people still believe and parrot them

>6 LamontCranston:

The fake-Democrats (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_Leadership_Council) had a golden opportunity to nominate a rather good, entirely moderate and electable candidate who, the best properly interpreted evidence suggested clearly, was much more than likely to defeat Trump in a two- or even three- or four-way race.

They stupidly and arrogantly blew that chance and stubbornly stuck with a demonstrably dismal candidate, Hillarly Clinton, because she's a woman, because "it was 'her turn'," and for other disgusting and unrespectable reasons.

I supported Sanders. I and several millions of others like me warned that Clinton would lose to Trump. The people whose opinions count most laughed at and scorned us and our warnings. This is their just desserts. Live and learn. Next time, don't be such idiots.

A side note to the attentive reader:

Two days ago marked the fifteenth anniversary of the death of Noble-laureate Wisława Szymborska.

(Maria Wisława Anna Szymborska (2 July 1923 – 1 February 2012) (Polish) poet, essayist, translator and recipient of the 1996 Nobel Prize in Literature.)

"Brueghel's Two Monkeys"

This is what I see in my dreams about final exams:
two monkeys, chained to the floor, sit on the windowsill,
the sky behind them flutters,
the sea is taking its bath.

The exam is the history of Mankind.
I stammer and hedge.

One monkey stares and listens with mocking disdain,
the other seems to be dreaming away --
but when it's clear I don't know what to say
he prompts me with a gentle
clinking of his chain.

Wislawa Szymborska (1923-2012): Bruegel's Two Monkeys, translated from the Polish by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh in Szymborska: View with a Grain of Sand: Selected Poems (1995)

Insomnia. Someone should slap a Fitbit on that boy and stream results to We the People.
(Can you imagine poor Melania even trying?)

>4 proximity1: PREFERENTIAL VOTING AND RUN-OFFS BETWEEN THE TOP TWO VOTE WINNERS WHERE NO OUTRIGHT MAJORITY IS WON IN A FIRST ROUND WOULD BE MY OWN RECOMMENDATION.

I'd prefer a Ranked Voting system (like IRV) where people can list their votes in order and thus get the benefit of multiple rounds of voting without the negative effect that no one votes in a run-off election.

>8 margd: Oh, I like that idea!

There was this from yesterday's New York Times (third story down)...I can just picture Nancy Pelosi's grin...

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/02/us/politics/trump-congress-tax-code.html?ref=...

>10 Marissa_Doyle: (Pelosi offers help with presidential mental health bill) Not a bad idea--physical, mental, emotional, financial disclosures, before and regularly after the election. We, the People would appreciate that, I think! Was it Reagan who shared photos from his colonoscopy--or am I thinking of a cartoon? :-)

Maybe a diary of diet--Trump's doesn't sound exactly optimum for cognition. A little deficient in the Plant Kingdom? (Another task for poor Melania?)

And regular drug screening. I remember the President sniffing through at least two debates with HRC?

>11 margd: Mr Trump is obviously unbalanced. But I doubt even Republicans want to know what's going on in their president's mind.

The fake-Democrats (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_Leadership_Council) had a golden opportunity to nominate a rather good, entirely moderate and electable candidate

She was nominated by millions of voters, not by the DLC.

>4 proximity1:

. . .Speaking of mental health. . .Perhaps you wouldn't be so irrationally upset if Trump demonstrated his mental balance by having a personal astrologist advise him? Here, drink some more of this red Kool-Aid. You'll immediately feel better.

>8 margd:

Slapping a FitBit on da Trump will only track him making fast food runs to the nearest cheeseburger and fries joint.

As for colonoscopy pics, I dunno, But Johnson lifted his shirt to show his operation scar. No problem with full public disclosure by him.

>13 StormRaven:

Don't waste your breath by trying to reason with a demagog. We've got a true believer who substitutes RW conspiracy theories and fake news for reason. Some of us were absent the day in secondary school when we were taught the skills for discerning credible from incredible sources. As Trump would say, "Sad."

Pelosi may have the right idea trying to legislate a "Federal Fitness Bill." Let's hope it's broad enough to include lie-detector testing of elected and appointed bureaucrats. The lie detector testing to be administered during confirmation hearings of the appointees. We've got two lying liars (none of them named Hillary, so they don't count!) seeking cabinet posts at the moment -- Steve Mnuchin and Tom Price.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/two-nominees-who-said-false-things-to-congre...

>4 proximity1: Whoever found and continues to find the Clintons were and remain today mentally fit to serve in the office of president of the United States

William Jefferson Clinton competently held the job of President, and there is no evidence, unlike Woodrow Wilson or Ronald Reagan, that his mental problems caused him to depend on outside help for the core functions of what the president should be doing.

Edit: "that he had mental problems causing him...", I mean.

NPD was a known factor in his election, and I couldn't conscience a replacement based on that. I do think Alzheimer's is a much more clear concern, given that it's progressive and clearly debilitating to holding any sort of office. Given the age of many presidents, it's a problem that been a concern for previous presidents and will probably be concerned for later ones.

Not sure what thread this best belongs in, but here's an interesting read from Nate silver. Mental illness is one scenario he doesn't consider...

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/14-versions-of-trumps-presidency-from-maga-...

I'm thinking of Dubya, another incompetent and lazy POTUS. He stayed away from work as much as possible. I can see Trump doing something like that--it's really hard to imagine that he could withstand the fallout from the avalanche of shit he's produced at this tempo, for four years.

But I'm not sure what would be better if he's gone and Pence steps in. Would the US go all Handmaid's tale, but relations with the rest of the world improve? Are people hoping for this switch?

>17 LolaWalser: It can't be too taxing to sign Executive Orders written by Steve Bannon. Trump does most of his heavy lifting on Twitter; he's currently in a death match against Arnold Schwarzenegger. Impeachment or military coup remain viable "out" options.

Someone here who worked on the Sanders' campaign and was sure Clinton would lose actually said (in August) that she was hoping for a military coup after Trump's election. At the time, although I was ready to think Clinton might lose, I thought the coup scenario was purely fantastic. Has there ever been one in the US? It's hard to picture.

And yet. More and more it looks as if the conditions might get there. In which case, what happens after? Another election? Is that at all possible without a civil war?

Has there ever been one in the US?

No. There has never been a military coup in the United States.

There was a rebellion that resulted in a civil war.

Hey guys: you want to remove Trump? Then Mike Pence would be your president. Is that what you want? Really?

21: Pence would be bad, but he would be normal bad. Trump is out of control bad.

>21 madpoet:

Obviously the logic of their ambition requires that they get rid of both-- first Trump and then Pence and his successor and so on. They want to reject, nullify and reverse the consequences of their own political failings.

>23 proximity1:

Let me guess -- you also believe in the domino theory of the spread of communist dominion, right?

Where did anyone suggest that anyone but Trump is mentally ill and unfit and what should be done if that can be medically demonstrated? Why, nowhere, except in your silly post.

Having a firm grasp of reality and the ability to reason increasingly belongs to those who do not align themselves with the Republican -- "love your local billionaire" -- Party.

Lack of reasoning ability, independent critical thinking, and fondness for intellectually and emotionally stunted narcissists is characteristic only of certain conservatives -- dominantly the bigoted ones. You may be able to demonstrate the validity of a domino theory there.

>21 madpoet: I'm afraid that the results of a Trump presidency will be apocalyptic, or at least permanently scarring on a global scale. For the most part Pence's flaws should be fixable by a more liberal president and congress.

Man, this story... Trump and Staff Rethink Tactics After Stumbles https://nyti.ms/2kbB4UY

>26 sturlington: I saw that. He isn't reading stuff before he signs it. *facepalm*

>27 Marissa_Doyle: He isn't reading stuff before he signs it.

But he had time to study 17 p book of window coverings!!!

Well, those pages had lots of nice pictures...

Trump should issue an EO that orders all future EOs submitted to him for his signature be drawn up in emojis.

>1 Limelite: "Ever growing opinion of medical professionals is that Donald Trump suffers from an incurable mental illness"

Sources?

Many unpleasant assumptions being tossed around here.

That mental illness means a person is "bad" and therefore unqualified to be president or much else. Not like us "normies", right? That mental illness prohibits one from leading a happy or successful or normal life. That no previous president, here or elsewhere, has suffered from mental illness.

Took me two minutes to annhilate this thread.

>31 barney67:

Since Google is not your friend. . .Like 'em or not:

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/06
/the-mind-of-donald-trump/480771/

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/richard-greene/is-donald-trump-mentally_b_13693174...

Virtually every mental health professional I interviewed told me that they believed, with 100% certainty, that Mr. Trump satisfied the DSM criteria of this incurable illness and that, as a result, he is a serious danger to the country and the world.

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/shrinks-break-silence-president-trump-e...

http://bipartisanreport.com/2017/01/27/johns-hopkins-top-psychotherapist-release...

https://www.palmerreport.com/politics/former-trump-organization-exec-donald-trum...

For 'both sides" of the story:
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/brainstorm/201701/shrinks-battle-over-diagn...

And for right wing nuts who prefer to believe BS, there's Breitbart never-ending pearl grasping as they shove their heads in the sands of conspiracy theory. GASP!
But I'm not directing Internet traffic there. You'll have to do it yourself.

>32 barney67:

No unpleasant assumptions here.

If from his behavior we -- even we who are not mental health professionals -- can tell Trump is a serial and pathological liar, which he is, it's logical that the same 'we' can tell FROM HIS BEHAVIOR that he's a narcissist, also which he is.

If it looks like a nut, and cracks (over criticism) like a nut, it's a nut.

Tough that facts don't align with your political prejudices. But then, everyone on the right knows that the truth has a liberal bias.

Even Trump knows that the media is lying, covering up, and is deceptive. Except Beitbart, Fox, and a certain Russian correspondent who started the whole conspiracy theory that the anti-Trump and pro-women protests are paid professionals.

You don't read much outside your safe zone, do you?

Here's a cartoon. . .just for you.

http://www.dailykos.com/stories/2017/2/7/1630777/-Cartoon-The-backwards-BS-detec...

One psychology magazine of dubious scientific value, one left-wing political magazine (The Atlantic) gone to fallow, and the New York Daily News. All three have political axes to grind. The other sources you mention are so worthless and absurd they aren't even worth commenting on.

It's possible to find editorials claiming all kinds of wild things. Proves nothing.

Accusations of mental illness against presidents are a a sign of the times and certainly not new. Obama was called a narcissist and so was GW Bush. And Clinton, who was also called a sex addict and sexual predator. GHW Bush was called a wimp despite having flown fifty combat missions as a fighter pilot. Reagan was called senile and stupid. JFK was called a sex addict. Grant, an alcoholic.

We might as well disqualify Lincoln and Churchill from history because of their depression.

>35 barney67: Compared to Mr Trump, Mr Obama is a paragon of mental health and rectitude.

The Atlantic left wing?

>35 barney67:

I take it you didn't like the cartoon.

I don't have to prove anything. You asked for sources. They're all ACCURATE. Even the leaks from inside the WH are now expressing that Trump is "unfit" to be prez. That doesn't prove anything, either.

None are so blind as those who will not see. Your so-called president's behavior proves he's an habitual liar (analysis of his remarks demonstrates that 90% of his statements are totally false, mostly false, or somewhat false). His behavior proves he is NPD (analysis of his behavior demonstrates "me,me,me" obsession; self-proclaimed genius doesn't hold up in face of fact he knows nothing about economics and market value meaning of the dollar; has no friends and likes no one beyond glad handing level outside his immediate family.

You prove to me that Trump's sane. Cite your sources.

"None are so blind as those who will not see." *

Tape this script to your bathroom mirror. You should read it early each morning and each evening before retiring for the night.

-------------------

* Empahsis added.

>34 Limelite:

Fox News is starting to call Trump out on his bullshit, too. Even those in the right-wing media bubble can't avoid confronting it.

http://mediamatters.org/video/2016/12/12/watch-foxs-shepard-smith-debunk-trumps-...
http://www.politicususa.com/2017/01/22/fox-news-trump-lying-inauguration-crowd-s...

>37 RickHarsch:

Totally. That's why lifelong neocon and former George W. Bush speechwriter David Frum is one of their senior editors. :D

Anarchist bastards!

Is it possible that Fox is suffering a philosophical schism? That some of their gang of blitherers are doubting Trump Speak and acknowledging Trump Behavior as the bellwether of his mental soundness and fitness?

It's not so much what he says about Nordstrom dumping his daughter's brand so much as it is that he finds it necessary to publicly tweet about it in the first place. Just the latest example.

About election fraud. . .he won the election; he didn't win the popular vote. It's that he attacks the election process because he's a loser that's crazy. People can count.

About the comparative inaugural crowd sizes. . .he has the indisputable photographic evidence. It's that he contests irrefutable evidence because he feels slighted that's crazy. No Photo Shop here.

For every insult, he invents a conspiracy of enemies out to "get" him.

Millions of marchers pro-women and anti-Trump turn out around the world? They must be paid professional shills employed by Soros. (A conspiracy that originated with a Russian columnist as fas as I can determine). Yet Soros' bank account doesn't reflect a major draw-down and no one has come forward waving a check signed by him.

No wonder Bannon is Trump's chief strategist. He's similarly unreasonable and unhinged. If the Pope praises bridge building as opposed to wall building he must be destroyed. "Let's find us a reactionary cardinal and enemy of Pope Francis. Raymond Burke, for instance," says Bannon to himself, "and start a religious war within the Vatican to undermine His Holiness." (After all, the Pope has been cleaning house of arch-conservatives and their hangers-on who are behind Church financial and child abuse sandals.)

When the media prints the truth about Trump's unfitness and his dangerous loose canon behavior, what does Herr Bannon do? He tells the media to "keep its mouth shut." The 4th estate is now officially labeled the opposition by the Trump Admin.

If these FACTUAL incidents were not evidence of whack-doodleness I think we would have seen a majority of the previous 44 prezes and their chief strategists behave the same way because it would be normal behavior. We don't see anything of the kind except in Nixon and GWB -- both Republican (that should also tell us something about the conservative 'mind'). Sanity is the norm. Nutcase is the abnormal.

The guy's 'round the bend. The guy's lickspittle personal fluffer is 'round the bend. And they are surrounding themselves with as many mentally beyond the pale bureaucratic leaders as they can.

Those who don't see it? Look in the mirror. Or look at that cartoon in post #34.

If you want cartoonists to do your thinking for you, go ahead. That doesn't sound very sane to me.

All this "Trump is crazy" is just a smoke screen anyway, for so many people who have so many problems. Do some soul searching. Take a good long look in the mirror. You might find the explanation for your politics.

Remember, this is the kind of thing that keeps people from voting for Democrats: Trump is crazy, fascist, sexist, racist...blah blah blah.

I didn't even vote for him. But I can keep an open mind. He's been president for a month. What's the matter with you people? You know who got Trump elected? You did!

I suggest everyone drop the word "crazy" from their vocabulary. It has no real meaning anyway. It's not a medical term. You can say "mentally ill" only if you are using it in the medical context and if you have some knowledge of the subject.

