Donald Trump: mentally, physically, temperamentally compromised #43

Guess who's due for an annual physical?

Trump re-nominates Ronny Jackson for promotion despite investigation into misconduct allegations
Louis Casiano | Fox News Feb 3, 2019

President Trump has re-nominated his former doctor, Navy Rear Adm. Ronny Jackson, for a second star amid an ongoing Pentagon investigation against him that derailed his nomination for Veterans Affairs secretary.

The White House sent Jackson’s name to the Senate on Jan. 15 for promotion consideration, according to reports. Jackson faces a series of allegations that surfaced after Trump nominated him to head the VA, including drinking on the job, creating a hostile work environment and overprescribing medications...

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/trump-re-nominates-ronny-jackson-despite-invest...

Read Trump's "Executive Time"-filled leaked private schedules (95 p)
Alexi McCammond, Jonathan Swan | Feb 3, 2019

A White House source has leaked President Trump's private schedules for nearly every working day since the midterms, showing that Trump has spent around 60% of the last three months in "Executive Time."...

https://www.axios.com/read-trumps-private-leaked-executive-time-schedules-00e931...

"I set out to look at the president, the promiser of luxury experiences, through the lens of travel writing."

Journeys in Trump World
Jason Wilson | March 12, 2018

I traveled to five Trump-branded properties in four countries. Here’s what I glimpsed about America’s future from being a tourist in the world of Trump.

Trump International Hotel & Tower, Vancouver Canada

Trump Taj Mahal Hotel and Casino in Atlantic City, NJ

Trump International Golf Links in Aberdeenshire, Scotland

ALBEMARLE ESTATE AT TRUMP WINERY, VA

International Hotel & Tower Panama

https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2018/lifestyle/magazine/trump-travel/

'Willful Ignorance.' Inside President Trump's Troubled Intelligence Briefings
John Walcott February 2, 2019

...senior intelligence briefers are breaking two years of silence to warn that the President is endangering American security with what they say is a stubborn disregard for their assessments.

...Trump displays what one called “willful ignorance” when presented with analyses generated by America’s $81 billion-a-year intelligence services. The officials, who include analysts who prepare Trump’s briefs and the briefers themselves, describe futile attempts to keep his attention by using visual aids, confining some briefing points to two or three sentences, and repeating his name and title as frequently as possible.

What is most troubling, say these officials and others in government and on Capitol Hill who have been briefed on the episodes, are Trump’s angry reactions when he is given information that contradicts positions he has taken or beliefs he holds. Two intelligence officers even reported that they have been warned to avoid giving the President intelligence assessments that contradict stances he has taken in public...

http://time.com/5518947/donald-trump-intelligence-briefings-national-security/

#4--his own intelligence tells him that Iran is abiding by the agreement that they made with the Obama administration even though Trump has taken us out of that deal and Trump decides all on his own that Iran is not. It's not convenient to his version of the 'facts'. He wants conflicts and his allies in the region--Israel and Saudi Arabia want a conflict with Iran. What a responsible administration would do would be to continue to engage diplomatically. Iran doesn't have to be our friend but that doesn't mean that we can't try to build a relationship with Iran to some level of cordiality whether the Saudi's or Israeli's like it or not.

But 'willful ignorance' is pretty much what we got. Less than two years.

See accompanying photo of Trump the day he had his annual physical...

Trump’s doctor says he is in ‘very good health’ after exam by 11 specialists
Anne Gearan | February 8, 2019

President Trump is “in very good health” and is expected to remain healthy for “the duration of his Presidency, and beyond,” the president’s doctor reported Friday after a physical exam that lasted nearly four hours and included 11 specialists.

The White House did not release details of the exam at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center...

The memo did not include the disciplines of any of the specialists...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trumps-doctor-says-he-is-in-very-good-he...

Jake Tapper @jaketapper | 6:40 AM - 12 Feb 2019:
VP Cheney’s cardiologist has a question

Jonathan Reiner @JReinerMD | 6:11 AM - 12 Feb 2019:
It’s been 4 days since the president underwent his annual physical exam and still no data has been released. What are they hiding? @jaketapper @peterbakernyt

An opinion piece:

Being Raised by Two Narcissists Taught Me How to Deal with Trump

Now, I’m not weighing in on the president’s mental health or trying to diagnose him with narcissism from afar … But children of narcissists are hyperaware of a--hole games being played because we’ve had the most experience with it, and often, we know how best to handle it.

If I can’t technically call Trump a narcissist, he sure looks like an a--hole.

1. A--holes are incapable of being shamed.

2. A--holes view tantrums as another means to an end.

3. A--holes will always know the extent of leverage they have and they will always, ALWAYS use the threat of it to get what they want.

4. A--holes can be and do get defeated, but expecting a true Watergate moment—where the president steps down to prevent the country from falling further into chaos—is not based in reality.

5. A--holes usually don’t change, because there’s too much benefit to the way they do things. But the country does not have to feel beholden to the a--hole.

It is a lie that trump is 6'3". He is 6'2".

It is a lie that trump weights 243 lbs. He probably goes about 265 these days - just fucking look at him. He is morbidly obese, besides being morbidly obtuse. lol.

Since quadrupling his Crestor daily dose his HDL has dropped. Yea, Crestor - work your magic on that ignorant sumbitch.

If trump drops dead of a heart attack in the short term will anyone be surprised? Cheeseburgers every fucking night just can't be healthy - one does not have to be a fucking vegan to figure that out.

trump is a billionaire redneck. How proud we Americans should be. Not.

>9 JGL53:

trump is a billionaire redneck

I'm gonna have to use that.

>9 JGL53: It is a lie that trump is 6'3". He is 6'2".

Pfft. Not even.
(And does anyone doubt that Trump usually wears lifts?)
I've stood next to him - and I'd be surprised if he's 6'1".

Here he is with the ACTUAL 6' 3" JEB Bush

Here he is with 6'2" Trudeau

Here he is with 6'1" Obama

Every aspect of Trump is a lie.

“Part of the reason that writers have paid so much attention to LBJ is the size of the documentary record. For students of politics and policy, Lyndon Johnson left one of the largest collections of historical evidence in world history.
…

... “Randall Bennett Woods, the John A. Cooper Distinguished Professor of History at the University of Arkansas and author of the award-winning Fulbright: A Biography (New York, 1995), is the most recent biographer to address Johnson's "habit of inventing versions of himself and putting them up for inspection and approval" (p. 639). Depending on the circumstances, according to Woods, he could be

"Johnson the Son of the Tenant Farmer,
Johnson the Great Compromiser,
Johnson the All-Knowing,
Johnson the Humble,
Johnson the Warrior,
Johnson the Dove,
Johnson the Romantic,
Johnson the Hard-Headed Pragmatist,
Johnson the Preserver of Traditions,
Johnson the Crusader for Social Justice,
Johnson the Magnanimous,
Johnson the Vindictive" or
"Johnson the Uncouth,"
"LBJ the Hick,"
"Lyndon the Satyr," and
"Johnson the Usurper" (pp. 639, 644, 645).*

Previous biographers have offered up Johnson the big daddy, the southerner-westerner-Texan, the American dreamer, the politician, the father's son, the rising star, the flawed giant, the Periclean paradox (domestic dreams undone by war), the very human, the tragedy, the pathbreaker, the ascender, and the master.”
_______________________

(University of South Carolina | Department of History | Faculty Publications : (11-1-2009) Historians and the Many Lyndon Johnsons: A Review Essay by Kent B. Germany, USC-Columbia, S.C.

(first published in THE JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTORY Volume LXXV, No. 4, November 2009)
______________________
*LBJ: Architect of American Ambition By Randall B. Woods. (New York and other cities: Free Press, c. 2006

(from The Reader (Weekly) (Chicago) FILM | HISTORY | POLITICS | TELEVISION ) Trump may be a grandiose narcissist, but he’s no match for the Lyndon Johnson of All the Way*

Posted By J.R. Jones on 05.25.16 at 01:00 PM
_______

… ”There's no question that grandiose narcissists can be extraordinarily effective politicians. When Johnson gives legislators the treatment, he often calls up in them the same lust for greatness that he knows so well in himself.” …

* (IMDB.com) All the Way (2016)
_______________________________

(From Culture CheatSheet“Donald Trump Isn't Alone: These Presidents Had the Most Unpresidential Personality Types” by Jess Bolluyt | December 13, 2018 …
…“many Trump opponents criticize the president’s temperament as “unpresidential.” The insult implies that there’s a standard of appropriate behavior in the Oval Office. Of course, there is. But throughout American history, voters have elected plenty of presidents who violated the unspoken rules of presidential behavior and speech.” …

_______________________________

(George Tames/The New York Times Photo Archives)
(Senate Majority Leader, Lyndon Johnson (D-TX.) giving Senator Theodore Green (D-R.I.) “the treatment.” (1957) )

_______________________________



("Lyndon B. Johnson meets with Sen. Richard Russell" (17 December, 1963 ))
(Wikipedia) (Source: Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum. Image Serial Number: W98-30)

_______________________________

(from Wikipedia's page Lyndon B. Johnson )

..."Central to Johnson's control was "The Treatment",(50) described by two journalists:

..."The Treatment could last ten minutes or four hours. It came, enveloping its target, at the Johnson Ranch swimming pool, in one of Johnson's offices, in the Senate cloakroom, on the floor of the Senate itself—wherever Johnson might find a fellow Senator within his reach.

"Its tone could be supplication, accusation, cajolery, exuberance, scorn, tears, complaint and the hint of threat. It was all of these together. It ran the gamut of human emotions. Its velocity was breathtaking and it was all in one direction. Interjections from the target were rare. Johnson anticipated them before they could be spoken. He moved in close, his face a scant millimeter from his target, his eyes widening and narrowing, his eyebrows rising and falling. From his pockets poured clippings, memos, statistics. Mimicry, humor, and the genius of analogy made The Treatment an almost hypnotic experience and rendered the target stunned and helpless." (51)

(50) New York Times, The Johnson Treatment: Lyndon B. Johnson and Theodore F. Green". Afterimagegallery.com. Retrieved October 6, 2008. (Wikipedia)

(51) Evans, Rowland; Novak, Robert (1966). Lyndon B. Johnson: The Exercise of Power. p. 104. (Wikipedia)

(From American Heritage) : The Temper Thing | How bad is it when Presidents get really sore? | by Kevin Baker | May/June 2000
____________________

...“Most Presidents—and nearly all successful Presidents—have displayed some kind of temper at some time in their tenures. It’s simply too difficult to get that far in politics without so valuable a tool. Sooner or later any President is going to have to get tough with truculent senators, evil foreign dictators, willful special-interest groups, corrupt criminal syndicates, recalcitrant state governors, shilly-shallying bureaucrats, and feckless relations. And then there’s the rest of us. Any man who could get to be President without becoming at least occasionally fed up with all the silly, self-serving demands we make of him would have to be possessed of an almost unnatural serenity.

“About the only Presidents who seem to have been consistently genial were William McKinley, William Howard Taft, Gerald Ford, and Warren G. Harding (at least until Harding discovered that all the friends he had appointed to public positions were robbing the country blind). None of them fared very well in office, save for McKinley, who was assassinated by a man in a reception line who pretended to have a bandaged hand. (A little more impatience—“Why is that fool trying to shake my hand with a cast?”—might have served him well.)” ...

> 12 Gee - that sure was a whole lot of trouble taken to get to effing nowhere. It made me cry, as I was utterly bored to tears. lol.

----

- There is no way ANY previous President can compare with trump in highest degree of NPD (narcissistic personality disorder). trump wins, (small) hands down. lol.

Furthermore, no previous modern President can be accurately compared to trump in sheer ignorance of ALL facts that one would expect a POTUS to command. trump is out of touch with the real world as any hillbilly one can imagine, including Jed Clampett. And about as sophisticated also. lol.

Defending trump is like defending a barnyard pig from charges of fatness and dirtiness. People with eyes can see and even the blind can sense that trump is in a category by himself. Forget John Edward - it is trump that is Douche of the Universe. lol.

One could compare trump favorably with a dictator, one supposes, because trump is only a wannabee dictator. trump is continually finding out, after the fact, that most of what he thought he could do he cannot legally do. Tough luck on him for being a citizen of a republic with a quite enforceable Constitution.

Trump's latest piss-ant attempt to call attention to himself and avoid (in his tiny mind) the fact that he is a loser and a fool is this national emergency declaration. Anyone want to bet this latest shitass move does not eventually blow up in his fat ugly orange face?

>9 JGL53: The point was made yesterday that if he can make such an obvious falsehood, how can we trust anything else he says. (He certainly illustrated that this morning in the Rose Garden.) His weight is definitely suspect and his blood pressure could be that low because he slipped an extra Crestor or two that morning. He can't help but lie about everything, whether it matters to anyone or not. I mean, who the h-e-double-hockey-sticks cares if he's 6'0" or 6'2"?

>14 mamzel:

I'm guessing his concern with a 2" difference lies elsewhere. And probably doesn't do anything but lie there without medical intervention.

>9 JGL53: trump is a billionaire redneck.

Please. The red neck part of a redneck is because they've actually worked with their hands outside. A stereotypical redneck may be an asshole about his beliefs, but at least he's sincere about his love of God and country. Rednecks have their own political jerks, but Trump is a city kid from NYC.

>16 prosfilaes:

Who cares? "Redneck" is a pejorative which resonates with many people. Therefore, call Trump a redneck. This is completely par for the course.

Many of Trump's critics, obsessed, delusional fools who have little acquaintance with fidelity to the facts, apparently work on the view that whatever is fashionably despicable qualifies for application to Trump.

The pejorative "redneck" originally described white people who worked outside - usually farmers - who thus developed red necks.

This was back when most American men were farmers - now farmers make up a mere tiny per cent of Americans. Literal red necks are no longer a problem.

The term "redneck" has now come to mean anyone with some combination of a poor education, pure ignorance, utter lack of even a pretense to sophistication, and being a blatant racist, gay-hater, sexist and in general a no good useless squint-eyed mouth-breathing sumbitch, who quite possibly fucks sheep and is married to his cousin (or some foreign whore if he is a rich redneck).

Other than the poor education part the above fits trump to a tee. The only people who disagree are those who believe trump is just great, i.e., his slope-headed shit-kicking brain-dead zombie army of clueless rednecks - around 32 per cent of the country, apparently. The normals - the majority of Americans -can see exactly what trump is - because they don't watch foxx noise all fucking day long - like the abbey-normals do. lol.

Out of the hundreds of examples I could give of trump's sheer inanity and gob-smacking shitheadedness I will only mention his latest proffered paralogism where in the same breath that he declared a national emergency he stated "I didn't have to do this." The fucktard advocates taking billions of dollars for his stupid wall from the military and infrastructure appropriations. I suppose his boss V. Putin told him to do so because, you know, piss tapes. lol.

Even though I am an atheist I've been praying hard to - Mother Nature, I suppose - to let me live at least another two years to see how trump finally goes down the tubes for good and plenty - because the son-of-an-Orangutan WILL be taken down - ALL the way down. He will not escape like Clinton or Bush Jr. - he will be taken down so hard at some point that he will make Nixon look like an Eagle Scout in comparison. lol.

Do I really know this? No. I merely feel it in my very bones. It is a grok sort of thing.

>18 JGL53: You are dealing with machines not programmed with a humor mechanism.

> 19

I am merely venting here and, at best, preaching to the choir, i.e., the aforementioned normals.

The aforementioned trump's zombie army is dead to me. The only way those motherfuckers could have a brain is if they ate a brain. They can all die in pain for all I care - I am completely out of fucks to give for them.

Uh, lol.

As pressure mounts (e.g., https://www.newsmax.com/newsfront/us-trump-russia-probe/2019/03/03/id/905246/ ),
Trump gives a free-association, psychologically revealing 2-hr speech, dissociated from reality, to CPAC:
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2019/03/02/trump_hits_mueller_probe_at_c...

Bob Cesca @bobcesca_go | 4:26 PM - 2 Mar 2019
This crackpot has the nuclear codes in his pocket. Sleep tight, world.

ETA:
Michael @michaelschweitz | 10:52 PM - 3 Mar 2019
Mad as a hatter. This is the leader of the free world. This isn’t funny. It’s scary AF.

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

Fact Check
15 Claims From Trump’s Speech to CPAC, Fact-Checked
Linda Qiu | March 2, 2019

...“When they charge 40 percent tariffs on our cars going into China, and we charge them nothing coming to our country. When they raise their tariff from 10 percent to 25 percent then 40 percent, and they said to me, ‘We expected somebody would call and say, you can’t nobody called so we just left it.’”...

“The Green New Deal, I encourage it, I think it is really something that they should promote. They should work hard on, it is something the country needs desperately. They have to go out and get it, but I will take the other side of that argument, only because I am mandated to. But they should stay with that. Never change. No planes. No energy. When the wind stops blowing, that’s the end of your electric.”...

“Then in 1913, they ended tariffs.”...

“So we fired Comey. Schumer who called for his resignation many times. Podesta, I believe that day ... called for his resignation.”...

“I flew to Iraq — first time I left the White House because I stayed in the White House for months and months because I wanted the Democrats to get back from their vacations from Hawaii and these other places.”...

Mr. Trump also made at least 9 other inaccurate claims that The Times has previously fact-checked:

He understated the number of Electoral College votes Mrs. Clinton won as 223. (It was 232.)

He exaggerated the United States’ annual trade deficit with China as $500 billion. (It was $336 billion in 2017.)

He exaggerated the United States’ annual trade deficit with the rest of the world as $800 billion. (It was $553 billion in 2017.)

He misleadingly claimed that the news media would have deemed the level of job creation and reduction in food stamp participation “impossible.” (The numbers are on par with figures reached before he took office.)

He falsely claimed military spending had reached levels “nobody’s ever heard of.” (Congress authorized more money for the military several years under President Barack Obama.)

He falsely claimed just 3 percent of detained unauthorized immigrants “come back for a trial.” (About 72 percent showed up in the 2017 fiscal year.)

He misleadingly claimed Democrats voted to “execute” babies after birth. (Infants are rarely born alive after abortion procedures, and if they are, doctors do not kill them.)

He misleadingly claimed “we just got” Veterans Choice. (The health care program has existed since 2014, though Mr. Trump did enact changes.)

He falsely claimed “you couldn’t fire anybody in the V.A.” before he took office. (He signed a law that would make it easier to remove bad employees, but the department had been able to fire people before.)

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/02/us/politics/trump-cpac-fact-check.html

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

David Frum @davidfrum | 3:38 PM - 3 Mar 2019:

"He's going to be a very wealthy young man." - President Trump at 1:24 encouraging a conservative student who was assaulted on campus to sue his state government ( https://sfist.com/2019/03/03/trump-mentions-berkeley-assault-in-speech-universit... )

I feel I'm wearing out my welcome here. Suggestion: watch the CPAC speech for yourself, starting at hour 2 ... the CPAC audience has long since zoned out, and the performance becomes ever more psychologically revealing

At 1:04, Trump mocks the names of generals serving in Syria and Iraq
"What's your name?"
"Raisin."
"Like the fruit?" (biting motion) (ETA--margd: as in "raisin' cain"--General Caine... schoolyard humor)

"I stayed in the White House for months and months ... I figured it would look good if stayed in the White House so that you people all loved me and vote for me. I figured it would look good! So I stayed in the White House. ... I spent my New Year's all by myself." 1:00:22

At 59 minutes even the CPAC audience is visibly bored. And at just this moment, it is becoming much more psychologically revealing ...

At 56:24, Trump claims California Gov Gavin Newsom said, "You're a great president and one of the smartest people I've ever met." "That's what he said. Will he admit it? No, I doubt it. But that's what he said."...

At 40:00 exulting that Richard LeFrak - a genuinely successful NY developer - no longer calls him "Don" but "Mr. President" Then adds, "Actually that's true, that's actually true." So maybe that's the secret code: Two "actually true"s back-to-back...