If you are using it as hyperbole, out of your own exasperation, your own frustration over the election and other sorted miseries, then you lose your credibility. Thoughtful adults use their words more carefully. I realize the internet feeds impulsivity, but there's no shame in deleting posts. Or in thinking before you write.

So...crazy, deranged, nuts, blah blah blah...empty words from empty heads.

Medical doctor César Chelala (famous for his reporting on the Argentine junta) weighs in.
http://www.counterpunch.org/2017/02/10/a-psychological-portrait-of-donald-trump/

>45 barney67:

Empty heads explode in the face of top psychiatrists' concern based on trump's behavior. Sad.

We are writing to express our grave concern regarding the mental stability of our President-Elect. Professional standards do not permit us to venture a diagnosis for a public figure whom we have not evaluated personally. Nevertheless, his widely reported symptoms of mental instability — including grandiosity, impulsivity, hypersensitivity to slights or criticism, and an apparent inability to distinguish between fantasy and reality — lead us to question his fitness for the immense responsibilities of the office. . .

Signed:

Judith Herman, M.D.
Professor of Psychiatry
Harvard Medical School

Nanette Gartrell, M.D.
Associate Clinical Professor of Psychiatry
University of California, San Francisco (1988-2011)
Assistant Professor of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School (1983-87)

Dee Mosbacher, M.D., Ph.D.
Assistant Clinical Professor
Department of Community Health Systems
University of California, San Francisco (2005-2013)

When reasonable people hear an African person exhibits. . .
Fever
Severe headache
Muscle pain
Weakness
Fatigue
Diarrhea
Vomiting
Abdominal (stomach) pain
Unexplained hemorrhage (bleeding or bruising)
. . .they don't need to be MDs or see for themselves to understand that the person is suffering from hemorrhagic fever, most likely Ebola.

The difference between that African and Trump is that, with quick intervention and intense therapy, the Ebola patient will get well. There is no cure for NPD.

The labored way Mr Trump reads a prepared statement (like an uncertain seven year old) and his incoherence when speaking freely indicate some degree of diminished capacity.

The only person qualified to make a serious judgment about his mental health, or yours or anyone's, is a psychiatrist who has seen him for years. That's qualified. That's the only person who even has a chance. Without knowing him, it's impossible to make any a reasoned judgment about his mental state, especially when you don't even know what constitutes mental illness.

You are assuming that Trump believes everything he says and that he isn't using strategies. I assumed during the election that Trump is a showman. Little has changed that view. He usually has something up his sleeve. And all of you are falling for it.

I wonder if Trump cares that there are people call him crazyracistsexist. When people call him that, they not only undermine their own credibility and reveal their own weakness at debate, they never even approach the debate. They don't talk about the issues. That might suit Trump just fine. Because then he doesn't have to debate either. If you are going to call names, then so will he. That's exactly what many Republicans have been wanting for years -- for Republicans to adopt the sleazy tactics of Democrats. Now he turned the tables and you can't stand it. He's holding up the mirror.

If you really want to get him, prove him wrong. Instead of calling him crazyracistsexist.

It's like a person refusing to step up to the plate because they say baseball is stupid. OK, it's stupid. Then why are you at the ballpark? Why not go home and shut up? Go back to watching Keeping Up with the Kardashians. Go back to your Harry Potter fairy tales. If you're not going to engage in debate, then what's all the complaining about? What's the point really?

This is one of the biggest problems with liberals today. They don't debate. They won't debate. They can't debate. If they can dismiss you as inferior, as crazyracistsexist, then they don't have to debate. They can sit there with their arms folded and hold their breath until their faces turn blue like spoiled children. That way they can win. Because the debate never gets started. There is no debate. There wasn't one during the election.

You think that suited Trump? Do you really think this real estate salesman from New York wanted to have a serious philosophical debate a la Bill Buckley? If it's a contest between who can be nastier, then go ahead and take him on. Haven't you seen what happens to people who do that? You think you're tougher than this loudmouthed billionare from New York? You think he got to where he is by being a doormat? We just had a doormat for president. We don't need another one. That's one huge reason people voted for him. You have to lead with strength.

I dare you, I dare you to refute what I said. I dare you to think for yourself. I dare you to change your mind.

Robb Willer: How to have better political conversations
https://www.ted.com/talks/robb_willer_how_to_have_better_political_conversations

Robb Willer studies the forces that unite and divide us. As a social psychologist, he researches how moral values — typically a source of division — can also be used to bring people together. Willer shares compelling insights on how we might bridge the ideological divide and offers some intuitive advice on ways to be more persuasive when talking politics.

As encapsulated by:
altEPA ‏@altUSEPA 4h4 hours ago
Know your audience. Offer empathy and respect. Resist hatred. Embody rationality. Appeal to purity and beauty.

A few Republicans are spilling the beans to Sen. Al Franken (D-MN) about their belief that Trump is gaga. And he confirmed it today on CNN's State of the Union. Why tell Franken? Because his reputation as a truth teller is unimpeachable.

Finally, even some Republicans in Congress acknowledge that compulsive lying and inability to distinguish truth from reality are symptoms of abnormality. Just like any normal person recognizes the same.

You don't have to be a US Senator to know who's mentally unfit when you see it in the person's behavior. In fact, it helps not to be a Republican officeholder since many more ordinary people beyond quite a few medical professionals see it for themselves without help from the Tea Party.

The sane FEC Election Commissioner demanded Trump provide evidence for voter/election fraud before he investigates the man's (forgive me) trumped up charges. He hasn't. Because there is none. Trump is caught in another lie.

And again today, when he sent out Steve Miller to still push the tired lie yet again, the sane talking heads demanded Miller provide evidence. He didn't. Because he couldn't. There is none.

Have you no shame Trump? It's one thing to humiliate yourself by being proved a liar to your face. It's a far more venal act to make a lickspittle minion do your lying for you and be humiliated, too, for the same reason. No, Trump has no shame. NPD people don't feel shame for either lying or manipulating.

>51 Limelite: As POTUS44 predicted, reality will be cruel to a Trump presidency, whether it's Mr Trump's mental abilities (or lack thereof) or his impossible promises to his gullible base.

Donald J. Trump ‏@realDonaldTrump 12. Dec. 2012
We can’t even stop the Norks from blasting a missile. China is laughing at us. It is really sad.

Sad indeed!

This thread shines light on the nature of left-wing politics. It has always been an odd mixture of idealism and violence.

Who protests elections? Who refuses to attend inaugurations? Who refuses to design clothes for the First Lady? Who lectures you at rock concerts? Who uses a TV award program to vent their disgust? Who writes protest songs and protest novels and protest movies? Who "drops out" of society? Who are the hippies, hipsters, and slackers? The bohemians, boomers, bitchers-and-moaners? Who are the homegrown terrorists, the Black Panthers, the Weather Underground?

Left, liberal, democrat. Not Republicans, not conservatives.

Look at the history of revolutionary politics. Take the French Revolution, that great example of left-wing politics. Begin by talking about liberty, equality, and fraternity. End up with Napoleon, the guillotine, Robespierre, the Reign of Terror, and slaughtering priests.

Left, liberal, democrat. Revolutionary politics. French, Russian, Maoist, Communist, Fascist.

They don't want to persuade people they disagree with. They want to "off" them. They want to take them out of the game. They want them gone, deleted, disappeared. They don't to deal with them, talk to them, get to know them. Better to mock. And worse.

Conservatives get called Know Nothings and Do Nothings. I would rather do nothing than do harm. I would rather risk being called crazy and so much else than be a murderous, starry eyed, overemotional ideologue.

It's when people are overemotional, excessively angry for example, that they resort to hyperbole. Disagree with Trump? Instead of thinking about why, hit the streets. Carry a sign. Protest. Scream. Call names. Crazyracistsexist. Crazyracistsexist. Arrogant, mean, narcissistic, stupid, crazy, bullying, blind, privileged, rich, white, male. There. That'll teach ya.

And in those kinds of ways debate is shut down so that other forms of expression, so to speak, can charge through like a bull in a china shop. Idealistic fury can't be expunged by debate. Reason and rationality won't mollify. Idealistic fury manifests in more emotional, intense, satisfying ways: name calling, mockery, manipulation, deception, projection, carrying signs, yelling, killing.

If Trump is mental, which I'm not denying, what does that say about his supporters?

Have you ever heard of the pot calling the kettle black?

In January this year, Trump was warned by Acting AG Sally Yates (remember, she was fired by Trump) of the DOJ that National Security Advisor Michael Flynn

misled administration officials about his conversation with the Russian ambassador to the United States. . .

Further, Yates expressed concerns Flynn was ripe to be blackmailed. Even further, the CIA believed the Russians had audio recordings of Flynn's conversations with Russian officials while Obama was still president.

This would indicate Flynn lied to Vice President Mike Pence, who relayed claims in mid-January that Flynn did not discuss sanctions with Russian officials.

Still further, Kellyanne Conway, aka Lyin' Lickspittle, insisted that

Flynn enjoys the “full confidence of the president.”

No sane person, much less a sane POTUS, would:
1) Ignore intelligence briefings;
2) Behave in an irrational defiant manner by naming the subject of negative intelligence his National Security Advisor;
3) Not immediately fire that person when he lies to your VP;
4) Retain 'full confidence' in a mole;
5) Send your communication gal out in public to announce that to the rational world.

http://www.rawstory.com/2017/02/justice-department-warned-trump-administration-f...

If you believe 1-5 is a list of reasonable behavior by a sane person, you're blinded by the alt right and think Russian agents serving as America's security advisor to POTUS is just peachy. My how the Trumpster conservative leopards have changed their spots!

>56 Limelite:

"No sane person, much less a sane POTUS, would:
1) Ignore intelligence briefings;
2) Behave in... "

laughable bullshit.

JFK, after the Bay of Pigs fiasco, basically wrote off the national intelligence apparatus and never again took their briefings fully at face value. Was he therefore insane?

G. W. Bush didn't merely "ignore" briefings, in the case of the WMD fiasco, he ordered analysts to repeat their work until they came up with results which suited his political needs of the moment. Was he insane on that account or rather a calculating politician?

Jacques Chirac, whose intelligence briefings presented him with analysis which proved accurate and diametrically opposed to the skewed "findings" which Bush wrung from the C.I.A. or N.S.A., was asked how such a thing could be explained. His answer was astute and came from his long experience in office. Intelligence agencies, he explained, easily fall into a habit of circular reasoning, talking to each other, they accept and circulate a useful but not necessarily accurate narrative which ticks all the required political boxes and leaves top careers in the safest hedged positions. Thus, he--as did FDR, Churchill, de Gaulle, Truman, JFK, LBJ, Nixon, Carter and Reagan themselves learned to do sooner or later-- treated intelligence briefings and the analyses in them with skepticism.

None of these men were quite insane--though Reagan sat in on WH rooftop crystal ball seances with a full-time reader-advisor exactly like the charlatans who have basement studios in seedy neighborhoods of big cities.

Mental health professionals warn Trump is incapable of being president

...It is usually frowned upon among psychiatrists to give a professional opinion of the mental state of a public figure they have not examined in person, as dictated by a passage in the American Psychiatric Association’s code of ethics known as the Goldwater rule.

But in a letter to the New York Times, the doctors said they had decided it was necessary to break their silence on the matter because they feared “too much is at stake”.

Similarly, the Russians walled up East Berlin because they feared too much was at stake in leaving Berliners free to come and go; a naval assault was claimed by the U. S. govt to have occurred in the Gulf of Tonkin by North Vietnam against the U.S.S. Maddox; the alleged attack was a lie concocted by the Johnson administration to provide a pretext for increased U.S. military involvement in Vietnam because it was feared that the stakes were too high to leave matters as they were; law, facts and common sense were all tortured before being thrown to the wind in order to create the myth of Saddam Hussein's "weapons of mass destruction" again because it was feared that the stakes were too high to do anything "less" than a gargantuan public relations sham--one bound to fall apart openly by the end.

The worst things are done by those who are certain about the disaster that awaits if people do not accede to their certain knowledge of a risk too great to dare to be run. So, though the rule against armchair remote psychiatric diagnosis was designed specifically to prevent the resort to it in just the circumstances deemed too exceptional to bear doctors' honoring it, they are just such exceptional circumstances which are claimed to justify setting aside the rule-- because "this time it's different," this time the stakes are feared too high to "risk" keeping to standards of just, fair practice .

>57 proximity1:

Oh, dear, pearl-clutchers. Flynn is a gonner. Not fired but resigned.

Flynn's trespasses that endangered American security are documented. Yes, audio tape exists of phone calls between Flynn and Russian officials, even before Trump was inaugurated. His case is in no way analogous to Bay of Pigs. Inarguable direct evidence of a traitor in your midst, or at least a Russian agent, is not to be ignored unless you're engaging in the same behavior and see nothing wrong with it.

Pearl-clutcher's who want to give our Fascist Fearless Leader "a chance" need to acknowledge that ignoring direct evidence of a threat to American security is the attitude of a madman or a narcissistic know-it-all. Nobody can use "stupid," or "new to the job," or "misunderstanding" as an excuse.

Of course, who cares about Flynn hanging around National Security briefings when the POTUS is likely just as guilty of the same crimes? (See FBI dossier, CIA dossier, Steele dossier, and oh yes, probably the Mossad dossier -- at least.) These dossiers aren't rumors. They're documented and independently confirmed factual files, as yet not fully made public.

>60 Limelite: We're just one John Dean away from impeachment/abdication. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/14/us/politics/russia-intelligence-communication...

Rep. Ted Lieu to Introduce Bill Requiring a Psychiatrist in White House

A psychiatrist, and four burly orderlies holding a straitjacket at the ready, at all times.

>62 LolaWalser: Does one of the orderlies get one of those big butterfly nets?

>63 sturlington:

How fast can he run though? :)

We laugh, but we may all die yet.

On the news this morning someone said Trump has the means to release four thousand nuclear weapons.

>65 LolaWalser: I do not advise watching The Dead Zone right now. Too close for comfort.

I found where these ideas are coming from. There's a channel on YouTube called TrumpWatch. It's moronic.

>67 barney67: Trump is already the Rodney Dangerfield of Presidents.

On a serious note: everyone said Trump was unfit to be President. They were right.

>67 barney67:

1. These aren't ideas. They are facts of Trump's recorded behavior.

2. I've cited sources. None of them from YouTube.

3. Your non sequitur of a comment is moronic because it has nothing to do with what has been posted by various commenters who are supplying sources.

4. Your characterization of the video is only one person's opinion -- yours. I have not seen the video to which you refer, therefore can not determine if you opinion is moronic.

5. Still waiting for you to offer evidence and argument that Trump is sane, but I guess by now you've concluded if he's sane, then he's the world's biggest jerk, based on his behavior. In that case, he's still unfit to be POTUS.

Note to pearl clutchers: Pudzer's out. Repubs just couldn't muster the votes to put a wife beater on the Cabinet. One foul misogynist must be enough. After all, our government is already led by a p*ssy-grabber, who doesn't seem to disturb them at all. Ahhh, the marvelous minds of conservatives.

Now the CIA is withholding information from the SCROTUS. This must be part of his plan to make America great again.