At 39:45, Trump first brags that he got drilling approved in Alaska National Wilderness Reserve, then says that he did not want to get it approved to punish Senator Lisa Murkowski, who treated him very badly...

"Don't fall asleep." Trump at CPAC 2019. 37:14. (Almost 90 minutes to go!)...

Wait, Trump at 34:00 embarks on extended argument that his inauguration crowds were bigger than Obama's. He invites @marklevinshow to back him up on this...

Mocking @daveweigel for not having a private jet. In fairness, that's really on @washingtonpost for failing to provide one...

"There's so much love in this room" - Donald Trump at CPAC 3/2/2019 29:56...

"Matt Schlapp is loving this" - Trump at CPAC 2019...

Trump making it clear that he actually believed Jared Kushner when Kushner assured him that Democrats would be delighted by firing of James Comey...

Trump getting laughs at CPAC by mocking simon-pure conservative Jeff Sessions for speaking with a southern accent...

Trump: People are saying that my election was greater of Andrew Jackson. I'm not saying it, people are saying it. Greater even than election of Ronald Reagan, greatest of all time...

Amid barrage of trade gibberish, an interesting acknowledgement at 18:55 that Trump is bothered by (correct) argument that tariffs are tax upon US consumers...

Trump at 15 minutes lamenting that political correctness forbids him to make sporting jokes about inviting foreign subversion of US elections for his own personal advantage. (Why am I doing this?) ...

Robust defense of the immigration policy of the McKinley administration policy at 11:00, sublimely unaware of actual immigration policy of actual McKinley administration ... and why again am I doing this?...

At 10:45, Trump tells me the United States was richer in 1888 than it was under President Obama. ("Back then, our country was so rich, we didn't know what to do with the money.")...

At 8:30, Trump tells a blatantly obviously invented story about President Xi of China, and then caps it with, "It's hard to believe." Yep....

OK honest to goodness, nobody needs an after-the-fact non-live Twitter feed ... but at 7:50, Trump is bragging about how much foreign leaders like him. The Sally Field presidency...

Belatedly watching Trump's 2 hour Saturday morning CPAC speech and thinking, "I don't have time for all this. He's president of the United States. How does he have time for all this? Isn't there some work he has to do, some place he has to go?"

( margd: If you don't believe tweets above, listen to Trump's speech as you check your e-mail, etc. https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2019/03/02/trump_hits_mueller_probe_at_c... Brr!! )

‘Grab that record’: How Trump’s high school transcript was hidden
Marc Fisher | March 5, 2019

In 2011, days after Donald Trump challenged President Barack Obama to “show his records” to prove that he hadn’t been a “terrible student,” the headmaster at New York Military Academy got an order from his boss: Find Trump’s academic records and help bury them.

...In 2011, when the military academy was asked to secure Trump’s records, he...was considering challenging Obama in the 2012 election and had been making the rounds on TV, stepping up his criticism of the president, including insinuating that Obama was not qualified for admission to Columbia, where he finished his undergraduate degree, or Harvard, where he went to law school and graduated magna cum laude. During the 2012 campaign, Trump offered to donate $5 million to charity if Obama released his college transcripts...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/grab-that-record-how-trumps-high-school-...

>22 margd: Trump really is an asshole, isn't he. There's nothing those documents could say that would tell you as much about him as the fact that he made sure his documents were hidden as he was demanding that Obama turn over his records.

I would not be at all surprised to learn that Daddy paid for those diplomas and degrees. If he is so stupid that he thinks we swallow his bilge then lick our lips he couldn't possibly have made it through on his own.

Golf Magazine: Trump won a tournament he never played in (5:17)

Golf Magazine is reporting that the President has a plaque in his golf club in West Palm Beach stating that he won the club's annual golf championship last year. But he never actually played in that tournament.

https://www.msnbc.com/hardball/watch/golf-magazine-trump-won-a-tournament-he-nev...

>25 margd: If that turns out to be true -- and it's completely plausible in my mind -- then I'm going to have to realize all over again how mentally ill this man is.

>25 margd:
Saves the trouble of cheating. Less hassle.

>26 amysisson: "If that turns out to be true --"

& >25 margd: & >27 krolik:

LOL! Look, who among you lot even cares if it's true? The point has nothing to do with the accuracy of the headline, touted here. The point is that it makes Trump look as you want to believe him to be.

I'll bet you right now that the report is spurious in the posted "Golf Magazine: Trump won a tournament he never played in (5:17)"

I bet that's flatly false. But do you care? Fuck no. Of course you don't.

I've never cared for golf---that is true.

One might wonder why this Golf Magazine would publish this article though if there wasn't some truth to it. What's in it for them? I would think most of their subscribers are white with lots of business people--lots of the well to do.....or more likely to be Trump voters than not.

Photo-shopped by a prankster-- maybe even by a Trump ally who enjoys watching Trump-Agoniste suckers rise to the bait.

Look closely at the photo's series of "plaques" and you may notice that the bottom one is

a) out of alignment with the others-- the top edge slopes unevenly;

b) not evenly-spaced-- i.e., again, out of conformity with the spacing between plaques above

c) does not indicate, show, the same 3-D "relief" on the door's plane-surface as do the other plaques above it.

I contend that the photo is simply doctored and that someone has put this out for the over-eager press to pounce upon. And, of course, they did. LOL!

If one can copy-and-paste that photo,



how hard would it be to doctor it in photo-shop?

Using that, one could add "any number" of "years" to this lokcer-door right away:



"2019 Men's Club Champion"



"2020 Men's Club Champion"

"2021 Men's Club Champion"

"2022 Men's Club Champion"

How hard is that?!

ETA: As you can see by the plain photographic evidence here, Trump "won" in 2018, skipped the 2019 event and "won" again in 2020!

Damn! He's good! Not only does Trump win tournaments he's never played in before, he wins tournaments he's never played in yet! The guy is Batman!, I tell you! LOL!

You people crack my shit up!

>28 proximity1:

I do care whether it's true or not. That's why I said "IF it's true....", i.e. I'm withholding jumping to an actual conclusion until I have more information.

>31 amysisson:

"That's why I said "IF it's true....", i.e. I'm withholding jumping to an actual conclusion until I have more information."

Thanks so much!

So, IF the smear-mongering inuendo in which you're already taking part is true,... then, uhm.... etc.

And IF it's not true--- well, then, your ass is covered, isn't it? I mean, you have posted (after the fact,) that you're "withholding jumping to an actual conclusion until I have more information" (emphasis added).

LOL! So, here, then, I suppose, you're merely "jumping" to a "provisional" "conclusion." I see. (I guess) LOL! Cool!

"Your Fortune, your future, foretold, 75 cents.

The seer-advisor is IN."

Please take a number and wait until called.

~ ;^)

>26 amysisson: How a Trump "wins" in Trumpland:

President Trump won a 2018 club championship — without actually playing in it!
Michael Bamberger | March 11, 2019

https://www.golf.com/news/2019/03/10/president-trump-club-championship-did-not-e...

>25 margd: The Daily Beast is reporting the plaque as a "clubhouse joke."

It's not photoshopped.

Here's the version being consistently reported across all sources who deemed it newsworthy:

(Ted) Virtue held that title outright, Bamberger writes, until “Trump ran into him at the club, according to multiple sources who recounted the story. Having some fun with him, Trump said something like, ‘The only reason you won is because I couldn’t play.’” Trump challenged Virtue to a nine-hole match-play playoff—that is, each hole scored independently and worth one point—for the title. “As in nearly all amateur golf rounds, no rules official was on hand. Golf’s tradition calls for players to police themselves and, if necessary, one another. Trump won. In victory a magnanimous Trump said to Virtue something like, ‘This isn’t fair—we’ll be co-champions.’”

>30 proximity1:

"Must I observe you? must I stand and crouch
Under your testy humour? By the gods
You shall digest the venom of your spleen,
Though it do split you; for, from this day forth,
I'll use you for my mirth, yea, for my laughter,
When you are waspish."

Trump's 2018 "win" not exactly one of the top 5 greatest moments of sportsmanship in golf!
ETA: Now I really want to see Donaldo's transcripts--and tax returns!

...golf is well known as the gentleman’s game and the sportsmanship displayed by many of the game’s players should act as an example to other sports...
https://www.nationalclubgolfer.com/news/top-5-greatest-moments-of-sportsmanship-...

Paul Manafort has 7.5 years in a federal prison now minus 9 months for time already served and the potential for further state prosecutions. He and Michael Cohen and Mike Flynn are what should be an effective future 2020 campaign ad (or two or three) against Mr. Trump for whatever Democrat gets the POTUS nomination.

>35 2wonderY:

You've posted this, from >35 2wonderY:

"(Ted) Virtue held that title outright, Bamberger writes, until “Trump ran into him at the club, according to multiple sources who recounted the story. Having some fun with him, Trump said something like, ‘The only reason you won is because I couldn’t play.’” Trump challenged Virtue to a nine-hole match-play playoff—that is, each hole scored independently and worth one point—for the title. “As in nearly all amateur golf rounds, no rules official was on hand. Golf’s tradition calls for players to police themselves and, if necessary, one another. Trump won. In victory a magnanimous Trump said to Virtue something like, ‘This isn’t fair—we’ll be co-champions.’ ”

claiming about it that, (I quote) : "Here's the version being consistently reported across all sources who deemed it newsworthy:"

You'll notice that your text reads, "Bamberger writes"... (emphasis added)

SO, I went to Bamberger's story (the same story that margd's post cites with a URL, but which perhaps you didn't bother to read) and found the following:

I suggest that you may not have bothered to read it because here, below, in a separate "blockquote" are the portions your cited text does not include---

"After Virtue won the championship, Trump ran into him at the club, according to multiple sources who recounted the story. Having some fun with him, Trump said something like, “The only reason you won is because I couldn’t play.”

The president cited the demands of his job, although he was able to make 20 visits to the club in 2018, according to trumpgolfcount.com.

Trump then proposed a nine-hole challenge match to Virtue, winner-takes-the-title.

"You could say there wasn’t much in it for Virtue, and you could argue that this is not how these matters are typically, if ever, settled. But consider these factors:

"1. Trump owns the course;

"2. Trump is the president of the United States;

"3. Trump is not your typical golfer.

"Virtue said yes. (emphasis added)

"They played match play (each hole as its own contest) and straight up (no shots were given). As in nearly all amateur golf rounds, no rules official was on hand. Golf’s tradition calls for players to police themselves and, if necessary, one another.

"Trump won."

It seems to me that you admit that Trump won a nine-hole challenge for which the agreed-to-outcome was the winner's taking, or keeping, as the case may be, the title of the club's "championship."

So what's the beef here? That the (2018) plaque on Trump's locker-door does not read, "Co-champion" ?

Tell me:

how do you know the photo isn't doctored? It seems to be a "Pinterest" photo having nothing at all about its source--no photo credit to the photographer, no date, no description cited by the anonymous person who made the photo and, not least: nothing to indicate what the photo shows or where this locker-"door"--if it even is a "door"-- is in the first place.

(No wonder you people so easily bought into the 'Trump colluded with the Russians' bullshit.)

Even if it isn't (altered), how do you know that the plaque is there according to Trump's own instructions?-- that is, you seem to be insinuating that it does not say "Co-champion" because that's how Trump made sure it would be.

How do you know this?

I notice that the report says that, according to Bamberger, Trump said, (I quote Bamberger's story here) : ..."Trump said to Virtue something like, 'This isn’t fair — we’ll be co-champions.' ” (emphasis added.)

Where did Trump say that, on his locker-door, there'd be a plaque that, referring to Trump's 2018 challenge and victory over Ted Virtue, should read, "Co-champion"?

You people are really petty and obviously have so much time on your hands that you've nothing more important to do than to obsess over such trivial stuff.

You think I'm laughable?! LOL! Your position here is a joke.

It doesn't occur to you, does it?, that in such a ridiculous effort to make Trump appear petty-minded, you demonstrate that same but do it (hint) about someone other than Trump.

Don't forget to see to it that Trump is defeated in the 2020 presidential race, okay?

Stick with your present tactics in that regard, please.

>32 proximity1:

I made a conditional statement. If this is true, which I think it could be, then I will think XYZ about it.

You seem to think you're producing these brilliant rhetorical arguments, but really, you're not.

Fuck all things golf.

There is a ton of other examples demonstrating conclusively what a hapless stupid psycho trump truly is.

Applegate, for instance:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GtxD_gP07f0

and

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qN0FiiGMYP0

Trump is either a very stupid crazy person, or a very crazy stupid person. No sane intelligent person would ever come up with two such contradictory stupid/crazy lies.

trump will go down in history as one of the most inane asses to (steal) high public office.

>39 amysisson:

I pointed out that you're content to post stuff that merely might be accurate, might be true, provided, of course, that its effect is to smear and defame Donald Trump. You'd never do the same about any other person for whose reputation you had a shred of fair-minded regard.

That's what I'm doing: showing you up for the trafficker in scurrilous innuendo that you are.

Mission accomplished.

>41 proximity1:

You're cute when you're cranky. Would you like a juice box and some string cheese?

I didn't post it, I commented on it. And my comment (simply saying how I would feel about it if it's shown to be true) is accurate. That is how I'll feel if it's shown to be true.

I would also comment on the current college admissions scandal. I have always had terrific respect for Felicity Huffman, but I am perfectly comfortable saying this: if the allegations turn out to be true, then I will be sorely disappointed in Felicity Huffman.

I also have regard for Hillary Clinton, but I criticized her quite vocally some years ago when she got involved in a proposed law in New York state to make flag-burning illegal.

I call it like I see it. You disagree. Bully for you.

>42 amysisson:

"I didn't post it, I commented on it. And my comment (simply saying how I would feel about it if it's shown to be true) is accurate. That is how I'll feel if it's shown to be true."

Suppose I write a string of "commentaries" about how I'd "feel" if you were a plagiarist, one who'd cheated her way into and through the universities which she'd attended, who'd bought and sold others' compositions in college, found she could make good money that way and kept it up later; that you also indulged in extortion of others in order to gain employment or advance yourself over others in competition with you; that you lied about people to ruin them in some cases or to help them into positions in order to exploit their help for you in other cases?

Hmmm?

Not sayin' you actually did any of that. On the other hand, I have no proof positive that you haven't done or aren't still doing all of these, now, do I?

If you posted those things about me, I'd be vaguely annoyed, for the few moments I can spare to pay attention to anything you say.

Changing the topic slightly:

A particularly orange Trump makes fun of Beto's hand movements while he's talking:

https://www.cnn.com/videos/politics/2019/03/14/trump-beto-orourke-hand-movements...

Meanwhile, the BBC posted a commentary on Trump's signature hand movements (which to me look ridiculous):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1p7sOsDHLiw

The fact that Trump cannot see any hypocrisy in his remarks about Beto demonstrate his inferior intellect, or his inferior mortality, or both.

For the record there are many many people who consider HRC lying scum who are aware of d. trump being a much worse form of lying scum. Some held their noses and voted for her as the lesser of evil, some voted third party or stayed home in protest.

The idea - floated by some on this forum - that to oppose trump is to love HRC - well, that idea is dogshit stupid.

For the record.

>46 JGL53:

Oh yes, I agree. I know many, many people who hate her as well as Trump. My father is one of them.

>44 amysisson:

... "If you posted those things about me, I'd be vaguely annoyed..."

You consistently ignore the larger picture of what is going on and that tells us a lot about your thinking-"talents" and your intellectual-"honesty".

What's going on is a great deal more than merely some obscure person's occasional comments in an online-discussion-forum, comments which are largely ignored and unknown.

Rather, the picture is this:

a vicious and deliberate effort to create vile, defamatory, allegations is spawned and spread, aided and abetted by unscrupulous people like you, in reckless disregard for the truth--doing this out of pure bloody-minded spite and petty hatred. These things then take on lies-of and a lives-of their own and things grow and ramify.

If these things started happening to you--if you began to encounter more and more accounts of strangers who repeated rumors about you which they'd read or heard from others--defamatory rumors, you'd not only find it "vaguely annoying," you'd be frantic. Ask--or look for--commentary by people who've been the subjected to the kind of abuse I'm describing --and to which you're contributing.

"Vaguely annoying" ! Try finding your reputation ruined. Yourself shut out of prospects for getting work in your chosen profession.


People like you remind me of a once-popular song by "The Band,"

You ought to listen to it; it's all about the viciousness of rumor-mongers like you.

The Band - "The Rumor"

For you, of course, this is all excusable by the "fact" that Trump is a powerful political figure who is far from "innocent."

No one is completely innocent. You ought to look straight into a mirror and repeat that--often.

Some of your neighbors
Will invite the rumor right in

Maybe it's a lie,
Even if it's a sin,
They'll repeat the rumor again
...

Could there be someone
Among this crowd,
Who's been accused,
Had his name so misused,
And his privacy refused, ...

You also achieve that most remarkable of things--

popular sympathy for Donald Trump.

OK, say I agree with you that OH NO! I should not have commented on something at all unless I knew it to be 100% true.

I shall now comment on things I do know to be 100% true:

- Trump was caught on a recording saying he could grab women by their p***y and can get away with it because he's a celebrity.
- Trump challenged Obama's academic success in a public venue, without knowing whether there was anything to it (irony much?), at the same time his school was told by wealthy donors to bury his (edited to change "tax" to "school") school records.
- Trump openly criticized Obama several times for playing too much golf, yet has spent a great deal more time at his golf courses than Obama ever spent golfing.
- Trump was caught on video mocking a disabled journalist.
- Trump makes up childish nicknames for people who disagree with him and tries to bully people online with his tweets.
- Trump has had a record level of staff turnover in his administration as people quit or are fired. While those jobs are in the process of being filled, much time is wasted and work is not getting done.
- Trump was publicly saying on television years ago that manufacturing and industry should remain in the U.S., at the same time his clothing line was being made in Asian countries.
- Trump University was fraudulent and Trump ended up paying a $25 million settlement.
- Trump consistently claims that he knows more about various subjects than anybody: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YA631bMT9g8
- Trump lied and contradicted himself regarding the memo he dictated about the Trump Tower meeting.

I could go on and on. This is not a vicious and deliberate effort to create vile, defamatory, allegations. These are things that actually happened. There is substantial video and verifiable online proof (i.e. Trump's Twitter account) of these things.

Trust me, kiddo, you are way out of your league if you're taking me on over my thinking talents and intellectual honesty.

⭐

> 48

"...You consistently ingore (sic) the larger picture of what is going on and that tells us a lot about your thinking-'talents' and your intellectual-'honesty'....."

Like his hero trump this poster consistently accuses others of what he himself is the hairiest example.

One hopes he could cut that out as he is embarrassing himself, not to mention all his fellow primates, who are embarrassed for him.

#49--word.

- Trump was caught on a recording saying he could grab women by their p***y and can get away with it because he's a celebrity.

True. Though "caught" is a bizarre way of putting it; he wasn't stating this for "the record" nor was he saying it with some trepidation--that he might be "caught" expressing... surprise--that's right, his point was his surprise at what some women (not all, of course) would actually allow--apparently because of his wealth, celebrity, whatever may have been the cause of their forbearance.

- Trump challenged Obama's academic success in a public venue, without knowing whether there was anything to it (irony much?), at the same time his school was told by wealthy donors to bury his (edited to change "tax" to "school") school records.

As a matter of fact, numerous people have observed that Obama's reputation as a star intellect, some sort of academic model, is greatly overrated. I agree with them. Looked at dispassionately, there is nothing especially impressive about Obama's academic accomplishments; former students and fellow professors have expressed their puzzlement at the way the press once gushed such fulsome praise for this guy who simply spoke standard English and not only could but did read books.