>58 LolaWalser:

Allen Frances, professor emeritus of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Duke University Medical College, told the newspaper (NYT) that he wrote the criteria for narcissistic personality disorder ― and Trump doesn’t meet it.

However,

Frances called on others in the industry to stop “psychiatric name-calling” and instead denounce Trump “for his ignorance, incompetence, impulsivity and pursuit of dictatorial powers.”

71

I'm sure Dr. Frances must be mistaken: it says quite clearly right in the title of this thread, "Given: That Donald Trump Is mentally Ill"

Trump's accusers are lollygagging. In Salem Town, Salem Village and other towns in the area back in 1692 &'93 they knew how to deal with dangerous deviants.

Trump would be brought before a tribunal and charged with Narcissistic Personality Disorder and instructed to enter a plea. He could be tried the same or the next day.

And you lot would all volunteer for jury duty just as, had you lived then, you'd have served as jurors and handed in guilty verdicts against the local dangerous deviants.

Latest exhibit: today's press conference, just concluded. Wow.

ETA: Transcript and video from NY Times-- https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/16/us/politics/donald-trump-press-conference-tra...

TLDR: The 8 craziest moments from Trump's press conference: http://talkingpointsmemo.com/dc/craziest-moments-trump-press-conference-leaks-ru...

>74 sturlington:

“This administration is running like a fine-tuned machine”

Boy, what a relief! I thought things were going badly! :D

Here is the synopsis of the press conference, from a British press perspective.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/02/16/us-politics-us-defence-secretary-jame...

"Still waiting for you to offer evidence and argument that Trump is sane"

There is no objective criterion for determining whether a person is sane or insane. I can't believe I'm responding to such a moronic assertion.

"A GOP senator on Thursday reportedly responded to President Trump's extended press conference blasting coverage of multiple administration controversies by suggesting that the president consult a therapist.

"I got a text from a Republican senator who said in this text, 'He should do this with a therapist, not on live television,'" CNN's John King reported, noting that he also received texts from Democrats." http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/319969-gop-senator-suggests-tru...

NYT: Is It Time to Call Trump Mentally Ill?

https://nyti.ms/2ldxqeJ

From the comments:

I agree with a commenter below that one need not be a specialist to see that Trump is the poster child for Narcissistic Personality Disorder. In fact, Professor Friedman neglects to consider that many people have come in contact with narcissists and had more or less close relationships with them. The signs are unmistakable: the manipulation, mendacity, gaslighting, bullying, blame-shifting, constant drama and lack of empathy and introspection. I'd wager that far too many women recognize in Trump the abusive partner they once (hopefully past tense) had.

Ethics matter, and mental illness itself is not a black mark - Professor Friedman's comments are well-taken. But incompetence is incompetence. At some point, it is more ethical to avoid a greater harm by speaking out than by holding back -- yes, at some point, instability is disqualifying. If the past 18 months haven't offered enough proof, then today's conference should have. To say so is not to provide Trump with a crutch; it is to resist the normalization of the utter insanity the man would foist on the world, and we've all plainly seen what an unhinged alt-reality it is. If you doubt, I invite you to review Stephen Miller's appearances from Sunday. They sent chills down my spine.

Mental illness is not a flaw. But Trump has a pathological personality disorder which, as Friedman knows, has no cure. Experts know the disorder causes tremendous harm to the people the narcissist encounters. We ignore it at our peril.

That was a show of such monumental incompetence and unfitness for living and functioning in a society that it must be a textbook first. Can anyone think of a similar example at that level in a country with the political weight of the US, any time in history?

>79 artturnerjr:

But incompetence is incompetence.

Right. I assume the pressure to diagnose him formally is to somehow use it to remove him from office, but I wonder if it's even necessary, given his performance.

>80 LolaWalser: "Trump Ends the Presidential Press Conference as We Know It" -- http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/02/trump-ends-the-presidential-press-c...

Perhaps the most important thing to happen at today’s press conference is that respectable Republicans in Washington and elsewhere had to be at least disturbed a bit by the spectacle, which no one could imagine any prior Republican president since Nixon, and probably not even the Tricky One, producing. At some point they will have to ask themselves exactly how much damage to traditional politics and government they are willing to accept in exchange for cutting taxes, criminalizing abortion, or giving the people who own most of the country relief from regulations.

John McCain's senior campaign strategist: http://www.thenewcivilrightsmovement.com/davidbadash/every_pundit_has_critiqued_...

"You've never seen an America president, the commander-in-chief, the head of state of the United States of America, the most powerful person in the world use this mantle of victimhood."

Re : "You've never seen an America president, the commander-in-chief, the head of state of the United States of America, the most powerful person in the world use this mantle of victimhood."

------------------
website source: Miller Center
http://millercenter.org/educationalresources/i-really-need-son-bitch
This recording is presented as part of the Watergate Collection.
------------
Date: Thursday, July 1, 1971 - 8:45am - 9:52am
Participants: Richard Nixon, Bob Haldeman

Editors' Note: And earlier version of this transcript was published as: Stanley Kutler, Abuse of Power: The New Nixon Tapes, (New York: Free Press, 1997), pp.7-8.
--------------

President Nixon: It may be here that we can use Melvyn Laird.1 I’ll tell you why. Laird has the biggest spy apparatus of anybody, you understand. That’s bigger than the FBI on things like this. The FBI won’t get into this sort of thing. They don’t know how to handle it, Bob. They do not handle it.

Now, the main thing is whether the Laird group will get into it. Here’s what I have in mind, and I’ve got to get Tom Charles Huston or somebody fast, but either Huston or somebody like Huston fast. That’s why the—on the Dick Allen thing.2 I think you’ve got to take Dick Allen on the mountaintop and see if he wants to handle this. Who said that he didn’t? You didn’t think he was the right guy, or somebody didn’t. John didn’t, I think, or somebody, because he’s too—

Bob Haldeman: Well, Dick doesn’t think he is.

President Nixon: Dick Allen doesn’t? OK.

Haldeman: He’ll come—on the short term, though, we can get Allen in right now and get him—

President Nixon: Yeah.

Haldeman: Get him pulling some people together who can do it.

President Nixon: He doesn’t need really to come to Henry Peterson∇right away, does he?3 Does Peterson need him now right away?

Haldeman: Yeah, but, you know, we can use Allen.

President Nixon: But here’s the thing. This is the way I want it. I have a project that I want somebody to take it just like I took the Alger Hiss case, the Elizabeth Bentley case, and the rest. And I’ll tell you what this takes. This takes 18 hours a day. It takes devotion and dedication and loyalty and devilishness such as you’ve never seen, Bob. I’ve never worked as hard in my life and I’ll never work as hard again because I don’t have the energy. But this is a hell of a great opportunity because here is what it is. I want to track down every goddamn leak there is and, you see—and here’s where John will recoil. I don’t—probably we, we’ll have to tell him. You probably don’t know what I meant when I said yesterday that we won the Hiss case in the papers. We did. I had to leak stuff all over the place.

Haldeman: Mm-hmm.

President Nixon: Because the Justice Department would not prosecute it. Hoover didn’t even cooperate until I leaked it out. It was won in the papers. John Mitchell doesn’t understand that sort of thing. He’s a good lawyer. It’s abhorrent to him. John Ehrlichman will have difficulty. But what I mean is we have to develop now a program, a program for leaking out information, for destroying these people in the papers. That’s one side of it—how to get at the conspiracy.

The other side of it is the declassification . . . declassification. And then leaking to or giving out to our friends the stories that they would like to have such as the Cuban confrontation. Get what I mean? Let’s have a little fun. There’s a . . . Let me tell you why the declassification of previous years helps us.4 Unclear. It takes the eyes off of Vietnam. It gets them thinking about the past rather than our present problems. You get the point?

Haldeman: Yeah. Absolutely.

President Nixon: And, as a matter of fact, these papers in a sense, well, in a sense, well, they were about the Pentagon war papers and so forth. It was too confusing to be the war, in my opinion. What do you think?

Haldeman: It was another day, and it was other administrations, other casts of characters, you know.
President Nixon: Yeah. Unclear I think it was, sure, it’s about the war and so forth, unclear but it is not what we’re doing in the war at this time.

Haldeman: That’s true.

President Nixon: It’s not about what we’re doing. Now, you see what we need? I need somebody . . . I need really rather than a worker (just to give you the personality type) oh, like John C. Whitaker who’ll work his butt off and do it honorably. I need a— I really need a son-of-a-bitch like Huston who will work his butt off and do it dishonorably. Do you see what I mean? Who will know what he’s doing and will—I want to know, too. And I’ll direct him myself. I’ll pitch it. I know how to play this game.

↑Melvyn Laird was secretary of defense.
↑Richard Allen was an aide on the National Security Council staff.
↑Henry Peterson was assistant attorney-general.
↑Nixon is referring to the ongoing publication of the Pentagon Papers in the New York Times and Washington Post

-------
The Miller Center
Copyright 2017 Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia
Contact the webmaster or give web feedback.

----------

ETA

When Nixon refers to "the conspiracy"-- ..."But what I mean is we have to develop now a program, a program for leaking out information, for destroying these people in the papers. That’s one side of it—how to get at the conspiracy." --he means a conspiracy which, as he sees things, is directed against him personally. He's referring to those, some of them, powerful people, who found a place on what was literally his "enemies list". Many of those people were in no real sense "out to get" Nixon. They were politically opposed to some but not necessarily all of what Nixon had done, was doing or wanted to do. But a good deal of Nixon's sense of being targeted sprang from a tendency to indulge in somewhat paranoid fancies. Certainly Nixon had enemies, properly speaking. But they probably could never have succeeded in achieving any designs for Nixon's ruin better than what Nixon's own character flaws led him to produce in self-inflicted harms.

Trump, by contrast, has been in the cross-hairs of a particular subset of the national establishment power-structure from the moment he upset its usual minute control of U.S. national political life by snatching a victory from the establishment's heir-apparent, Hillary Clinton. He really does have powerful individuals ranged against him and it is very personal. They not only don't agree with Trump, they find him culturally offensive, an affront to the norms in taste and demeanor which they believe they exemplify and of which Barack Obama is so insufferable an example.

When Trump sees these people as "out to get him" it isn't a paranoid's delusion at work. The power cliques that despise Trump haven't accepted and never shall accept his election as legitimate. Never mind that our system is inherently corrupt and, thus, "illegitimate", Trump is a person the usual fixers see as categorically and constitutionally unacceptable by their own definition of things. For them, it's simply impossible for Trump to "be" president of the United States. They, after all, and not the American electorate, determine such things.

And this is why the near-uniform alignment of the supposedly Left-wing part of U.S. political spectrum automatically against Trump and, by default, doing the work of the power-structure's key figures, is so very amazing to behold.*

True, Trump is in so many ways so like a creature of the wealthy corporatist interests that are indeed at the heart of the political power-structure. However, he is not emotionally and intellectually owned, controlled and inspired by this set.◆ In various ways, mainly cultural in character, he's not compatible with that elite. He merely has (or occasionally had) bank balances, personal wealth, which placed him in many of the social circles they dominate. There are many others like Trump in those circles. They're treated politely but they aren't taken seriously politically because they've never gone down the well-worn paths which mark out those who are to be taken seriously as potential political actors. But in the past two generations, those traditional guidelines have weakened and broken down.

Ironically, Nixon, then a U.S. Senator from California, was picked by powerful Republican party figures to be Eisenhower's running-mate on the 1952 presidential ticket. Trump, by contrast, won his place in direct and quite open opposition to the party's ruling élite --at least as far as his primary campaign's actions and declarations indicated about him. Thus, again, Trump isn't simply imagining things when he sees himself as the object of a politically-designed concerted effort to undermine and, ultimately eliminate him as an office-holder--an effort which includes many from what is supposed to be his own party.

-------------

* In this instance, Glenn Greenwald's arguments are a good exposition of the point.

See : Greenwald: Rooting For "Deep State" To Undermine Trump Is Destroying Democracy In Name Of Saving It
Posted By Tim Hains
On Date February 17, 2017

ETA
◆ That same cannot be said about the Obamas or the Clintons, both families completely the mental captives of and servants to the power élite. It also can't be said of Obama's former Secretary of Labor, Tom Perez, the ruling establishment's best hope for carrying on the disgusting examples set by party hack Debbie Wasserman Schultz.

In an example of the sheer power which elites wield, an example stunning for both its swift and openly observable features, Perez was recently forced to retract and disavow an admission so obviously true that any informed and honest observers had already figured it out : the candid admission that the DNC had rigged their management of the presidential primaries to give Hillary Clinton unfair advantages over Bernie Sanders. Had Perez stuck to the truth, he'd have effectively ended his career and future in Democratic party politics as we know it. Instead, he demonstrated that the party's heavyweights own and direct him--meaning that he can stay if he continues to behave and stops telling such inconvenient truths.

Even the so-called "liberal" candidate for DNC Chair, Keith Ellison (MN. 5th), is a very poor excuse for a political progressive. He, like Perez, ticks the idiot-unconscious-bigot's Identity Politics box being Black. As a "plus, " Ellison is also a Muslim. (Why didn't the party didn't run a Black female "progressive" Muslim or aren't there any?) In each case, the dismal fact is that the party is adamantly determined to learn nothing and to serve power first and the great general publics' needs either not at all or dead last.

I have no problem with debating the issues.

Resolved: Trump's personality disorder makes him unfit to be president.

Semantics, anyone?

Barrack Obama is sane, exhibits no sign of mental illness, personality disorder, nor emotional instability. Behavior in the accepted normal range admits quirkiness. Quirkiness is not what Trump exhibits. He exhibits off the rails abnormal adult behavior that makes observers so uncomfortable that they view him as dangerous as Chief Executive.

76-77 minutes of it Thursday was on display for all to see. Or are observers all over the world wrong in their assessment? A HUGE, BIGLY, GLOBAL conspiracy exists to "make it up" ("it" being Trump's abnormal behavior and mental disorder) just for the purpose of revenge against a "real winner.".

Where are the dissenting views that Trump's behavior is normal, adult, and stable? Because when compared to the 44 preceding presidents his behavior as C-i-C is very similar to theirs. Riiight.

No previous president was able to put a Cabinet together in an orderly fashion; all such efforts were considered "chaotic," "dysfunctional," and "exhibiting lack of leadership."

All other president ordered post-election political rallies peopled with paid attendees to be held "in their honor" because their egos were pathologically fragile, requiring constant aggrandizement.

No other presidents answered questions from all the media without excluding major journalists and organizations in order to only be questioned by ideological allies.

All previous presidents had members of their own political party consulting one another and legal advisors about how to remove their own candidate from office because of incompetence, unfitness, and mental instability within 30 days of their inauguration. This is perfectly normal in our history.

Richard Nixon's behavior while in his second term, most resembles Donald Trump's behavior the first 3 weeks of his term. Therefore, like Nixon, Trump has the most reasonable, considered, and normal mind when compared to the other 43 presidents not mentioned.

Obviously, the exception is normal and sane.

Bigly? Are you allowed to vote?

>86 Limelite:

"Or are observers all over the world wrong in their assessment? A HUGE, BIGLY, GLOBAL conspiracy exists to "make it up" ("it" being Trump's abnormal behavior and mental disorder) just for the purpose of revenge against a "real winner.".

Really, yes, they are in certain very important ways quite wrong in their assessments. If their spectacular failures in that regard over the course of the past sixteen months have told us anything, it's that millions of people have the political sophistication of goldfish, mechanically rising to the surface of their little bowl-environment when news organizations sprinkle flakey reports for them to gobble up.

What huge global conspiracy is needed to feed goldfish their flake-food? It exists. It's commonly referred to as "the Mainstream (news) media". That's obviously sufficient. It's quite sophisticated, by the way, compared to goldfish.

Voters "elected" Reagan _twice_--not counting his governorship terms in California, of course. They "elected"
Bill Clinton, George W.Bush and Barack Obama _twice._

In each and every instance, though marginally different aggregations of voters were involved in the separate elections, the same corrupt power-structure with a remarkably similar makeup of its key actors each time, were setting the political stage, casting the characters, dressing them, giving them their lines, supervising them through rehearsals and weeding through them, sending the inferior role-players back to study and coaxing, coaching and controlling those, the few others, who were more talented at making the sham system look semi-respectable.

This last time, in an amazing and a quite embarrassing fluke, the director/producers failed to effectively manipulate the goldfish. Instead of doing what was expected of them, too many of the goldfish--which, among the most gullible and easily manipulated, include Ph.D. holders from the most prestigious institutions of higher learning--gobbled up a Vaudeville act rather than the extraordinarily dreary three-act offering which was a pathetic mishmash of re-warmed-over past productions.

The political producers/directors have become so supremely confident of their unchallengable places and so supremely arrogant in their ownership of their places that they finally convinced themselves that they could run a Hillary Clinton against a Donald Trump and their goldfish would rise to take their flake-food as usual.

Well they were wrong and their failure was spectacular this time, so spectacular that their best efforts to shift blame--for these people are utterly without shame--look pathetic and desperate.

That doesn't in the slightest indicate that there's any danger of the goldfish leaving their bowl--no danger that, in the next cycles, virtually the same set of producer/directors won't be right back at the hack work they do, funding campaigns to the tune of billions of dollars and ensuring again that a flagrant fraud upon the principles of democracy is perpetrated on the public--good, bad and indifferent, the goldfish, swimming busily about their bowl.

No doubt: Trump is a man of obviously greatly different temperament from the usual JD/MBA corporatist policy-wonk drones that populate the working world of elective politics. But he is, despite his oddities and character quirks, neither insane nor so psychopathologically unlike others who've served before him that he cannot perform the role required of him--unless, unless the chagrined, grossly embarrassed stage directors succeed in efforts to make that impossible.

>87 barney67:

Quoting Agent Orange's favorite ungrammatical descriptor.

Guess if you're not qualified to vote for habitual use of "bigly," then, by your standards, you're hardly fit to be POTUS. Thanks for making my point for me.

Ay mess. Ay mess. Kay-oss. Kay-oss. 'Cept for minefinetooned mah-cheen.

There is really not much more pathetic than the spectacle of would-be social-critic/satirists' vain attempts to employ humor effectively against a political adversary when these critics are evidently unable to understand that, so far, at least, the real joke is on them.

> 88, 91

Well over half of the voting public has been convinced for some time now that d. trump is the biggest waste of space we have ever witnessed in modern U.S. politics. In most people's minds even Dubya ranks higher on the evolution scale of primates than d. trump.

d. trump is in a class by himself. It is the class of no class. He is a stinking sack of bigotry, vulgarity, comb over, incompetence, ignorance, childish selfishness and is the most out-of-control narcissist in a country that produces narcissists on a level similar to the production of corn, wheat, beef cattle, chickens, turkeys, fruit and vegetables.

If you think you can convince ANYONE otherwise at this point with your fucking goldfish-in-a-bowl analogy then I would love to sell you a bridge I own up in Brooklyn. I can work you a really good deal. Only five per cent down!

Title: Protest Pie.

@ Youtube
Jonathan Pie
175.208

"Pie loves a good protest but a recent protest at Berkeley Uni has got on his tits."

"What's happened to the Left? What's happened to us? I thought that after Trump we'd finally start getting it but we're getting worse. Isn't it obvious that we need to change our tactics?--and yet, we're making exactly the same mistakes, only worse! When you go to a university and set fire to things, throw rocks at police, pepper-spray and punch people whose opinions you don't like, you're not a liberal, you're not left-wing, you're a fuckin' idiot! And you lose! You lose the argument! It's a gift to Trump. How fucking thick do you have to be to hand Trump the moral 'high-ground'?" ... It's not just a handful of violent thugs, Tim, when they're being legitimized by thousands of people proudly re-Tweeting videos of Trump-supporters getting punched or pepper-sprayed. ... You've got The Guardian running articles asking whether it's ethical to punch a Nazi. What the fuck are you talking about!? Weighing up the pros and cons of arbitrarily labeling someone a Nazi in order to legitimize punching them in the face! What the fuck does The Guardian think it's doing!?" ...

Remember Luther, Obama's Anger Translator--
looks like Pence has taken on role of Trump's Sanity Translator!

>94 margd:

Which is (unintentionally, but still) truly horrifying. I've no words for the total effect Trump leaves on me, but Pence's mere appearance creeps me out. One of Goya's nightmarish creatures. But worse.

I know, I know... But still more sane than Drumpf? Not as likely to trigger war or a depression?

That seems to be the general hope, yes...

Russia Compiles Psychological Dossier on Trump for Putin

...Among its preliminary conclusions is that the new American leader is a risk-taker who can be naïve, according to a senior Kremlin adviser.

...many in the Kremlin believed that Trump viewed the presidency as a business.

(Deputy Foreign Minister) Fedorov added: "Trump is not living in a box — he is living in a crowd. He should listen to the people around him especially in the areas where he is weak."

...The issue of Russia "is now a kind of banana skin for Trump — that's why we should avoid any kind of step that could damage Trump," said Fedorov. "Trump cannot come to a meeting with Putin as a loser — he must sort out his domestic problems first."

Fedorov added that Trump's "constant battle with the mass media" was "worrying us."

The U.S. president "is dancing on thin ice," he said. "It's a risky game."...

http://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/russia-compiles-psychological-dossier-trump-pu...

> 93

You extrapolate from a (relatively) small number of anarchists engaging in anarchy to anyone and everyone who is politically left of Barack Obama.

Genius, prox.

NOT.

>99 JGL53: I no longer read your posts. Post whatever you please. I won't read it.

94-97, contd. Trump's Sanity Translators--Europe is leery

Trump’s Jekyll and Hyde Administration Has Europe Spooked
While the reasonable-sounding Jekylls—Pence, Mattis, Kelly—try to reassure the Europeans that Trump doesn’t mean what he says, the Hydes are pushing an agenda that will destroy the EU.

...Early on, U.S. Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) gave a speech that drew a clear line between the (unnamed) U.S. president and his more rational, professional Cabinet.

McCain denounced those who “turn away from universal values and toward old ties of blood, and race, and sectarianism.” He decried “the hardening resentment we see toward immigrants, and refugees, and minority groups, especially Muslims.” He noted with alarm “the growing inability, and even unwillingness, to separate truth from lies,” and the extent to which “more and more of our fellow citizens seem to be flirting with authoritarianism and romanticizing it as our moral equivalent.”

Giving Pence, Mattis, and Kelly a shout-out, McCain said neither he nor they would be “laying down the mantle of global leadership.” And when the White House announced Monday that hard-driving H.R. McMaster, another general, would take over the position of national security adviser, McCain welcomed the appointment as if he’d just had a star player added to his team: “I give President Trump great credit for this decision, as well as his national security cabinet choices. I could not imagine a better, more capable national security team than the one we have right now.”

At the Munich conference, when Pence made his appearance, he struck many in the audience as “somebody attempting to and succeeding in projecting the image of someone who is mainstream,” said one participant. The vice president spoke in the dulcet tones he learned working as a radio and TV talk show host. And, as the same observer put it, the sentences Pence spoke “had a subject and a verb—we are not used to this anymore.”...

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2017/02/21/trump-s-jekyll-and-hyde-adminis...

______________________________________

ETA: In the week before U.S. Vice President Mike Pence visited Brussels and pledged America’s “steadfast and enduring” commitment to the European Union, White House chief strategist Steve Bannon met with a German diplomat and delivered a different message, according to people familiar with the talks.

Bannon, these people said, signalled to Germany’s ambassador to Washington that he viewed the EU as a flawed construct and favoured conducting relations with Europe on a bilateral basis...

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/bannon-nationalism-europe_us_58ac4e45e4b0f07...

> 100

Oh? This makes me feel warm and toasty all over. Thanks for making my day.

But I will continue to read your posts and make appropriate comments on same for the amusement and edification of our fellow posters, i.e., until you become too boring, prox, you will continue to be grist for the mill - for all of the rest of us.

LOL.

>100 proximity1:

Perfect example of conservative mindset -- fingers in ears yelling nah-nah-nah-nah.

The all too frequent behavior of reality denying Trumpettes and typical to committed ideologues.

Agent Orange trips himself up when his behavior is to watch the cable channels from 6AM through breakfast when he read the NYT, NY Post, and WaPo, then again during lunch he watches cable news. His tweets reveal his TV watching habits. The point is, after consuming a mild variety of news sources, Trump proclaims them all but Fox to broadcast and print fake news. Only Fox, which is notoriously fake is deemed factual.

That is a fine behavioral example of ideological fingers in the ears nah-nah-nah. Pathetic in a private citizen but beyond pathetic, dangerous, in a POTUS. His news source should primarily be from intelligence reports. However, Trump can't be trusted with full reports because of Russian infiltration into his government and his own suspect ties to Russians. Besides, Agent Orange has told us he's got a very good brain and doesn't need intelligence briefings.

All information that doesn't conform to his opinions is fake and is dismissed by him. Only fawning flattery is taken in. That is the attitude of the unsound mind.

I saw a discussion on the news somewhere about a... 25th? amendment that regulates conditions when the VP can step in and take over the president's office, and how it needn't be a medical emergency or some such (i.e. the rules don't over-define the conditions because it's impossible to predict all circumstances). Basically, Trump's incompetence at the job can be deemed a sufficient reason to remove him, any psychiatric considerations apart.

Basically, Trump's incompetence at the job can be deemed a sufficient reason to remove him

Theoretically, yes. The decision has to be made by the Vice-President and a majority of the "principal officers of the executive departments", which is generally taken to mean the cabinet secretaries. In other words, Pence and a majority of the cabinet secretaries Trump has appointed would have to agree that Trump is incompetent to discharge the responsibilities of the office of President. This seems, as a practical matter, quite unlikely.

I'm sure it's faster said than done, but it's amazing to be even discussing things like that less than a month into the presidency.

>104 LolaWalser: ff.

Yup.

https://youtu.be/Gnnj_YjdJgs

>107 artturnerjr:

Interesting, I didn't know it was being discussed so early. I found the one I saw:

The Most Dangerous Man In President Trump's World Is VP Mike Pence | The Last Word | MSNBC

I don't know who's that man or what kind of channel that is, I clicked on it as it came up in my recommendations.

>108 LolaWalser:

MSNBC is the main left-leaning cable news channel here in the States. Lawrence O'Donnell is the host of The Last Word with Lawrence O'Donnell, one of their prime-time commentary shows. He was a producer and writer for The West Wing. He is sort of the less cool straight male version of Rachel Maddow, if that means anything. :)

Not much, but thanks! I avoid looking at any "mainstream" US news outlets, just can't bear that style.

>110 LolaWalser:

Well, they are primarily designed to keep you watching during the commercial breaks, so they are best taken in small doses. Alternatively (and probably preferably), you can watch stuff like C-SPAN and/or the PBS NewsHour, which are commercial-free.

>111 artturnerjr: commercial-free
Except for all the "sponsor acknowledgements" -- which, depending on the specific PBS programming in question, will include oil majors, defense contractors, and/or David Koch's foundation... if the sponsors are acknowledged at all (see 3rd link).

cf.:
The Petroleum Broadcast System Owes Us an Apology
http://www.gregpalast.com/the-petroleum-broadcast-systemowes-us-an-apology/

A WORD FROM OUR SPONSOR
Public television’s attempts to placate David Koch.
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/05/27/a-word-from-our-sponsor

The Wolf of Sesame Street: Revealing the secret corruption inside PBS's news division
https://pando.com/2014/02/12/the-wolf-of-sesame-street-revealing-the-secret-corr...

More PBS conflict woes as activists move to eject David Koch from board of "NOVA" station
https://pando.com/2014/03/03/more-pbs-conflict-woes-as-activists-move-to-eject-d...

An Open Letter to Museums from Members of the Scientific Community (regarding Koch philanthropy)
http://thenaturalhistorymuseum.org/open-letter-to-museums-from-scientists/

From: https://www.rawstory.com/2017/02/psychiatrist-warns-trump-is-a-psychiatric-frank...

“I would argue to my colleagues that those who don’t speak out are being unethical,” he stated. “If we have some knowledge and understanding about the unique danger that Donald Trump presents through our psychiatric training and don’t say something about it, history is not going to judge us kindly.”

Be sure to watch the video at bottom of article from Lawrence O'Donnell Show MSNBC.

We can do what we've always done. If he commits an impeachable offense, which most presidents have, he can be impeached. Until then, just a lot of loose talk by sore losers.

All I hear from Trumpeters is whining about the evidence against the fitness of gent Orange, constantly falling back on the oppodition being sore losers.

Evidence to the contrary: Trump can't stop acting like a sore delusional loser and his supporters are uber defensive about his overwhelming (and plunging) unpopularity in US and abroad.

Go listen to his raving rant at CPAC and present a reasonable case that it represents the speech of a sound and collected mind. You can't.

In an effort to build a wall around their defective product, WH staff, led by an avowed Leninist, have denied free press access that reports facts that Trump labels "fake." No one is buying this demonstrable mentally dissociated perspective.

Never has any president had to be hidden, stifled, diverted, distracted, focused, managed, man-handled, cleaned up after, and generally propped up intellectually than this idiot.

And here we thought "W" was the bottom of the Republican barrel of best and brightest.

Nowhere
Near

In closing, a BIG BWAHAHAHA to CPAC Trumpeters waving their Trump Russian flags at their conference today. Smiles on their faces as they get humiliatingly p'nked! Nursery maids hustled threw the audience confiscating the symbol of embarrassing truth and confirmation of abysmal ignorance of conservatives.

>115 Limelite:

led by an avowed Leninist

Nonsense.

>115 Limelite: >116 LolaWalser:
Maybe nonsense. Given it's via the Daily Beast, I'd say probably nonsense. But not definitely nonsense.
http://www.snopes.com/bannon-leninist-destroy-state/

>117 davidgn:

Double nonsense with a heaping of bullshit.

>117 davidgn: The bullshit is that it's very doubtful that Bannon's conception of Leninism is anywhere near Lenin's own. Calling him a Leninist would be generous. Using it to attack him would be absurd.

>119 RickHarsch: Agreed. Much hinges on how one wants to interpret the word "avowed." I'll also observe that Bannon seems more than happy to misappropriate any concept from any tradition to fill out his eclectic collage. It's worth noting that Evola started out as a Dadaist, too...