To be clear, I stress this point: it isn't that Barack Obama hasn't read a great deal more than Donald Trump; no, not at all. Obviously, Barack Obama has spent years of his life just before, during and after his college career carefully doing everything required of a person whose ambition was to one day become the first Black man elected to the office of president of the United States. Indeed, Obama was apparently a wholehearted policy-wonk and remained that through his terms of office. You're welcome to read that and reply, "Good for him! and good for us!" But as I (and, I believe, others, too) see it, Obama was much less wholehearted in other respects which I count even more important. I've recently read a biography of William Cecil, the first Lord Burghley (1520-1598). Cecil's life had much about it that resembles, say, Dick Cheney's or, indeed, Barack Obama's. Cheney and Obama are and were, through their careers, consummate political "operators"--in the extremely pejorative sense of "operator." They rose not so much by their special worthiness for office from admirable merits as by, rather, their good grasp of Machiavellian political principles: “Look like th’ innocent flower but be the serpent under’t.”

By the way, try this:

Read and consider the following--

August 29, 2011 | Early Obama Letter Confirms Inability to Write | By Jack Cashill

and these, (Notice that there are _two_ versions: In one, one of the subject/object errors-in-agreement has been corrected and in the other it hasn't.)

Record Retrospective: Obama on Affirmative Action (1)

Record Retrospective: Obama on Affirmative Action (2)

(See also the comments (from each of the two versions) from readers, following the letter's text.)

- Trump openly criticized Obama several times for playing too much golf, yet has spent a great deal more time at his golf courses than Obama ever spent golfing.

Amazing!, that: a fellow who, at the time, isn't president of the United States expressing disapproval of the amount of time another fellow-- who, it happens, is president of the United States--spends on the golf course playing golf.

- Trump was caught on video mocking a disabled journalist.

And, as you've put it to us, you're 100% certain about that, aren't you?

Look, you can try to dismiss the following as just too much of a coincidence but you cannot really claim that this is simply not at all plausible. It's not only entirely plausible it's the impression I had when, for the first time, I watched the video to which you refer:

"After Trump then became the center of a second, even bigger controversy for supposedly having callously mocked a disabled reporter in public (that Trump was mocking Kovaleski was undeniable, but whether he was specifically mocking Kovaleski’s appearance and disability was a subject of debate), Trump asserted that the whole thing was just a coincidence — he had no idea who Kovaleski was and thus couldn’t have been aware of his physical condition:

'I have no idea who this reporter, Serge Kovalski sic, is, what he looks like or his level of intelligence. I don’t know if he is J.J. Watt or Muhammad Ali in his prime or somebody of less athletic or physical ability. Despite having one of the all-time great memories, I certainly do not remember him.

'I merely mimicked what I thought would be a flustered reporter trying to get out of a statement he made long ago. If Mr. Kovaleski is handicapped, I would not know because I do not know what he looks like. If I did know, I would definitely not say anything about his appearance.' "

(end-quotes)

(Source: Snopes.com: https://www.snopes.com/news/2016/07/28/donald-trump-criticized-for-mocking-disab... )

- "Trump makes up childish nicknames for people who disagree with him and tries to bully people online with his tweets."

Yes. And, apparently, not enough voters agreed with the view that this sort of thing did and ought to disqualify him for the office of president--since they knew this and elected him anyway. (By the rules of the Electoral College.)

- "Trump has had a record level of staff turnover in his administration as people quit or are fired. While those jobs are in the process of being filled, much time is wasted and work is not getting done."

Do you really want Trump "getting more work done" ?!

- "Trump was publicly saying on television years ago that manufacturing and industry should remain in the U.S., at the same time his clothing line was being made in Asian countries."

And? Suppose Phil Knight, founder of NIKE shoes, expressed the view that the shoe-manufacturing industry should (ought to) remain--or, in this case, return to--the United States. Is that view not allowed merely because he finds it, or has found it, impossible to operate his business with U.S.-made goods at the same profit level which he obtains overseas? Really? And you apply the same standards to everyone, right? I mean, you're not simply looking for any and every occasion to find something outrageous in Trump's pronouncements, are you?

- "Trump University was fraudulent and Trump ended up paying a $25 million settlement."

Yeah. A fraudulently-run university! Well, I never! I blame Trump personally. Now, personally, I'm opposed to business-fraud and all other sorts, too, and, if, at a fair trial, a defendant is found guilty of such fraud, I am pleased to see that defendant convicted and sentenced to the proper fines and other penalties which apply.

Now, about his performance in the office of president of the United States ....

- "Trump consistently claims that he knows more about various subjects than anybody."

This is called "bragging." Are we now to practice character-assassination on all such people just because they're blowhards? Are we to do more and even go so far as to try to impeach, try and convict all such presidential braggarts?

_______________________________________________

RE: "Trust me, kiddo, you are way out of your league if you're taking me on over my thinking talents and intellectual honesty."

"Kiddo"? LOL! Never mind that far-from-contemporary fifteen year old photo of you on your LT page; I was finishing my last year at university when you were still reading L. M. Montgomery's "Anne" novels. I know what "league" I'm in or "out of" as far as this is concerned and, on this point, I have no need to blush or apologize.

^
Again, a new low has been achieved by prox. The above is now the worst and most ineffective apologetic by a trumpet on this forum.

The worst of the worst is trump mocking the disabled reporter and now claiming that he wasn't. He obviously was and his apology is the height of unadulterated lying, not to mention having moral implications that trump's Tim Apple Cook blatant lie did not. Yet prox defends same, taking us all on a bus trip to Bizzaro Town.

The fact still remains that trump is the worst President in modern history and perhaps in our entire history. This fact is so obvious that the obviousness BURNS - it BURNS! Oh, The HUMANITY!

trump is as dumb as the proverbial bag of hammers or box of rocks. There exists more evidence for this fact than the fact that the earth is spherical rather than flat.

E.g., https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iMIKzUAY8n4

Though I happened to be a straight A student from grammar school through university in my various math classes I do not claim to be some math genius. And I barely remember most of it now at age 69. But I still find it rather easy to multiply a one digit number by a two-digit number in my head - no calculator or pencil/paper needed.

E.g., if someone asked me what is 8 times 43 I can come up with 344 within seconds, no problem. 6 X 17? The answer is obviously 102. I can give you the correct answer in less than 3 seconds.

Also this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UZBCaxyUv3g

>53 proximity1:

You are just too funny for words. If nothing else, you provide value to the world in that you're making a lot of LTers laugh!

Yeah, I think I'm going to stick with "kiddo." I wasn't referring to biological age when I said it.

Oh, and thanks for looking at my picture!

I share 47 books (out of 2420) with prox.

- Thus, a 1.942 per cent overlap.

I am so ashamed. I am going to take a shower now.

>55 amysisson: I hope you don't live within 2000 miles of that stalker.

Not sure what the point of #56 was.

‘Be Weak & Die!’ Seeking Clues Behind Trump’s Weekend Twitter Barrage
Annie Karni, Katie Rogers and Maggie Haberman | March 18, 2019

...Brian Ott, who studies the effects of rhetoric at Texas Tech University and is the author of a book studying Mr. Trump’s tweets, said the president appeared to have become less concerned with the consequences of his messaging.

“Not only is it already getting worse,” Dr. Ott said, “I don’t think we’ve even seen the tip of the iceberg yet. As these investigations begin to close in on him, really his only play is to stoke vitriol and violence.”

...George Conway, spent the weekend raising concerns about “Narcissistic Personality Disorder” (and Anti-social personality Disorder) and said on Twitter that Mr. Trump’s “condition is getting worse.”*...

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/18/us/politics/trump-weekend-tweets.html

* https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/434485-conways-husband-suggests-trum...

>60 margd:

"Dr. Ott said, 'I don’t think we’ve even seen the tip of the iceberg yet.' "

In the same vein, this, from our "archives" :

(Saturday Night Live)

The players:

"The McLaughlin Group" (spoof)

John McLaughlin…..Dana Carvey
Jack Germonde…..John Goodman
Pat Buchanan…..Phil Hartman
Eleanor Clift…..Jan Hooks
Morton Kondracke…..Kevin Nealon

______________________

https://snltranscripts.jt.org/90/90gmclaughlin.phtml

... ...

John McLaughlin: Issue number 1: the commander-in-chief in Mexico. Bush wants a free trade agreement, what does President Salinas want? Pat Buchanan!

Pat Buchanan: John, Salinas is playing up his recent economic success and steering his...

John McLaughlin: Jack Germonde!

Jack Germonde: I don’t think it’s so much what Salinas wants, it’s what..

John McLaughlin: Eleanor Clift!

Eleanor Clift: John, this is just another case of President Bushtrying to push a policy..

Pat Buchanan: I’m not sure Bush has a policy..

John McLaughlin: Excuse me Pat, I believe Eleanor has the floor.

Eleanor Clift: Thanks, John. The hard truth is that Bush needs Salinas more than Salinas..

John McLaughlin: Morton Kondracke!

Morton Kondracke: I think this agreement talk is basically a..

John McLaughlin: Wrong! There will be a free trade agreement; it will take place within one year. Issue number 2: Maggie out, Major in. The new British prime minister, some believe he’s a Thatcher clone. Will he carry out her policies? Jack Germonde!

... ...

John McLaughlin: Wrong! There is intellegent life in the 11th galaxy on the planet Neptar, which will conquer Earth in the year 5482, utilizing us for slave labor in their Chellonian salt mines. Issue number 5: what number am I thinking of? Pat Buchanan!

Pat Buchanan: Geez, uh, 82?

John McLaughlin: Wrong! Eleanor Clift!

Eleanor Clift: Is it between 1 and..

John McLaughlin: Don’t skirt the issue!

Eleanor Clift: Uh.. 40!

John McLaughlin: Wrong! Mortontyne!

Morton Kondracke: 212?

John McLaughlin: Wrong! Jackareeno!

Jack Germonde: 2?

John McLaughlin: Wrong! The correct answer is 134. 134. Issue number 6: what did you have for breakfast today? Eleanor!

Eleanor Clift: Some cantaloupe.