>120 davidgn:

What "concept" did Bannon mis/appropriate from Lenin? Ignorant idiots jumped on the phrase about "deconstructing the state"--might as well call him a postmodern philosopher, a Derridan--hey, he said deconstruct!!

The rank ignorance and stupidity of these shamefully glib, mindless, shallow word-associations are simply ridiculous. Insulting to ordinary human intelligence and basic high school education, but that's obviously getting to be a daunting threshold these days.

No, Lenin didn't write about "deconstructing" the state; he subscribed to the marxist prediction of the state withering away of itself after an--unspecified, but likely lengthy--period of dictatorship of the proletariat (organised, to nobody's surprise, through the bureaucratic machinery of, guess what, classic states). Oooh, the rule of the proletariat--obviously that's got "Steve Bannon" written all over it! Central to Lenin's thought are anti-imperialism and communist internationalism--only about a galaxy cluster removed from Bannon's overt fascist white supremacist nationalism. I could go on but what's the point?

P.S.

I see this crap originated with Glenn Beck. Well, 'nuff said. You have fascists in the White House--must be somehow the Communists' fault. In this revolutionary centennial year no less! :)

>120 davidgn: Low blow. Dada doodoo on you.

>121 LolaWalser: No, Lenin didn't write about "deconstructing" the state; he subscribed to the marxist prediction of the state withering away of itself

In theory, sure. As I recall, though, when it came to brass tacks, Lenin seized power by end-running and subsequently suppressing the post-revolutionary, multi-partyRussian Provisional Government to the benefit of his Bolsheviks, with the famous Octoberist cry of "All power to the Soviets!" Somehow I don't think that's quite what Bannon had in mind either, though.

One commenter named "orray2" on the Genius annotations of the WaPo transcript has a good theory:

By “deconstruction” Bannon clearly means “destruction.” This is why he has called himself a “Leninist,” though what he really meant, if he had a better grip on Russian revolutionary history, was a “nihilist,” an earlier version of immature revolutionaries who believed they had to blow everything up–literally–before they could build again from the ground up. Yeah, they called themselves “populists,” narodniki. As bad and as destructive as Lenin and his Bolsheviks were, they were not as infantile as the Bannon-like Narodniks. Lenin was a more mature and realistic revolutionary.

Assuming that Bannon ever uttered those words at all, that's the best theory I've seen on what he might have meant. (Of course, if I were of a more speculative and free-associational cast of mind, I might say that this association of enemy-Bannon with enemy-Bolshevism might reflect an ideological tic of certain old Trotskyites. It wouldn't be the first time a certain strain of old Trotskyites have used The Daily Beast to disseminate utter garbage. But then, I'm not quite that speculative. ;-) )

In any case, when Bannon's not travestying history, he's busy harnessing honey badgers and other forms of memetic "magic."
(You might call that a dada doodoo double-down. )

cf.:
https://dadaismandmemes.blogspot.com/
http://www.crixeo.com/dadaism/
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/trumps-occult-online-supporters-belie...
http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/meme-wars
and...
https://youtu.be/m7ZuffBrloo?t=6m27s (not safe for work)
(Most of the video is at least tangentially relevant, especially after the first few minutes, but don't miss the 20 seconds or so after this point. This was choreographed.)
See also: https://youtu.be/m7ZuffBrloo?t=15m42s -- through to the end. (not safe for work).
(Dada Doodoo? Poo poo pee pee Pepe...)

And for the more venturesome cultural anthropologists:
https://encyclopediadramatica.se/The_Great_Meme_War (site never safe for work)

>123 davidgn: Worth its own post:
For essential background on 4chan itself (a cultural phenomenon inextricably intertwined with my own generation) and its larger cultural and political significance, this is excellent (and SFW), even if it could use a little editing:
https://medium.com/@DaleBeran/4chan-the-skeleton-key-to-the-rise-of-trump-624e7c...

>123 davidgn:

In theory, sure. As I recall, though, when it came to brass tacks, Lenin seized power by end-running and subsequently suppressing the post-revolutionary,

Please forgive my bluntness, but this just shows abysmal ignorance and confusion. "The withering away of the state" has got nothing to do with the moment of seizing power or warring factions. It's a process Marx (and Lenin) expected to unfold in time once/as direct rule of the people got established and fully realised. It's not something that happens in war, with opposing factions, or through violent means, but AFTER a revolution (which itself is/will most likely be violent).

Trumpist/Bannonist sabotaging of your ministries and subverting their mission to serve private interest relates to it like giraffes relate to ATM machines. On Pluto.

Lenin didn't theorise "destruction" of the state and Bolsheviks didn't destroy the state apparatus. They removed (more or less) the bourgeoisie and aristocrats from power and began organising, through the invention of soviets, that "rule of the people". Judging the project's success doesn't fit here, but let me note that the Soviet state was very much an organised "state" with a (formidable) bureaucracy and hierarchy. They even had, for instance, a ministry of environment whose job was, believe it or not, to monitor and protect the environment--contrary to the agenda and m.o. of the Trump's cabinet in that matter.

By “deconstruction” Bannon clearly means “destruction.” This is why he has called himself a “Leninist,”

First, I can't find any evidence that Bannon ever called himself a Leninist. (These particular bollocks seem to have started with a meme where someone stuck an alleged and since contested--by him--"quotation" under his picture.) And until/unless Bannon comes out and states his debt to Lenin, trying to "explain" this random nonsense is a precious waste of time.

There seems to be some vague woolly-headed conflation of the fact that Bolsheviks came to power through violent revolution and Bannon's "deconstruction of administrative state".

Let's note that Trump and Bannon rode into the White House in full accordance with your democratic process and are currently undermining the usual role of a democratic government (i.e. presumably "greatest good for the greatest number") using wholly peaceful means.

The analogy here is to Weimar 1933, not October 1917.

>125 LolaWalser: Trumpist/Bannonist sabotaging of your ministries and subverting their mission to serve private interest relates to it like giraffes relate to ATM machines. On Pluto.
...
The analogy here is to Weimar 1933, not October 1917.
I actually agree with you entirely.

I don't claim more than a cursory familiarity with Marxist-Leninist theory, but the problem here is you're talking political ideology, while I'm talking historical political mechanics of how the weak pluralist postrevolutionary Russian state became the Bolshevist Soviet state -- this, as you've noticed, not for any good reason, but rather in a probably-doomed straw-grasping attempt to make heads or tails of Bannon's supposed quote, which really makes no sense ideologically.

Lenin didn't theorise "destruction" of the state and Bolsheviks didn't destroy the state apparatus.... I'm entirely aware of all of this, actually. Never did I claim that Bannon's reported words made any sense. I'm just toying around with theories on what he might have had in mind if, in fact, he actually said them.

I entirely agree that this is random nonsense that can only lead to a lot of head-scratching. You're wrong, though, on the source of the attribution of the quote. As I indicated before, it all started here, in a Daily Beast piece by one Ronald Radosh: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/08/22/steve-bannon-trump-s-top-guy-to...

The Daily Beast purports to be a serious journalism site and, for better of worse, is generally received as such, which means the piece's claims are harder to dismiss out of hand. Here's an excerpt:

Why has the Trump campaign taken as its new head a self-described Leninist?
I met Steve Bannon—the executive director of Breitbart.com who’s now become the chief executive of the Trump campaign, replacing the newly resigned Paul Manafort—at a book party held in his Capitol Hill townhouse on Nov. 12, 2013. We were standing next to a picture of his daughter, a West Point graduate, who at the time was a lieutenant in the 101 Airborne Division serving in Iraq. The picture was notable because she was sitting on what was once Saddam Hussein’s gold throne with a machine gun on her lap. “I’m very proud of her,” Bannon said.
Then we had a long talk about his approach to politics. He never called himself a “populist” or an “American nationalist,” as so many think of him today. “I’m a Leninist,” Bannon proudly proclaimed.
Shocked, I asked him what he meant.
“Lenin,” he answered, “wanted to destroy the state, and that’s my goal too. I want to bring everything crashing down, and destroy all of today’s establishment.” Bannon was employing Lenin’s strategy for Tea Party populist goals. He included in that group the Republican and Democratic Parties, as well as the traditional conservative press.
I emailed Bannon last week recalling our conversation, telling him that I planned to write about it and asking him if he wanted to comment on or correct my account of it. He responded:
“I don’t remember meeting you and don’t remember the conversation. And as u can tell from the past few days I am not doing media.”

Maybe Bannon knew he was talking to a former CPUSA member in Radosh and was foolishly trying to make an (alcohol-lubricated?) off-the-cuff appeal by analogy -- one that fell rather flat. (Radosh writes later on in the same piece: "As the Bolshevik leader once said, 'The art of any propagandist and agitator consists in his ability to find the best means of influencing any given audience, by presenting a definite truth, in such a way as to make it most convincing, most easy to digest, most graphic, and most strongly impressive.'") Or maybe it was a calculated piece of misdirection intended to produce head-scratching among Bannon's ideological opponents. (If so, it kind of worked, eh?) Or maybe it was all made up. Who knows? In the end, it boils down to (possibly inebriated) hearsay, but the problem is, it's being taken seriously. Hence the intellectual contortions.

ETA: Here's Lenin biographer Victor Sebestyen (Lenin the Dictator: An Intimate Portrait) weighing in on the echoes of Lenin in Bannon -- not in terms of ideology, but in terms of tactics. Whatever Bannon actually said or meant, perhaps this should be the takeaway.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/feb/06/lenin-white-house-steve-ba...

....No one should directly compare Lenin’s seizure of power in a military coup in 1917 with the populist insurgency that has swept through America and elsewhere in the west through the democratic process. And the lies the communists told for decades are different from Bannon’s or Trump’s. But much of Lenin’s political style and strategy can be adapted to present conditions. He depended on constant conflict and drama. He deliberately used shock tactics. He was nearly always domineering, abusive and combative, and often downright vicious. He battered opponents into submission with the deliberate use of violent language, not because he was personally vicious – he wasn’t – but as a technique “calculated to evoke hatred, aversion, contempt … not to convince, not to correct the mistakes of the opponent but to destroy him, to wipe him and his organisation off the face of the earth”.

Breitbart, the website Bannon created, and the hate-filled language of alt-right politics, are decidedly Leninist in tone. Above all, Lenin needed to invent enemies he had to be seen to defeat. In post- revolutionary Russia it was the kulaks – richer farmers who were “sucking the blood” of poorer peasants, bankers who were war profiteering, the “elite” (a word Lenin used frequently) who treated the majority with contempt. He despised so-called “experts” who claimed a monopoly of knowledge. He often said that a worker with five days’ training could run a government department. He scapegoated opponents and labelled them “enemies of the people”.

Lenin abolished the existing legal system and started afresh. Within a few weeks his regime closed down the first freely elected parliament in Russia’s history – and the Soviets never allowed another one. It would be wrong to assume that the next step for Trump is the abolition of Congress, or the construction of labour camps. But the unprecedented war by tweet between the administration and the judiciary over the president’s executive order on immigration has real echoes of Bannon’s revolutionary hero.

Lenin would very likely have identified 2017 as a revolutionary moment. He matters today not because of his flawed and bloody answers, but because he was asking questions similar to those we are asking today. In his quest for power, Lenin promised people anything and everything. He offered simple solutions to complex issues. He lied unashamedly. He justified himself on the basis that winning meant everything; the ends justified the means. Lenin was the godfather of post-truth politics. Powerful people have learned depressing lessons from him.

While we're at it: what if fascisto-Lenin made films?
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/08/19/i-watched-all-of-steve-bannon-s...

A choice quote (at least for the sake of my confirmation bias ;-) ):

Generation Zero was never going to win Bannon many accolades from his Hollywood colleagues, but it was enough to catch the attention of Sarah Palin, whom Bannon partnered with in 2011 to mount his masterwork: The Undefeated, a political documentary that glosses over all of Palin’s many failures and shortcomings to prop her up as a courageous and triumphant rebel.
At the time of its release, CNN noted that the pro-Palin film had “Clockwork Orange-esque evocative images sprinkled throughout (shark attacks, bodies being buried, warfare both modern and ancient),” and was imbued with artistic symbolism that is “almost dadaist.”
The shark attacks are the best part of the movie.

Man, you're out to give a good dadaist a pummeling today--well, it'll never work, for dada dont

>128 RickHarsch:
danger dada.
dictator dada.
danaean dupe dada dastardly deployed!

D'Annunzidoped!

>130 RickHarsch: Fiumefucked?

>126 davidgn:

http://www.snopes.com/bannon-leninist-destroy-state/

Unproven that he ever said it even once. As he was directly asked about it, you'd think that he'd at least remember thinking of himself as a "Leninist"--if he well and truly did.

I'm talking historical political mechanics of how the weak pluralist postrevolutionary Russian state became the Bolshevist Soviet state -- this, as you've noticed, not for any good reason, but rather in a probably-doomed straw-grasping attempt to make heads or tails of Bannon's supposed quote, which really makes no sense ideologically

I'm afraid it makes no sense of any kind. The context, the actors and their motivations, the events--virtually every single feature of the two situations are poles apart. On this level one could randomly pick any government at any time in history and compare its party factional "tactics" to Bannon's with equal or greater profit. Did I say government? Any business company, any church hierarchy, any pensioners' bingo club.

I'm just toying around with theories on what he might have had in mind if, in fact, he actually said them.

Well we all have our harmless fun in different ways...

>130 RickHarsch: >131 davidgn:
Worth reading: https://aeon.co/essays/the-macho-violent-culture-of-italian-fascism-was-propheti...

ETA deteriorates in a few sections, but still worth reading.

The best portrait of D'Annunzio I ever read was a page or two of Rebecca West's Black Lamb, Grey Falcon, (or vice versa on the colors). A short man, she cut him down to size.

Unfortunately, that article hits it close to home: the next town down the coast has a monument to several children shot while playing near RR tracks by Italian soldiers on the way to Trieste from Parenzo, now Poreć, but ultimately from Rijeka. The history of this region is truly horrific between the two world wars.
The strange thing is that the hatred of Slavs was an outgrowth of hatred of Austrians, the original target of irredentists. A permanent peace has been made, and by now the situation has led to this being a vibrant multicultural region depressed economically.

>132 LolaWalser: All right, here you go: Sebestyen skewered. http://www.socialistparty.org.uk/issue/936/24612 Better?
(Also: I certainly hope that my pensioner's bingo club will not be run as a relentlessly authoritarian regime employing shock tactics and virulent attack propaganda, but you never know... ;-) )

>134 RickHarsch: I've heard mixed reviews on Black Lamb, Grey Falcon. This one in particular had me kicking it down my list of priorities. Should I reconsider?

>135 davidgn: That review is fair and I agree with it. At this point I think it should be read for her portrait of D'Annunzio and her discussion of the Uskoks, not to mention her style, but it is inordinately Serb oriented, actually strangely so.

ETA: In other words, if you have it definitely read about the above; if not, find it in a bookstore and read those two parts...and return it to the shelf.

>136 RickHarsch: Thanks.

>124 davidgn:
Here's a response of sorts to the "Skeleton Key" piece. Makes a lot of good and valid points... which it proceeds hyperbolically to inflate out of all proportion. Worth reading (particularly for non-millennials), but best read as an exaggerated corrective.

http://www.counterpunch.org/2017/02/24/the-4chan-presidency-a-media-critique-of-...

If rages and seething characterize 70YO Trump's mood over next four years, a heart attack may be unavoidable.

Inside Trump’s fury: The president rages at leaks, setbacks and accusations
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/inside-trumps-fury-the-president-rages-a...

Trump is a con man. He saw a chance to pull the wool over the eyes
of a large group of Americans while he enriches the Trump clan. He is
another P.T. a-sucker-is-born-every-minute Barnum.

Apparently Trump's guy in the Defense Dept. (James Mattis) is traveling around the world telling world leaders to ignore what Trump says. That has got to be a first!!!

And it's again a toss-up as to whether he's more crazy than stupid or vice versa:

Trump’s Defense of His Lies: ‘I’m President and You’re Not’

... The truly revealing moment of the interview comes at the end, when Trump gives up the game. “But isn’t there, it strikes me there is still an issue of credibility,” asks Scherer, referencing Trump’s hallucinatory claims to have been surveilled by his predecessor, which his own intelligence officials have refuted. Trump rambles through various talking points, and lands on this conclusion: “I guess, I can’t be doing so badly, because I’m president, and you’re not.”

>141 LolaWalser:
Sadly his sense of entitlement has been further enabled.

>141 LolaWalser: Click, you won't be sorry.

https://www.buzzfeed.com/davidmack/vroom-vroom?utm_term=.ob3WEAVb9#.hkABEYM1P

>143 sturlington:

In a language even he might understand: LOL OMG WTF

He has "IDIOT" stamped all over him. But yaaass, he's the Prez, and we are not, because idiots and scum are many. I hope they are enjoying this Tonka truck presidency.

Which reminds me of this picture I saw yesterday... *off to another thread*

>143 sturlington:

From the comments:

"I wonder if we dangle shiny things in front of him we can lead him out of the White House? Next week if he's a good boy maybe he'll get a ride in a fire truck. If he's really good and doesn't tell a lie for a whole day I heard they may even let him turn the sirens and lights on."

Trump stokes fears of how he'd handle real crisis
After chaotic, self-inflicted week many fear chaos Trump can't control.
Edward-Isaac Dovere | 05/13/17

(A real crisis)...and likely more than one thing, is inevitable, because he’s the leader of the country and the free world, and something always does. And Trump’s behavior, chaotic management style and carefree careening through too many versions of what happened this week for any of them to have credibility has people throughout politics and national security terrified....

http://www.politico.com/story/2017/05/13/trump-crisis-management-238345

______________________________________________________

President Obama (Nov. 13 2016):

“I think what’ll happen with the president-elect is there are gonna be certain elements of his temperament that will not serve him well unless he recognizes them and corrects them. Because when you’re a candidate and you say something that is inaccurate or controversial, it has less impact than it does when you’re president of the United States. Everybody around the world’s paying attention. Markets move. National security issues require a level of precision in order to make sure that you don’t make mistakes.”

http://www.politico.com/story/2016/11/trump-temperament-obama-231360

There's the chance he might simply drop dead yet.

Then there's his physical health--too much fast food, too little exercise, "frustrated and angry" all the time can't be good for mental health, e.g., insomnia, stroke, etc.

Trump thinks that exercising too much uses up the body’s ‘finite’ energy
President Donald Trump is said to have mostly given up athletics since he left college.
Rachael Rettner | May 14, 2017

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/trump-thinks-that-exercis...

Charles M. Blow: Trump's Madness Invites Mutiny

https://nyti.ms/2rgJu0B

I wonder if hyperbole is a sign of immaturity and superficiality.

I'm thinking of comments like Trump is crazy, racist, sexist, fascist, authoritarian, should be impeached, America is a Nazi country.

I wonder what amateur (or professional) psychological judgments can be made about people who make such absurd allegations. Might they be projecting? Might they be mired in a lifelong tantrum? About what? About whom? Do happy people say such inanities? What conclusions can be drawn about people who refuse to admit they were wrong and refuse to change?

You might also take into account the possibility that you are being duped, that Trump's bombast is fighting fire with fire, that he often launches preemptive verbal strikes because he understands his critics better than they understand him. He still has the upper hand. Ever since he started running for president. Whenever you talk about him rather than the subject, he wins. But then I'm not convinced everyone wants to win. Some people are content to be losers and even find something noble and heroic in losing.

No thanks.

>150 barney67: But then I'm not convinced everyone wants to win. Some people are content to be losers

"Death comes to us all. Yes, even to kings he comes..." And then, "Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!' Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away." Those you condemn as losers may not be consider what you count as wins to be worth anything

Even by your apparently rules of victory, you haven't even shown that your president can get through the first year and you've established that when the Republicans have the votes to make "repeal ObamaCare" more than noise, they don't have the party cohesion to make "repeal ObamaCare" more than noise. And you're talking smack about the "team" that just had an eight-year presidency and a very narrow loss for this term's president? You're saying "Some people are content to be losers" because they're not jumping on your team which is temporarily up? "I wonder if hyperbole is a sign of immaturity and superficiality."

>151 prosfilaes: I've read this over and over and I still can't figure it out. Syntactically you went off the rails. I have no idea what you're talking about, though your use of "team" suggests you would like to pigeonhole me in a way that doesn't quite fit.

I don't interpret Shelley's poem as consolation for losers or as advice to go ahead and lose because it doesn't matter anyway. You could quote Kerry Livgren that all we are is dust in the wind, but Kansas was a band that very much was a winner.

I don't often quote David Brooks, but...

We’ve got this perverse situation in which the vast analytic powers of the entire world are being spent trying to understand a guy whose thoughts are often just six fireflies beeping randomly in a jar.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/15/opinion/trump-classified-data.html?action=cli...

>152 barney67: Before you talk about winners and losers, you've got to name the game. By a lot of standards, that you and I are sitting here arguing about this instead of making millions on the stock market or shaping state policy or doing anything productive makes us losers.

I don't interpret Shelley's poem as consolation for losers or as advice to go ahead and lose because it doesn't matter anyway.

Was Ozymandis a winner? Or was he a braggart asshole who lost at life and mistook his wasted life for a victory?

Kansas was a band that very much was a winner.

In what sense? Have they saved souls? Have they made the most money? Have they climbed the most prominent peaks? Have they prevented war? Have they won a war? Have they had many children to carry on their genetic legacy? Have they had many male children, to carry on their line and Y chromosome? Have they made it into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame? (no.)

your use of "team" suggests you would like to pigeonhole me in a way that doesn't quite fit.

Then what do you mean by "winner" and "loser" besides barney67 and people who disagree with barney67?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goldwater_rule

The Goldwater rule is the informal name given to Section 7 in the American Psychiatric Association's (APA) Principles of Medical Ethics,1 which states it is unethical for psychiatrists to give a professional opinion about public figures they have not examined in person, and from whom they have not obtained consent to discuss their mental health in public statements.2 It is named after presidential candidate Barry Goldwater.

Violations
Regarding Donald Trump

In 2016 and 2017, a number of psychiatrists and clinical psychologists faced criticism for violating the Goldwater rule, as they claimed that Donald Trump displayed "an assortment of personality problems, including grandiosity, a lack of empathy, and 'malignant narcissism,'" and that he has a "dangerous mental illness," despite having never examined him.1011

The organizer of this group criticized the rule, citing therapists' duty to warn; Dr John Gartner, a practicing psychologist, stated:12 "We have an ethical responsibility to warn the public about Donald Trump's dangerous mental illness".

On the Water's World TV show 13 Gartner proclaimed that he believed that President Trump suffered from "Malignant narcissism" which is not a disorder listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM–5) (APA, 2013) and is therefore not recognized by many in the profession as a valid disorder.14

Roger Stone says that Trump does not have Alzheimer's as people are claiming.
https://www.rawstory.com/2017/05/viral-video-that-suggests-trump-has-alzheimers-...

Young Turk Cenk Uygur, no friend of Trump, hadn't heard such a claim: he thinks it is at best a red herring or potential defense. Perhaps against Pence takeover via 25th amendment?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GTh5cut5S6U

Fake news, hey what?

Trump is like that bad boyfriend who everyone warned you not to date, and now that he has proven to be exactly what everyone said, you either have to admit that you were duped or double down and stick with him to save face. I doubt a lot of Trumpers will have the courage to admit they were wrong.

>152 barney67: Let us celebrate, you and I

We don't agree on much, but Prosfilaes does have a lot of trouble communicating with the typed word. Too many come from Wikipedia, and putting suddenly acquired language into one's own words can wreak havoc on old standbyes (sic) such as spelling and basic grammar.

>156 margd: I'd put money on dementia praecox or paresis.

The worm is slowly turning, >155 barney67:. Take Ross Douthat:

"Read the things that these people, members of his inner circle, his personally selected appointees, say daily through anonymous quotations to the press. (And I assure you they say worse off the record.) They have no respect for him, indeed they seem to palpitate with contempt for him, and to regard their mission as equivalent to being stewards for a syphilitic emperor.

It is not squishy New York Times conservatives who regard the president as a child, an intellectual void, a hopeless case, a threat to national security; it is people who are self-selected loyalists, who supported him in the campaign, who daily go to work for him. And all this, in the fourth month of his administration...

There will be time to return again to world-weariness and cynicism as this agony drags on. Right now, though, I will be boring in my sincerity: I respectfully ask Mike Pence and Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell to reconsider their support for a man who never should have had his party’s nomination, never should have been elevated to this office, never should have been endorsed and propped up and defended by people who understood his unfitness all along." https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/16/opinion/25th-amendment-trump.html?action=clic...

Since we're quoting conservatives, here's Bret Stephen's:

"That is the Trump reality. A man with a deformed personality and a defective intellect runs a dysfunctional administration — a fact finally visible even to its most ardent admirers. Who could have seen that one coming? Who knew that character might be destiny?

To reread “The Flight 93 Election” today is to understand what has gone wrong not only with the Trump presidency, but also with so much of the conservative movement writ large. In a word, it’s become unhinged."

‘The Flight 93 Election’ Crashes Again https://nyti.ms/2rsHNNy

'Outside the realm of normal,' 'crazy': James Comey is said to have expressed worries about Trump before his firing
David Choi | May 10, 2017

...The New York Times reports that after Trump had made the widely discredited allegation that President Barack Obama had wiretapped Trump Tower before Trump's inauguration, an astonished Comey told associates that Trump's behavior was "outside the realm of normal" and "crazy."...

http://www.businessinsider.com/what-led-to-james-comey-firing-2017-5

_______________________________________________-

Washington Post: "On Wednesday afternoon, President Trump declared that no politician in history had been treated more unfairly than he had."

Um, except the ones who were shot?

You all do too much quoting. Think for yourself.

> By a lot of standards, that you and I are sitting here arguing about this instead of making millions on the stock market or shaping state policy or doing anything productive makes us losers.

Hmm, no. I don't know anyone who believes that. You are oversimplifying in the extreme.

Generally, I don't think in terms of winning and losing, not if you mean the value of person's life over the long haul, but I do believe there are winners and losers, broadly defined, in certain situations.

On this subject, which I don't want to explore any further, what often strikes me is the terrible San Andreas fault running through the American mind. On the one hand you are told to be successful, and on the other, when you are, if you are, you're supposed to apologize for it, feel guilty about it, give everything away, and vote for Democrats.

No thanks. That's one trophy I don't want, the trophy of the self-righteous fraud. The romanticizing of the lower orders. Misjudging the losers is no better than misjudging the winners.

The resentment toward excellence, success, wealth, and happiness itself is among the most corrosive forces alive today. It's of a piece with envy and jealousy and therefore absolute destruction.

>163 barney67: This stand as an all time LT classic: 'You all do too much quoting. Think for yourself.'

Uh oh?

The Video That Suggests Trump Is Suffering from Alzheimer's
Could a more serious illness be at work beneath the bluster and the ego
Kali Holloway | May 16, 2017

http://www.alternet.org/personal-health/video-suggests-trump-suffering-alzheimer...

I wonder what conclusions can be drawn about someone who is obsessed with SOMEONE ELSE'S mental health.

There are lots of legitimate reasons to be concerned about someone's mental health, such as when the person is in one's family, one's boss, or the POTUS.

I wonder what conclusions can be drawn about someone who is so DEFENSIVE about a clearly dysfunctional and malicious person who holds the most powerful job in the world?

Our President, the boor: weird handshakes, no handshake, holding hands, threatening tweets, insults to various groups, lewdness, discourtesies to wife, odious toadying, betrayal of base, and most recently, "the shove".

Breaking down Trump’s ‘shove’
Samantha Schmidt | May 26, 2017
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2017/05/26/breaking-down-trum...

In a nutshell trump is clearly an out-of-control narcissist who is probably a sociopath to boot and quite possibly a psychopath. And he is POTUS.

But luckily, all experiential reality is temporal. Nothing is permanent except change. A thousand, a million, a billion years, etc. from now - where will trump be, and where will those disgusted by him be? As the Hindus say, kalpas come, kalpas go. The environmentalists are late to the game. The whole of effing reality recycles.

>169 Limelite: I'm not defensive. If you had read my posts, you would know that. I remind you that insults and personal attacks are a violation of the standards of this web site and can lead to expulsion.

It doesn't require much attention to figure out who on this forum is constantly posting untutored opinions about Trump's mental state. I find that persistence, easily provable, to be odd and significant.

So the old liberal trick of simply turning the tables doesn't work on me. I've seen it used by far superior people and smacked it right back at them.

Barney, where does 'feeling his oats' come from anyway?

Now it's the Germans' turn to interfere with our democracy.
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/donald-trump-is-a-menace-to-the-world-...

Not that they're wrong...

70 and exhausted...reminds me of time when Nancy Reagan murmured response which President Reagan parroted.

Watch A Mentally Not There Trump Wander Off From Meeting And Be Brought Back By Staff
Jason Easley | May 26th, 2017 at 5:41 pm

Here is a video of a moment where a vacant-eyed Trump wandered off from a meeting with Netanyahu and had to be brought back by staff. The President Of The United States looks like the lights are on, but no one is home.

http://www.politicususa.com/2017/05/26/watch-mentally-trump-wander-meeting-broug...

>172 barney67:

Demonstrate, why don't you, that Trump is a wise and sane leader. Produce evidence to back up your assertions. Counter-argue against our thesis. Posting whiny remarks about the facts that don't coincide with your prejudices simply doesn't hack it with my liberal reasoning. How difficult it seems for you to produce citations like nearly every other poster in this thread to back up and support your contention that we're naughty for commenting on the obvious. RWNJ tactics of attacking substantive evidence by trotting out the stale and crippled canards that liberals turn the table on them doesn't work with me.

Here's an example: Conservatives who call "espionage" or covert communication with an enemy, "setting up a back channel," demonstrate the ultimate in table-turning. They commit the time-worn fallacy of equivocation, which can also be understood in this instance as putting lipstick on a pig. All of which is done to dodge around fact and deceive people, and to make the crimes they commit against our state seem acts of kindness and beneficial.