John McLaughlin: Mortontown, USA!

Morton Kondracke: I had poached eggs and toast.

John McLaughlin: Jack Germondo!

Jack Germonde: Bacon and eggs.

John McLaughlin: Patty Patty Buke Buke!

Pat Buchanan: I’m thinking waffles, maybe a little..

John McLaughlin: Wrong! You all had Special K with banana. Issue number 7: what is issue number 14 going to be? Some say it will deal with economic matter, others believe it will involve Germany. Morteeny-tiny-tabletop!

Morton Kondracke: Acid rain?

John McLaughlin: Wrong! Eleanor-gee-I-think-you’re-swelleanor!

Eleanor Clift: I have.. no idea..

John McLaughlin: Wrong! You know quite well, you’re just shy. Mondo-jackalo-gee-mon-mania-jack..

Jack Germonde: Well, it might be..

John McLaughlin: I’m not finished with your name,Germonacle-jack-o-lantern-gee-gi-jummy-jummy-jammy-mayhem!

Jack Germonde: You’re insane, John!

John McLaughlin: Wrong! I’m perfectly sane. Everyone else, however, is insane and trying to steal my magic bag. St. Patrick of Buchananomics!

Pat Buchanan: I think I’m gonna leave, John.

John McLaughlin: Wrong! You can’t leave; all the doors are locked from the outside. Next issue! What motivates me? Why do I conduct my show in this manner? Mondo!

Jack Germonde: You’re a jerk?

John McLaughlin: Eleanor!

Eleanor Clift: Really large ego?

John McLaughlin: Wrong! I was neglected by my parents and I overcompensate to shadow my feeling that I have an inadequate intellect. Next issue!

Morton Kondracke: So, you didn’t know your parents very well?

John McLaughlin: Wrong!

Morton Kondracke: Wrong?

John McLaughlin: Wrong!

Morton Kondracke: Right?

John McLaughlin: Wrong! Next week: the S&L probe continues. Is my money in a safety loan? If so, what’s my account number? Bye-bye!

Or, in other words, "We've as yet only seen the the tip of the iceberg," opined the expert on Rhetoric.

I.e. "Trump twitter-tantrum trouvait toujours tip-of-iceberg still too trifling compared to tracked trend's trajectory of the to-be-tweeted. Tiens!



LOL! (Dr. Ott: Hint: "LOL!" is short-hand for "laughing out loud!" ) ;^)

>56 proximity1:

Hey, buddy! (Better than kiddo?) I'm fine with you calling me chérie, thanks.

Sorry to take so long to respond; I was home sick for a few days and not active on LT.

I'm a little perplexed by your list of our works in common, and particularly your parenthetical comments. (Wow, a signed copy of Angela's Ashes, so impressive! so irrelevant!) The most curious part is that you note that we have the Complete Works of Shakespeare in common, but then you also say that "If your library contains the works of Shakespeare, you don't even bother to include that in your LT catalogue." If I didn't include it in my catalog, we couldn't have it in common.

Anyway, draw whatever conclusions you want to about my reading -- that is, my book and story reading, since LT doesn't cover my magazine, newspaper, and journal reading. I'm sure none of it will impress you. But wait! That's right, I'm not trying to impress you. I don't seem to have the same need you do to wave my d***, whoops, I mean, credentials, around. But if it makes you feel better to be sure that you know everything about Trump and everything about Shakespeare/Edward, Earl of Oxford better than everyone else, you go right on thinking that.

I'm guessing the flags on your post are related to something you've since edited out. I'd love to know what you said.

>62 amysisson: His entire message is a clearly time-comsuming attack on you personally. Your photos! Your library! I admit that I have checked out profiles now and then, but only when someone interested me favorably or had become a friend of sorts. His attack is about as close to stalking as he can accomplish on LT.

>63 RickHarsch: He really does have way too much time on his hands. Do you think he watched that SNL skit over and over so he could transcribe it just for us? I'm exhausted just thinking about it! ;-)

>62 amysisson:

"I'm guessing the flags on your post are related to something you've since edited out. I'd love to know what you said."

You have to guess. Typically, we're not told expressly by those who apply them what prompts people at this site to flag others' comments. As for whatever it was, it's right there in plain view. So your comment suggests that you don't see any good cause for those flags. Nor do I. But that, too, is typical here. No one needs any good reason here to take (or find cause for taking) offense at others' words. In general, the flags simply boil down to someone's impulsive reaction: "Hey! I don't like/agree with that!" (But as for my having removed anything of that kind because others flag a comment of mine, I don't--and, of course, didn't in this case. You can see everything I'd written still in the post. The editing was only minor and trivial alterations in punctuation, etc.)

"But wait! That's right, I'm not trying to impress you. I don't seem to have the same need you do to wave my d***, whoops, I mean, credentials, around."

You have a d***!?!?

Credentials, I knew about. But a "d***"?

We'll just have to wait to find out if your, "I don't seem to have the same need you do to wave my d***, whoops, I mean, credentials, around," earns you any flags.

My guess is that it shall not. The people who find my comments objectionable because they don't agree with my views will probably agree with your views and so they'll give your comment about (my) "need to wave my d***, whoops" ... around a 'pass.' That is so very typical here, too.

"But wait! That's right, I'm not trying to impress you."...

Well, okay then-- if you say so---

all I know about you is what I read from what you've offered about yourself, not that you're in the least interested in impressing anyone, of course.

Education
Bucknell University (1990)

University of North Dakota (1992)

State University of New York, Albany (2002)

Western New Mexico University

University of North Texas

University of Sydney

Occupations
writer

librarian

book reviewer

Relationships

Organizations
Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA)

Phi Beta Kappa

Do you often attribute to others claims, assertions, which they never in fact claimed, asserted? In argument, in debate, that's known as employing a "straw-man" argument--

Here you are doing that:

"But if it makes you feel better to be sure that you know everything about Trump and everything about Shakespeare/Edward, Earl of Oxford better than everyone else, you go right on thinking that."

it's a fallacy in argumentation and also not an intellectually-respectable tactic.

But you may now put this on your personal profile; right after "Phi Beta Kappa", you may add,

"I resort to 'straw-man' arguments in debate."

__________________

About this:

"The most curious part is that you note that we have the Complete Works of Shakespeare in common, but then you also say that "If your library contains the works of Shakespeare, you don't even bother to include that in your LT catalogue."

I can explain that. All one needs is computers and their programs.

from "Books you share", clicking on "See all (32) books" produced a list that included 'William Shakespeare - Works', but, when I searched by author, no complete works of Shakespeare turned up (that I noticed, anyway) that way; and I noticed that even among the Shakespeare-related things in "Your library", several are noted "no longer own" and I assume you, like many here, own books which are never included in their LT catalogue.

Flagging:

1. Stalking, evidence thereof, yes
2. squirming around TOS rules to imply insult, no

>56 proximity1: Those who escape that academic mafia are the very fortunate few. My guess: you still completely buy into the orthodox view of "Shakespeare" --a guy from Stratford-Upon-Avon.)

I do believe this is you claiming that you know more about Shakespeare than almost everyone, because you're among the "fortunate few," and that you're making assumptions about my understanding of Shakespeare. :-)

>65 proximity1: all I know about you is what I read from what you've offered about yourself, not that you're in the least interested in impressing anyone, of course.

Perhaps you've noticed I don't go listing my credentials on blog posts about Trump's mental state. I filled in the blanks that were provided by LT. Yes, I'm proud of those accomplishments. No, I don't bring them up at every opportunity. Also, I don't think listing myself as a writer, librarian, and book reviewer constitutes any form of trying to impress anyone.

>65 proximity1: Do you often attribute to others claims, assertions, which they never in fact claimed, asserted? In argument, in debate, that's known as employing a "straw-man"--

>28 proximity1: I bet that's flatly false. (re: Trump / golf tournaments) But do you care? Fuck no. Of course you don't.

That was you employing a straw-man argument. You concluded that I don't care whether accusations about Trump are true or not, even though I never said I didn't care. In fact, I've said I care a lot.

P.S.

Re: Shakespeare, the complete works are in my catalog here: https://www.librarything.com/work/2480465/book/79948957

>67 amysisson:

>56 proximity1: proximity1: Those who escape that academic mafia are the very fortunate few. My guess: you still completely buy into the orthodox view of "Shakespeare" --a guy from Stratford-Upon-Avon.)

I do believe this is you claiming that you know more about Shakespeare than almost everyone, because you're among the "fortunate few," and that you're making assumptions about my understanding of Shakespeare. :-)

I didn't escape it entirely--certainly not in the first place. Those, among all the people who receive a typical state or private education in any of what we call the advanced modern western world, who are indeed never indoctrinated into the Shakespeare mythology are extraordinarily rare. And so, unlike them but very much like the others, who were, I, too, went through that indoctrination and for a very long time after it, I never doubted or questioned it. I took it for granted as most people do.

As for all the rest of the world's population, then, sure: since so many of them never get such an education (for better and for worse), these people probably outnumber those who are educated as we were.

Since that indoctrination, however, I've bothered to study the issues invoved.

But when you put it this way,

"I do believe this is you claiming that you know more about Shakespeare than almost everyone,"...

it's very misleading.

All I've read on this topic is still only a relatively small (to put it mildly) part of the total of works out there.

Still, the simple fact is that one doesn't need to have read a vast part, or even very much at all of the whole of that in order to be qualified to claim, if he wanted to, that he "kn(e)w more about Shakespeare than almost everyone." That would be strictly speaking true--because, frankly, almost everyone knows what amounts to very, very little about the facts. They know the basics of the mythology and for the overwhelming majority, that's all they know because, like me, until I happened by chance to inquire into it, they never bother to question what they were taught.