Ordinary liberal people are superior to any RWNJ by virtue of invariably showing that facts and the truth have a "liberal bias." Or put un-euphemistically, Facts are Facts and Truth is Truth. Is it any wonder conservatives are cranky?

Given: Not only is Agent Orange a dangerous nut job, he's also a traitor, hence the nickname -- a case of a shoe that fits. Cite: WaPo, FBI, NYT, Senate and House Intelligence Committees. Sorry you conservatives don't like hearing the truth. I understand if you conservatives need an aspirin. Or a drink.

>176 Limelite: "Demonstrate, why don't you, that Trump is a wise and sane leader?

Why? Your mind is closed like a prison cell. There are no arguments here, only assertions.

Obviously he is neither insane nor illiterate. Whoever can't get past that won't learn anything.

ETA: Children aren't allowed on LT.

ETA: Children aren't allowed on LT.

Then what are you doing here?

175 contd (exhaustion)

...Donald Trump followed along in a golf cart as leaders from the G7 nations took a leisurely stroll around the streets of Sicily, the latest sign that the U.S. president appears to be suffering exhaustion during the first trip abroad of his administration.

The leaders of the UK, France, Germany, Italy, Canada, and Japan were together in the Italian city for a summit when they took a short walk for a photo op. While the others walked the entire distance, Trump was forced to follow behind in a golf cart, The Times of London reported.

“They walked the 700 yards from the traditional G7 group photo, taken at a Greek amphitheatre, to a piazza in the hilltop town, but Mr. Trump stayed behind until he could take a seat in the electric vehicle,” the report noted.

News of the incident and pictures of Donald Trump’s trip in the golf cart went viral on Saturday, the latest instance of the president seemingly falling victim to fatigue during the extended trip to the Middle East and Europe. Trump has suffered from some other apparent lapses during the trip and also adjusted his schedule to shorten some visits and cancel others...

http://www.inquisitr.com/4250458/donald-trump-had-to-take-a-golf-cart-while-othe...

>177 barney67:

What would St. Ronnie say? Oh, yea. "There you go again."

Can't produce any cogent argument for your position, can you? So, you fall back on whining about liberals. Again.

Just like the baby man in the WH who wah wahs, "Fake news!" when the evidence piles up against him. He, too, tries to wiggle away from the pressure and divert attention to a shiny object over there rather than produce evidence to buttress his position. You know -- like the time President Obama wire tapped Himself. Only Agent Orange never could find the right time to produce the evidence for that allegation. Not. Ever.

Do you believe in the same actual fake stories Agent Orange does? You know: Benghazi, Obama's "real" Kenyan birth certificate, media enemies, intelligence services out to get Himself, Himself's inauguration crowd bigger than either of Obama's, Germany bad/evil, NATO obsolete, climate change a Chinese conspiracy/hoax, the Russian espionage and Trump's campaign collusion with Russian agents is a hoax?

Or can you defend all that? Trump has proven he'll literally go to the ends of the Earth to defend those kinds of stories. If you don't defend them, it's because you can't. If you don't choose to, it's because your belief in Agent Orange's mental fitness is weak. If your belief is weak, there may be hope for you yet.

>180 Limelite: Are you ok? I don't know who you are talking to or what you are talking about.

>170 margd:

"the shove"

Finally made myself watch that.* You know that kid in school that used to threaten to beat you up if you didn't give him your lunch money? Yeah - he's President of the United States now.

*Here: https://youtu.be/Iimj0j4NYME

>181 barney67:

You OK? Can't tell if you're playing dumb or. . .not playing.

Haven't yet thought of a defense for the indefensible? Leaving the Dark Side? We'll wait. I'd be delighted to see you present any evidence-backed argument at all in defense of Agent Orange's probity and wisdom.

While I'm waiting, I'll read a few good books.

I'm not a game player. I've written plenty, if you want to know what I think.

Name-calling is inconsistent with someone who has actually learned anything from books. But then, what kind of book? Anyone can read a novel. Try living in reality and thinking for yourself. That's where the action is.

Boor or narcissist or ______--you choose.
How NOT to do the National Anthem at Arlington Cemetery on Memorial Day:

http://www.palmerreport.com/opinion/anthem-trump-memorial-day/3143

ETA___________________________________

How Does A Narcissist Think?
Here is how narcissistic behavior is dangerous and harmful to others
Karyl McBride May 22, 2017

1. Has a grandiose sense of self-importance, e.g., exaggerates achievements and talents, expects to be recognized as superior without commensurate achievements.

2. Is preoccupied with fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance, beauty, or ideal love.

3. Believes that he or she is “special” and unique and can only be understood by, or should associate with, other special or high-status people (or institutions).

4. Requires excessive admiration.

5. Has a sense of entitlement, i.e., unreasonable expectations of especially favorable treatment or automatic compliance with his or her expectations.

6. Is interpersonally exploitative, i.e., takes advantage of others to achieve his or her own ends.

7. Lacks empathy: is unwilling to recognize or identify with the feelings and needs of others.

8. Is often envious of others or believes that others are envious of him or her.

9. Shows arrogance, haughty behaviors, or attitudes.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-legacy-distorted-love/201705/how-does-n...

The loneliness of Donald Trump by Rebecca Solnit

http://lithub.com/rebecca-solnit-the-loneliness-of-donald-trump/

With "resignation" of communications director, White House finally releases statement that Trump can get behind. Spokeswoman Hope Hicks was responding to a Washington Post report on Trump's habit of cutting down staffers with insults:

"President Trump has a magnetic personality and exudes positive energy, which is infectious to those around him. He has an unparalleled ability to communicate with people, whether he is speaking to a room of three or an arena of 30,000. He has built great relationships throughout his life and treats everyone with respect. He is brilliant with a great sense of humor … and an amazing ability to make people feel special and aspire to be more than even they thought possible."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2017/05/30/this-white-house-state...

Trump wasn’t always so linguistically challenged. What could explain the change?
Sharon Begley | May 23, 2017

...STAT reviewed decades of Trump’s on-air interviews and compared them to Q&A sessions since his inauguration. The differences are striking and unmistakable.

Research has shown that changes in speaking style can result from cognitive decline. STAT therefore asked experts in neurolinguistics and cognitive assessment, as well as psychologists and psychiatrists, to compare Trump’s speech from decades ago to that in 2017; they all agreed there had been a deterioration, and some said it could reflect changes in the health of Trump’s brain.

In interviews Trump gave in the 1980s and 1990s (with Tom Brokaw, David Letterman, Oprah Winfrey, Charlie Rose, and others), he spoke articulately, used sophisticated vocabulary, inserted dependent clauses into his sentences without losing his train of thought, and strung together sentences into a polished paragraph, which — and this is no mean feat — would have scanned just fine in print. This was so even when reporters asked tough questions about, for instance, his divorce, his brush with bankruptcy, and why he doesn’t build housing for working-class Americans...

https://www.statnews.com/2017/05/23/donald-trump-speaking-style-interviews/

>188 margd: Or he's dumbing down his speech to appeal to the masses. W. did it.

>187 margd:

Reads like something written by Himself, no?

And as part of MAGA, Trump gives us a new word, "covfefe." Wonder what the psychologists attribute that kind of linguistic invention to.

Enjoy a good laff with the rest of the country. https://twitter.com/search?q=twitter+covfefe&ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp...

>189 jjwilson61: Or he's dumbing down his speech to appeal to the masses. W. did it.

Obama, too. Remember how he would sometimes drop his "g"s in an attempt to sound folksy--nothin', sumpthin'. Drove me nuts!

Speech samples for Trump seem to have become much more pervasively dumb, though?

>190 Limelite: Reads like something written by Himself, no?

YES! Or by someone with no shame seeking boss's approval as openings are becoming available? Or to save her own job?

>189 jjwilson61: I don't think so. There's a difference between stylistic dumbing down and the complete breakdown that Trump is showing.

>191 margd: Obama, too. Remember how he would sometimes drop his "g"s in an attempt to sound folksy--nothin', sumpthin'. Drove me nuts!

The choice of an alveolar nasal over a velar nasal has nothing to do with intelligence; it's just a stylistic choice of equal complexity.

>192 prosfilaes: To your last point: you're correct, but the point is the sociolinguistics of the thing. You have read some Labov, right?

>192 prosfilaes: '...a stylistic choice of equal complexity.' I'd hate to be on the same golf course as that guy.

>193 davidgn: The point is that it's not "dumbing down", that the use of that phrase in connection with other dialects is insulting and carries offensive stereotypes.

>195 prosfilaes: it's not "dumbing down", that the use of that phrase in connection with other dialects is insulting and carries offensive stereotypes

Point taken. Mea culpa.

Geez, the tiresome, literal-minded, robotic-logic irrelevancies come with extra pomposity now. If Obama is putting on a fake accent to seem "folksy" and not his Harvard-educated, book-reading, "uppity Negro" self, that's down to general perceptions in your fuckwitted country that one is "of the people" and the other isn't. Neither Marg nor Obama invented the association of that accent with low education. And yes, if Obama was doing that, he WAS "dumbing down".

>197 LolaWalser: that's down to general perceptions in your fuckwitted country that one is "of the people" and the other isn't.

This country's anti-intellectual bent and resentment of education is one of the most inexplicable things about our culture to me.

>198 southernbooklady:

My theory is that the mindset of religious fundamentalism--copiously abetted by the GOP--in the end beat to death the humanist "better yourself, develop your mind" tendencies present in some of the homegrown American philosophies. If it hadn't been for the two wars that transplanted so much of European intelligentsia to the States and opened the door to higher education for the poorer men, AND the stimulus of competition with the USSR, the picture would likely be even more dismal.

P.S. But speaking of resentment, and I think it may be more correct to say resentment of the educated rather than education, it's hard to believe that the sheer cost of it nowadays doesn't have something to do with it.

>199 LolaWalser: I think you're right about the costs, which are outrageous. And shameless.

Not so sure about religious fundamentalism, but that's a purely personal feeling, entirely anecdotal. I know there are groups that are famous for silly things like believing in creationism, or being antivax, but that weird circle-the-wagons approach to outsiders seems more defensive than anything else. On the other hand, my family on my mother's side is Mennonite going way back to like the 1820s or something. Ohio farmers. And they regarded education as vital, believed in providing better opportunities for their kids, etc, a big part of which was giving them the chance to go to school, and eventually to college.

Still, as you say, for them it was always about being able to "better yourself." Something that was almost and obligation and a duty.

>200 southernbooklady:

I think it's fairly easy to show that the mindset and values of religious fundamentalism are today dominant in American culture and politics and how they got to that position. Americans in their "empty" new land always over-valorised religion in contrast to Europe, where the moderns had to fight for progress against an old, deeply entrenched church and where faith itself is much more generally discredited as a "way to knowledge".

But currently I'd say the most important factor is that in the US you had and have a mighty force actively, vigorously, relentlessly working to keep people stupid--the billionaires and their favourite party.

When the gen pub and too many Republicans reject science to the extent they do, make an "elite Eastern college" a derogatory phrase, desire creationism be taught in schools, establish a "kill public schools, fund religious private (charter) schools" policy, insult expertise and denigrate experts, fear immigrant, deny climate change is real and not caused by human produced pollutants and CO2, and vote for an obvious con artist who matches their bigotry, ignorance, inexperience and delight in the criminal street wisdom of a "leader," and general nastiness toward the "other," then you have government by the fuckwits, for the fuckwits, and of the fuckwits.

Will our democracy disappear from this Earth?

>53 barney67: barney67:

62-year-old liberal/progressive who would have preferred to vote for Bernie here. When Obama became president, I noticed MSNBC and Fox pretty much switched talking points from when Dubya was president. The same verbal tactics are used by both liberals and conservatives.

I prefer letting even those whom I consider guilty of speech that promotes hatred speak so that they can be refuted. (If the person claims to be a Christian, one may -- gently -- point out that Christ said we should do unto others as we would have them do unto us. Matt 7:12 and Luke 6:31.)

Christ also said what would be the fate of those who do or do not feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, welcoming the stranger, clothing the naked, caring for the sick, and visiting those in prison. Matt 25:31-46.

Samaritans were about as welcome to the Jews of Jesus' day as Muslims to many Americans today, but he chose to make the true neighbor of his parable about loving one's neighbor as oneself a Samaritan. Luke 10:25-37.

The way the early Christians lived could be considered old-fashioned Socialism. Acts 4:32)

Once, when Mass was over, a fellow parishioner parroted to me that talking point that parents should take care of their children's health back when the Affordable Care Act was not yet the law, I asked her nicely if she thought children should be penalized because their parents couldn't afford healthcare. She gave me such a shocked look that I knew that aspect had never occurred to her before. She didn't try to defend her original view.

I may be Catholic, but I don't listen to bishops or archbishops who tell me I should vote only for candidates who say they are pro-life. I consider candidates truly pro-life if they are trying to ensure that prenatal, actual birth, and the feeding/schooling/healthcare of children is covered. I don't believe that God gave me a brain without expecting me to use it.

I have read my copy of the New American Bible 43 times since I was 20 and I notice when some pundit or Congressperson is trying to misuse it. For example, take that line about those who don't work don't eat from Second Thessalonians 3:10. Saint Paul was NOT talking about persons who CAN'T work or can't find work. He was talking about persons who could work and find work, but CHOSE not to work, depending on others for food.

You are correct about name-calling not being helpful. However, I have avoided using the expression 'bull in a china shop' since I watched episode 85 of Mythbusters.

Yes, both sides engage in verbal sniping and even sadly, physical confrontation. Still, Gabby Giffords was my representative. She and others with her were not shot by a liberal. I fear fatal violence more from some members of today's Alt-right than any of today's Leftists. (Notice that I am not saying 'Conservative'. I don't like it when Progressive Pundits talk about Conservatives as if they were ALL uncaring of those less fortunate than themselves. I know that's not true.)

I've been a registered Democrat since I was 18 and am seriously considering becoming an Independent.

I apologize for rambling somewhat. I meant only to ask you to please not tar all Liberals with the same brush. The rest came pouring out.

>203 JalenV: Thanks for the ramble.

Donald Trump congratulates Australian PM on their superior and universal health care system---which just goes to show how little he actually knows about the subject. It gives Bernie Sanders and MSNBC host Chris Hayes a big laugh:

https://www.popsugar.com/news/Bernie-Sanders-Laughs-Trump-Comment-Australian-PM-...

However would such a Panel decide someone was incapacitated to exercise office of President? We might wish to block someone from becoming President who had, say, Alzheimer's, but in early stages (Reagan?), wouldn't it have been more harmful to the country to remove such a person? Depression (Lincoln?). JFK's issues? Trump's impulsiveness, thin skin, and resistance to facts is scary, but at what point might he be considered incapacitated, rather than eccentric (maximus!)? Can Congress require some kind of mental, emotional, physical health screening for future Presidential candidates, that couldn't be weaponized at a later date?

Two dozen Democrats get behind bill to lay foundation for removing Trump for being mentally 'incapacitated' (but they'd need Mike Pence to agree)

25th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution allows Congress to set up a medical commission that could determine if a president is fit for office
The president's cabinet is also allowed to serve that purpose, but Congress has never established its own group to participate
Either panel would require the vice president to agree before Congress could vote to remove the president
A Maryland Democratic congressman is trying to set up a commission to target President Trump, tweeting: 'Trump's mental incapacity is no laughing matter'
Plan has only attracted Democratic cosponsors so far
Senate that passed 25th Amendment agreed 'inability' meant a 'mental debility' rendering a president 'unable or unwilling to make any rational decision'

David Martosko | 30 June 2017

...Maryland Rep. Jamie Raskin, who also teaches constitutional law at American University,...bill would allow the four Republican and Democratic leaders of the House and Senate to each choose a psychiatrist and another doctor. Then each party would add a former statesman – like a retired president or vice president.

The final group of 10 would meet and choose an 11th member, who would become the committee's chairman.

Once the group is officially seated, the House and Senate could direct it through a joint resolution to conduct an actual examination of the president 'to determine whether the president is incapacitated, either mentally or physically,' according to the Raskin bill.

And if the president refuses to participate, the bill dictates, that 'shall be taken into consideration by the commission in reaching a conclusion.'

Under the 25th Amendment, such a committee – or the president's cabinet – can notify Congress in writing that a sitting president is unfit. In either case the vice president must concur, and he would immediately become 'acting president.'

...In the case of Raskin's plan, the Constitution holds that both houses of Congress would hold a vote within three weeks.

If two-thirds majorities in the House and Senate agreed that the president couldn't discharge his duties, he would be dismissed.

Raskin's plan could have a fatal flaw, however: Legal scholars tend to agree that when the Constitution's framers first provided for the replacement of a president with an 'inability to discharge the Powers and Duties of the Office,' they weren't talking about mere eccentricities...

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4655964/Democrats-lay-foundation-remove-...

...in some respects, the political obstacles to executing the 25th Amendment are even greater than impeachment, notes Joel K. Goldstein, a professor of law at St. Louis University. Under its provisions, if a president challenged a finding of incapacity and demanded that he or she be reinstalled in office, it would require two-thirds of both chambers to block the commander in chief from doing so. (By contrast, it only takes a majority of the House to impeach a president, although two thirds of the Senate must vote to convict and remove the president.)

Moreover, as Goldstein notes, even if Congress were to create the body called for in Raskin’s bill, it couldn’t act to declare the president incapacitated without the concurrence of the vice president. That means Vice President Mike Pence could effectively block any move to invoke the 25th Amendment option. “The vice president is a necessary party. He effectively has a veto,” said Goldstein. “He’s a deal breaker.”...

https://www.yahoo.com/news/bill-create-panel-remove-trump-office-quietly-picks-d...

There was already a test for President Trump's fitness for office. It's called an election.

It took place last November. You lost. Get over it. Move on.org. The inability to accept the outcome of an election is itself a sign of mental illness. Ever think of that?

No, wait. You might be one of those "caring foreigners" who feels it necessary to comment on American politics.

The greater the distance you are from an event, the less likely you are to understand it.

>203 JalenV: "When Obama became president, I noticed MSNBC and Fox pretty much switched talking points from when Dubya was president."

I'm not even sure I know what this means. I'm not sure you know what it means. I hear many people use the words "talking points" as though it were some kind of evil weapon. If you really want to be a thoughtful person, stop imitating people who invent this kind of language. There's no way for me to respond to people who no speaka da Inglese.

>207 barney67: 'The greater the distance you are from an event, the less likely you are to understand it.'

That's not the case with Hiroshima.

>208 barney67: What it means is that the focuses of the networks changed when the presidents changed. I believe, Barney, that it refers to the habit of ideologically fixed networks to hold different presidents to different standards.

Trump's obvious incapacity is a sign of the crisis in mental health in America.

A sign like a poster for the crisis.

https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/video/2017/may/06/stephen-colbert-donal...

a revisit

Trump loves to be the center of attention ~ that is his daily opioid fix!!!

>207 barney67:

No "election" is a test of presidential fitness, and most certainly not when the president didn't actually win the election. Otherwise there would be no 25th Amendment. That so many voters chose theater over substantive policy only shows that America has sadly been dumbed down sufficiently (by reality TV) to prefer circuses over bread.

America lost when Agent Orange was selected by the Electoral College; not just Clinton supporters. An election isn't more sacred than the security of our country, nor its continued existence as a democratic Republic, nor as a Constitutional democracy.

All three of those factors override in importance the selection of Agent Orange by the Electoral College, especially when the selection also overrides the will of the electorates' votes. Clinton won the election by more than 3 million popular votes. This fact is why Agent Orange created the FAKE Voter Fraud Panel. He is obsessed by the fact he lost the popular election and is pursuing a nonexistent meme that he lost due to voter fraud.

Understanding how totally crazy this pursuit of his is, 40+ states refuse to respond to the panel chair's (an avowed white supremacist) demand for detailed voter information, including private and protected information (SS #s) be sent to it via unsecured email. Where are all the Republican protests from Trump supporters who foamed at the mouth over the fake story surrounding Clinton's emails on an unsecured personal server? Silent as the ideologue's tomb.

We now have a vile, ignorant, arrogant, narcissistic, idiot in the WH. Where is it written that the Village must alter life to suit its Idiot? Nowhere, for obvious reasons. Resistance to the usurpation of American foundations has never been more important than now.

Recognition of a diabolical unhinged personality is not a partisan issue. Those who continue to make false excuses (you lost) in order to draw the veil and refuse to acknowledge the reality of a deteriorated personality occupying the most critical position in the country -- the position that is the ultimate source of equality under the rule of law -- are also a greater threat to The Great Experiment than any normal citizen who protests and acts to subvert the criminal behavior of an Executive with the personality and character of Agent Orange.

The lesson of Agent Orange holding the highest office of the land is that there are sufficient "undereducated" in the country who prefer to be ruled rather than governed, and that the Republican Party likes nothing better than ruling because it has proven over and over again, that when it holds the reins of Federal government, it is incapable of governing.

RESIST!

2017/July 4th weekend ~ if the Trumps were a normal family, they would be seeking medical help for their oldest family member.

@214 BRAVO!!! Well said!

This is typical liberal bullshit. This is the M.O.:

1) Anyone who disagrees with you is sick, evil, or stupid.
2) Employing the psychological term "projection", it would be v. easy to document instances of liberals projecting their problems onto others, i.e. accusing others of what they themselves are guilty of.

Do you really think saying "Donald Trump is mentally ill" is a thoughtful approach to politics? Not only will you not convince people to agree with you, you will drive them further to the other side, which is exactly what's happening. We're seeing the press's true colors. The majority of people love what's happening politically. Five of you here don't. Fortunately you are in a tiny minority.

I see that reading a lot of books hasn't made any of smarter. Perhaps you are reading the wrong books or reading them incorrectly. Reading is a lost art.

>214 Limelite: "when the president didn't actually win the election"

This is where I stopped reading. You need to hit the books and grow up. If you aren't an American, I can understand why the Electoral College puzzles you. If you are an American, there is no excuse. You shouldn't be voting. I would love to see fewer people in America vote.

>218 barney67: 'Do you really think saying "Donald Trump is mentally ill" is a thoughtful approach to politics?'

What do you make of his, if not insane, juvenile posting?

>218 barney67:

Have you noticed how Agent Orange attacks and accuses people who speak the truth about him and about real events with precisely the distasteful, detestable, and vile characteristics that apply to him?

Liar
Grandstander
Showboater
Fat
Ugly
Weak
Dumb as a rock
Loser
Low-I.Q.
Very dishonest
Failed
Total lightweight
Dummy
Liberal clown
Goofball atheist
"He's not a war hero."
Dopey
Disgraceful

Just to name a few. As any psychologist will say, narcissists habitually accuse and blame everyone else for their own failings. Now, I can understand why you attack me and defend Agent Orange, of whom Fox (ahem) News touts as a "pilar of strength." Surely, you can see that the largest purveyor of "fake" news -- which, may I remind you, Agent Orange claims he despises but only promotes their stories -- is faking Trump's fitness, too?

Most ordinary Americans can. Because his un-fitnes is not a partisan issue that was decided by a minority of voters. It's demonstrated on a near daily basis to the world every morning when his thumbs hit his phone.

Tell us, please, how does tweeting video of body-slamming a media entity that he took from a neo-Nazi demonstrates presidential fitness?

A lesson that has escaped your well-informed self is that Truth is not a function of power and partisanship, which conservatives deny by believing their president and denying truth. Because, according to them, Truth has a liberal bias.

>220 Limelite: Dear Limelight, My well-informed self put the wrong number on his post, which he has corrected. But read my post. It's short. You probably could have figured out that I erred. We are in agreement, and we both have the problem of putting Trump's behavior into words. It's self-evidently repulsive, but apparently too many people in the US are ignorant enough to go along with the argument that it just makes him a real guy. The dumbing down of the president as a tactic has gone on since Ike pretended to be an aw shucks sort of feller, until now intellect is not required in the least.

>221 RickHarsch: A message from the President of the United States of America to you:

Donald J. Trump
@realDonaldTrump
Happy 4th of July to everyone, including the haters and losers!

12:57am · 4 Jul 2014 · Twitter for Android

>222 theoria: Dear Theoria,

Thanks ever so much. I may never have received the message otherwise. And, you know, the personal touch, Don's willingness to use social media to keep in close touch even with emigres, well, I guess I'm just a sucker, but I can't help but like the big lug.

r

>221 RickHarsch: Thanks for pointing out my error. I'll try to fix. Fixed. And my apologies!

My ill-informed fingers hit the wrong numeral. Still friends?

>222 theoria:

Now who doesn't think that's very presidential?

>224 Limelite: I'm fine if you promise to have a sit-down or a twitter-down with your fingers.

>223 RickHarsch: He has a soft spot for Slovenia...

>225 Limelite: To be fair, that's a unpresidented pre-unpresidential tweet.

>227 theoria: Slovenia has been lifted during a hard period of neoconic change, austerity, into a slightly higher place, riding something like a cloud of collective bemusement...

Agent Orange. What does that mean?

>230 JGL53: What is flaggable about 230? There is no clear indication what he is referring to other than the post #229. 'It' refers back to the initial exclamation, but Barney is a he, not an it.

I counter-flag.

0316926159

>229 barney67:
Do as you say, not as you don't do.

Hit the books and grow up!

FYI: I accept that Republicans and conservatives got exactly the president they deserve in the 2016 selection.

Can't you answer my questions?

Where is it written that the Village must alter life to suit its Idiot?

Have you noticed how Agent Orange attacks and accuses people who speak the truth about him and about real events with precisely the distasteful, detestable, and vile characteristics that apply to him?

Tell us, please, how does tweeting video of body-slamming a media entity that he took from a neo-Nazi demonstrates presidential fitness?

I await your evasions answers.

I don't have to answer your questions or anyone else's.

I doubt it's wise to discuss anything with someone who uses "agent orange" out of context. I know that it was a pesticide that may have been used during military conflicts. I don't know what it has to do with this thread or with any of the issues of the day. Calling a person that isn't clever or funny. It's just illogical and absurd.

I know that when people resort to personal attacks, as they have often against me in this forum, especially during the past week, it means they have run out of arguments and are simply venting anger and frustration that has nothing to do with me. They're just using me as their whipping boy, easy mark, scapegoat. I'm sure they have other scapegoats in their lives.

Anger can be minimized with medicine.

204 RickHarsch: You're welcome.

208: barney67: According to Merriam Webster: a talking point is 'something that lends support to an argument; also : a subject of discussion' https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/talking%20point

Admittedly, I am a former medical librarian, so looking things up is second nature to me, but weren't you able to find the definition on your own?

A brief example of the switch in talking points I noticed was showing respect for the president because he was the president versus just because someone is the president doesn't mean he should be given respect if his character is not worthy of it.

I await your response to my Biblical examples.

By the way, I received my new voter registration card that states I am an independent two days ago.

Miss Ann Elizabeth Nichols

>235 JalenV: I'm not bothering to search 30 or so posts back up the thread to figure out the context. If you want people to understand what you're talking about, in the future you could add a > before the number and LT will automatically link it (and add the user name of the person you're responding to).

> 236

jjwilson61 -your post = incoherent pedantry.

I for one suffered no great bother to review the listed posts and get up to speed on the debate.

Anyway, talking point = subject of discussion is the obvious meaning, and in the context of politics, picking the subject and focusing in at a particular angle discerned to be in one's interest. This I think is a common understanding even among those of us who are not egotists and self-realized geniuses like barney67.

Maybe I am prejudiced but years of watching the various news and commentary shows have convinced me that rightwingers (e.g., Hannity) are far more prone to twist facts/truth into something nearly unrecognizable than are leftwingers (e.g., Maddow). Thus I see no moral equivalence between the wings that so many "lovers of peace" say exists.

Getting back to the OP I am not sure a case can be made for trump actually being mentally ill - i.e., as being delusional or schizo - but if narcissism is a mental illness, then yes he is. Also there does seem to be sociopathy in his personality - but that could just be his extreme form of narcissism, which was horrifyingly exacerbated by his being elected POTUS.

Rather than being removed for mental incapacity I think trump will resign at some point in an attempt to avoid having his finances revealed to the world by Mueller et al. Then we will live in Pence World.

So we can't win, we can only hope to survive. Or, rather, surviving will be the measure of winning, just like on a "reality show" - one of which trump used to host. Ironic - is that the word for which I am looking?

>236 jjwilson61: You're right, but you don't know the poster, who may be new and so could do without the haughty 'I'm not bothering'...I bothered out of curiosity.

>235 JalenV: "something that lends support to an argument; also : a subject of discussion"

Of course I know that. In which case why not use the word "subject" or "matter" or "problem" rather than talking points? This dictionary definition isn't how people are using the word, which is often the case. For those of you who are cheerleaders for language change, here's a good example. Obviously since the words "talking points" are uttered with a sneer, something more is meant: a prepared answer, possibly a lie, which dodges the question. In which case, why know just the word "dodge" or "lie"?

That's why I don't use "talking points" or any other trendy word or phrase. Like impactful, beginning every answer with "So...", "issues", "different to" instead of different than, lock and load, launch instead of begin, "friend" as a verb to refer to the pseudo-social communication of Facebook.

I realize this puts me on the side of the curmudgeons, but I don't mind and I have good company: Bryan Garner, David Foster Wallace, Joseph Epstein,Follett, Fowler, Swift, Dr. Johnson, Kenner, Buckley, Safire, Mencken, Fiske, Barzun and the editors at the old New Yorker.

I consider this thread and its topic thoroughly offensive. I'm continuing the "talking points" discussion in a new thread.

Apparently some of Trump's cabinet understood how volatile he can be.

Mattis, Kelly hatched travel pact to keep tabs on Trump

Two of President Trump's top advisers reportedly agreed in the early days of the administration that they would not leave the United States at the same time, in order to ensure they could monitor orders coming from the White House.

The Associated Press reported on Tuesday that Secretary of Defense James Mattis and then-Department of Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly - who was sworn in as chief of staff on Monday - agreed in the early weeks of Trump's presidency to coordinate travel plans so that one of them would always be in the United States.