So, yes, compared to most people, I'm far more and far better-informed of the whole picture--beyond the orthodox mythology about "Shakespeare" than "almost everyone". I do happen to think that's fortunate for me. Those who don't see things as I do wouldn't think so. But, in one sense, it's hard to argue that I'm not more fortunate than those who've never even heard of "the Shakespeare Authorship Question"--and there are a lot more of them than there are of those who have heard of it: I have a chance to make an informed choice on the matter. Those who aren't even aware of the issue can't make a choice. They're stuck with the limits of their ignorance. Of course everyone is always stuck within the limits of his ignorance--but in this case, my limits are less restrictive than, yes, what is tantamount to saying "almost everyone" else.

It's a function of the way that people are used to thinking about "Shakespeare" that means that this is bound to appear arrogant. What am I supposed to do? The fact is that I know more on this topic than almost everyone else and I know that that is just as much because almost everyone knows so damn little as that I read so much.

But, as I value reading, reading more--especially of "good stuff"-- is to be preferred to or valued over having read relatively less.

I know very well that in the times we live in this is not something that many people are at ease admitting. On the contrary, they apparently live according to the view that the more they've studied, the more they have to avoid letting on about. Too bad for them.

"Perhaps you've noticed I don't go listing my credentials on blog posts about Trump's mental state. I filled in the blanks that were provided by LT."

No, but I'm happy to take your word for it. It would require a lot more in effort than I have time or interest for in order to know or verify this. The fact remains that your comments make it clear that, apparently, in your mind, in your opinion, most people, yourself included, I suppose, would do better--because they simply couldn't do worse--than Trump is doing as president of the United States. In other words, you see most people and yourself as a hell of a lot smarter than President Donald Trump--or, if not precisely "smarter" less of a sexist, less of a chauvinist, less of a racist, less of a misogynist, etc. than Trump. And I think you almost certainly attribute many or most or even all of these traits to the vast majority of those who can and do find something to approve of in Trump.

But if you're going to carry on participating in an informal smear-campaign aimed at defaming Trump, maybe you ought to routinely indicate (at least once, somewhere in the discussion) your credentials so others can judge for themselves your qualifications for bad-mouthing him and repeating scurrilous gossip.

RE:
these two instances,

(1) My comment:

>28 proximity1: proximity1: I bet that's flatly false. (re: Trump / golf tournaments) But do you care? Fuck no. Of course you don't.
__________

That was you employing a straw-man argument. You concluded that I don't care whether accusations about Trump are true or not, even though I never said I didn't care. In fact, I've said I care a lot.

and (2) Yours:

"But if it makes you feel better to be sure that you know everything about Trump and everything about Shakespeare/Edward, Earl of Oxford better than everyone else, you go right on thinking that."

I think they're qualitatively different. The first doesn't constitute a straw-man argument because it does not represent you as having claimed, asserted or defended a view which is nowhere to be found directly supported in your comments themselves.

While it's true that I'm making a judgment about your unstated, an avowed, views there, I am not claiming or implying that you've admitted the fact of the accuracy of that judgment of mine about your view in this particular case.

A "straw-man" sets up a false version of the opponent--one which cannot be reasonably drawn from his comments or actions and is used as an example for the purposes of discrediting the opponent. In short, a straw-man argument seeks to discredit the opponent by painting him as something which cannot be supported in evidence from his words or deeds.

If you in fact do repeat gossip about Trump which is in fact unsubstantiated and you neither bring the proof of the gossip's accuracy yourself nor point out others' indications of it in a way that is clear and convincing, then you're granting your opponent grounds to infer that, despite what you claim to the contrary about "caring a lot" about "whether accusations about Trump are true or not," your actions belie those claims.

The references to the Golf Digest magazine article

here

https://www.msnbc.com/hardball/watch/golf-magazine-trump-won-a-tournament-he-nev...

and here

https://www.golf.com/news/2019/03/10/president-trump-club-championship-did-not-e...

constitute gossip which is defamatory of Trump without any clear proof of their claims. Instead, we're offered photos of something-- a door, a wall, it is not clear what, other than something that looks like "wood," with, apparently mounted on it the little championship "plaques" which are seen reproduced in the (photo at the top) in my post >30 proximity1:

You not only don't know that these allegations are accurate, you admit that you don't know whether or not they're accurate--true.

Despite that, for you, it suffices to write that,

"If that turns out to be true -- and it's completely plausible in my mind -- then I'm going to have to realize all over again how mentally ill this man is."

"if (they are) true -- and it's completely plausible in (your) mind -- "

then you'll feel entitled to be obliged "to realize all over again how mentally ill this man is."

For my part, I don't and never have claimed or even implied that I "know everything about" either Trump or about "Shakespeare/Edward, Earl of Oxford" "better than everyone else." So how am I supposed to "go right on thinking that"?

I seem to recall your having written above somewhere that when it comes to honesty or integrity, you have no lessons to take from me.

That's it, in >49 amysisson:, introducing us to "kiddo", you wrote,

"Trust me, kiddo, you are way out of your league if you're taking me on over my thinking talents and intellectual honesty."

Yes, about that intellectual honesty of yours:

how do you square your view of being in a superior league to mine in this respect when it appears that you're, first, erroneously ascribing to me the resort to a straw-man in argument with you while, yourself, clearly having resorted to just that and, second, in the case of Trump, claiming concern ( "a lot") for the accuracy of the gossip you repeat about Trump on one hand and, even as, the other hand, you're obliged to condition your comments' gossip about him with "if true--" ?

You've been fair to Trump? You haven't even managed to be fair to me.

You give me the impression of being here for the purposes of virtue-signalling to your anti-Trump allies and that you take pleasure and amusement in doing that, in the same way that you take pleasure in supposing and suggesting that my posts here are ridiculous.

>69 proximity1: You haven't even managed to be fair to me.

I said that if something about Trump is shown to be true, then I would feel a certain way about it.

You jumped all over me for saying that, even though I did not assert the rumor was definitely true. And you said I didn't care whether or not it was true, when you had no way of knowing whether or not I cared.

I repeat once again what you said: But do you care? Fuck no. Of course you don't.

Who isn't being fair here?

Re: the strawman argument? You used it too. You're nitpicking semantics in saying that you didn't. But by all means, please write us all another eight paragraphs on why you didn't use the strawman arguement and I did. Because I'm sure you're successfully convincing everyone here.

You're right, I admit that I implied your thinking talents and intellectual honesty are inferior to mine. I'm still OK with that.

"I said that if something about Trump is shown to be true, then I would feel a certain way about it."*

You're repeating yourself: >70 amysisson:, >39 amysisson:, >42 amysisson: I can read:

"If that turns out to be true -- and it's completely plausible in my mind -- then I'm >?going to have to realize all over again how mentally ill this man is."

_______________

* (emphasis added, above.) As one would-be writer to, you, a writer, your phrasing

"if ... then I would feel a certain way about it."

is what I call "precious."

You go, girl! You get on with "realizin' all over ag'in, now, hear?

LOL!

>72 proximity1:

And you jumped all over me for that simple statement, applying your own unsupported interpretation of it. You're the one who started attacking unfairly.

Have we entered the "who gets the last word" stage of the discussion yet? :-)

Back to the original topic, this Twitter account, which screenshots Mr. T's plethora of contradictory tweets, is both amusing and telling. I wish it had kept going after 2017, but there's plenty of material there.

https://twitter.com/trumpradictions

As the younger of the two of us I am very confident that you are going to have the "last word" no matter what else may happen in the meantime.

That's why I make my case as carefully as I can. I know that my words have to do their work after I'm no longer around to present clarifications.

It's annoying that the posting-soft-ware's auto-numbering feature can't keep pace with the frequency of the comments.

__________________

P.S. : Poor you: I " jumped all over you"! O, the humanity!

;^)

>76 proximity1: What's grammatically wrong with your first sentence?

As the younger of the two of us I am very confident that you are going to have the "last word" no matter what else may happen in the meantime.

Previously you said you were older than me, but now you just said that you're younger than me. Watch those misplaced participles.... :-)

ETA:

RE:

"Previously you said you were older than me,"...

And you, a Bucknell 'grad'!

LOL! "What's wrong with this picture," chérie?

For that "Zinger," "Lose your free annual ticket to the P.E.N. national meeting and 'go back three squares.' " You were so born in '68! :^)

__________________________

The intended meaning follows logically from the fact that statistically, significantly younger people typically outlive those significantly older; and this

>53 proximity1: "I was finishing my last year at university when you were still reading L. M. Montgomery's 'Anne' novels."

was already on the record here.

Wassamatter, don't you credit readers here with reading?

But, "As You Like It" :

"As the younger of the two of us, you, I am very confident, are going to have the 'last word' no matter what else may happen in the meantime."

_____________

No wonder you so often "misconstrue" what Trump says. His fans, however, don't seem to have any problem hearing what he both says and means.

>78 proximity1:

After wading through the convoluted message above ... yes, I knew what your intended meaning was. I just thought you liked to be precise in your language. Besides, readers should not have to rely upon previous statements or statistical assumptions to suss out what you mean.

I don't misconstrue what Trump says. He contradicts himself constantly in both words and actions. Many of his fans choose to ignore that fact.

>79 amysisson:

" I just thought you liked to be precise in your language."

And, in that, you are so correct. Und die? Na bitte!

;^)

For the sake of readers following this, I have seen proximity absolutely mauled by Shakespeare experts on the site he once linked to, presumable a group discussing only Shakespeare. It's not an argument I care about, but I spent a half hour or so one day reading in it, and the plain fact is that what Proximity believes is utter nonsense, unless, of course, the others were simply far more erudite or inventing citations.

Could someone please explain how the fuck a thread about the capacities of the current POTUS became trapped in the gravitational field of that arid gas planet called The Authorship Debate?

>82 librorumamans: It's one of proximity1's subjects they come back to over and over, and when they decided that amysisson's library was relevant, they injected that discussion as well.

Let's get it back on topic! :-)

From Wikipedia: Definition of narcissistic personality disorder (NPD): "...a personality disorder with a long-term pattern of abnormal behavior characterized by exaggerated feelings of self-importance, excessive need for admiration, and a lack of empathy. Those affected often spend much time thinking about achieving power or success, or on their appearance.
They often take advantage of the people around them. The behavior typically begins by early adulthood, and occurs across a variety of social situations."

I agree with Mr. Conway that you-know-who is a classic textbook case.

>82 librorumamans:

Easily. This is all very directly related.

When asked to give an account for herself as a shameless defamer of Donald Trump, Ms. Sisson, sincerely or otherwise, offered up this utterly transparent piece of self-delusion:

>31 amysisson: "I do care whether it's true or not. That's why I said "IF it's true....", i.e. I'm withholding jumping to an actual conclusion until I have more information."

Now, almost certainly, she is the only person here taken in by such an absurd rationale. For what is practically and probably nearly everyone else, her story rings ridiculously false. Many people can see through transparent dodges. But minds working as they are now well-known to do (See Kahneman, Daniel; Thinking Fast and Slow (2013)* ) the possibilty that she actually has convinced herself of this cannot be entirely ruled out.

If I've belabored the back-and-forth it's at least in part because Sisson presents such a good example of this very common phenomenon. She's got everything a person of ordinary or quite-better-than-ordinary intelligence has: a standard education, K through university graduate for someone of her age (if not, indeed, beyond a Bachelor's degree, though, as Kahneman points out, university training is no safe-guard against Type-1 vs. Type-2 thinking); she has experience in the world of work, a job, professional peers and, not least, she's not only a working writer, she's a published working writer.

Concerning this last--being a writer--the failure to see through one's own rationalizations is, if I may be excused for pointing it out, one of the very worst failings by which a professional writer can suffer.

In this context, whether she recognizes the truth of it or not, when someone points out such a serious flaw in one's reasoning, it's a favor. It's especially a favor to a writer. In the often-used words of my inimitably clever and wonderfully companionable house-mates of once-upon-a-time, "You're doing it wrong." That phrase was commonly used in all sorts of circumstances in the household we shared; it was said with complete compassion and helpful intent whenever one of us was seen to be struggling through some task in the household.

Amy, though she is obviously stubbornly determined to try to deny this, is simply "doing it wrong." She's adopting and using a patently phony rationale and this isn't fooling anyone here--probably not even herself , as her own words betray a clear defensiveness and lack of convincing conviction about it.

So, to this,

"I'm withholding jumping to an actual conclusion until I have more information."

I say, "Amy, 'you're doing it wrong.' "

Your rationale is simple nonsense; and, as nonsense, it's not even interesting or unusual in some way. Amy has very obviously not "withheld" anything in conclusions about Trump's faults. This claim insults both our intelligence as well as her own.

A hobbled attempt at a discussion such as this one, with its principal agents so disposed to point-counterpoint style argument, is likely to range rather widely across a number of fields of learning and topics as one or the other resorts to examples in the course of debate. For me to ignore or avoid using examples drawn from the most central part of my own reading and study concerning Edward de Vere as "Shakespeare" would be silly of me.

If my bringing in such matters for use as examples bothers you, well, that's just too goddamn fucking bad, then, isn't it? You're similarly free to bring into the discussion anything you deem pertinent from the areas of learning you know best.
_____________________________

* Kahneman, Daniel; Thinking Fast and Slow (2013); Not in A. Sisson's library; though, of course, she could walk over to the bookshelves any time (it's there) and borrow it from her nearest library's holdings. Viz: https://cllibrary.biblionix.com/catalog/biblio/346627660

__________________________

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2019/03/19/ted_koppel_establishment_pres...

Ted Koppel: "Establishment Press" Decided That Trump Is Bad For The United States, "Out To Get Him"

#85--Proximity doing his Sigmund Freud impression and failing miserably.

>85 proximity1:

Oh my goodness, I'm so embarrassed that I didn't understand this before: I'm just doing it wrong!. And proximity1 is doing me a favor!. And how kind of proximity1 to provide me with a link showing that my local library has a copy of Thinking Fast and Slow, although, considering the fact that I'm a librarian, I probably could find it in the library on my own. I assume he can navigate his own local library catalog, in which case he might want to check out How to Win Friends and Influence People.

All sarcasm aside, yes, I have come to many, many conclusions about Trump's faults. (Ironically, one of them is that he appears to believe his own lies.) However, I did withhold concluding whether the golf plaque incident was true or false. I might have spent more time researching it had I not wasted so much time countering the unending bombastic and repetitive posts we see here.

If my "story" rings ridiculously false for "practically and probably nearly everyone else," why are they not chiming in to agree with you, proximity1?

Re: my education, since proximity1 brought it up: In recent years especially, I've come to recognize that my education is due largely to the privilege with which I was born, and honestly, I'm ashamed that I didn't recognize that much earlier in my life. However, I made the most of my opportunities, and I could elaborate about things that I believe, perhaps somewhat arrogantly, make my education somewhat more than "standard." But 1) that's not the point of this discussion, and 2) if I do so, I think I will be accused of bragging.

But back to the latest argument, I do not believe there is anything unusual or wrong in the following thought process:

- "If my dog chews my slippers, I will be mildly upset." This doesn't mean I have concluded that my dog has chewed my slippers.

- "If my husband cheats on me, I will be very upset." This doesn't mean I have concluded that my husband has cheated on me.

- "If Donnie Trump is pretending he won a golf tournament when he didn't, I will consider it further evidence that he is mentally ill." More specifically, I will consider it further evidence that he has narcissistic personality disorder. Yes, I have concluded that he is mentally ill, but that conclusion is not based on the golf tournament issue. It is based on a great deal of other evidence, much of which exists on audio or video recordings for which authenticity is not in question. Hence I am not a "shameless defamer." And it doesn't mean that I have concluded that he definitely lied about this particular golf tournament. Therefore, my original statement of "If this turns out to be true" stands.

Finally, I rescind "kiddo." Perhaps you would you like all of us to get off your lawn, old man?

>87 amysisson:

"I'm so embarrassed that I didn't understand this before"...

Embarrassed or not, you're defensive about it. Hence the sarcasm.

"And proximity1 is doing me a favor!"

In fact, yes. But there are a lot of people who, like you, can't see straight enough to recognize it when others do them such a favor. Again, you're lost in damn-fool defensiveness. That's too bad for you. You only hurt yourself by the stubborn refusal to profit by others' gifts of candor to you. It's a self-inflicted injury and those are, because avoidable, deserved when they aren't avoided.

"All sarcasm aside, yes, I have come to many, many conclusions about Trump's faults. (Ironically, one of them is that he appears to believe his own lies.) However, I did withhold concluding whether the golf plaque incident was true or false. I might have spent more time researching it had I not wasted so much time countering the unending bombastic and repetitive posts we see here."

LOL!

... "one of them (i.e. Trump's faults) is that he appears to believe his own lies"

So? You are no less fixated on your lies. As Trump's lies comfort him, so you take comfort in the ways you lie to yourself.

The point is that, despite your claiming here that the truth or falsity of the golf-championship report's details mattered to you, you not only lend yourself to the propagation of that report (by adding yet another post about it), you do that while, at the same time you deny having drawn any conclusions concerning the report's truth, accuracy.

Again and again you pretend not to understand the significance of these, taken together; again and again you offer up the same patently lame rationale.

If my "story" rings ridiculously false for "practically and probably nearly everyone else," why are they not chiming in to agree with you, proximity1?

There are several likely explanations, each contributing some part in varying degrees to the whole answer.

The sociology of internet discussion fora--and particularly this place, "LT" isn't given to doing much of that kind of thing. It sometimes happens but it's just rare. People here are are clique-ish, mimetic, given to herd-mentality and stoked with envy or resentment of others. This is the powerful "driver" of the little red flags. A person takes offense, he or she goes and recruits friends to add to the red-flags on the offending post--just because a friend has called on the favor of that.

Most readers simply don't give that much of a damn about anything they read here. But, touch one of their sacred topics--their cats, their knitting, their collections of Cloisonné or Hummel figurines, whatever the matter may be-- and they'll suddenly become very active in the discussion.

There's the "I agree with this guy, but..."

"I don't personally like him, ..." / owe him any open support," etc.

"Not my 'fight', my 'dispute,' "

"he's already made all the points I'd mention--why bother repeating them; she
obviously ain't interested in listening." (which is another purpose of my
belaboring the topic: I've been interested in highlighting your "fingers-in-your-
ears" attitude here. No one forced you to show us that. It's pure "you.")

"I'm not going to stick my neck out in a matter where it could be thought I'm actually giving some support to or sympathy for Donald Trump, no matter how back-handed the support or sympathy and no matter how unfair this librarian/author or others are toward him. Defend Trump? No, thank you."

There's a perhaps understandable reluctance to take an open position in a controversy that is based in ethics, morals; a lot of people are loath to appear "moralists," "moralistic." It's one of the stupid social aspects of our spoiled and complacent times. It is always safer to avoid ethical, moral, disputes between others--so, the default is not to "chime in."

Ours are typically conformist and cowardly times--you are a very good example of this: conformist, safety-seeking in the opinions you express openly. and pointing that up has been part of my point here. People take the safe path of least resistance; I'm an exception to that tendency and I always have been. But while I speak and write what's on my mind, I know that I don't dare do this other than via a pseudonym. However, I always use the same pseudonym. It's the only safety-feature I have and I make no apologies for using it.

You don't even recognize the favor of candor here on my part. I certainly don't owe you my real name on top of that ingratitude. So, add to the list the fact that numerous LT members do use their own names; this contributes to their hesitation to take any controversial position openly. And even seeming to defend Trump is too controversial for many here to do under their real names.

If other much better reasons come to mind, I may add them.

__________________________________

"Perhaps you would you like all of us to get off your lawn, old man?"

Ha-ha-ha! That's so funny!

It's of course not "my lawn" and I'm not interested in telling anyone here to get off it.

I'm shouting something else:

"Quit LYING to yourself--in order to lie all the easier to others about others.

You like to think of yourself as a writer. Well, once more, this lying to yourself--in any form and in any circumstances--is self-destructive and is something which, as a writer, you can least afford.

But, of course, you're free to scoff at this counsel and I expect that you shall. You show every indication of not having enough good sense to take it and benefit from it.

That's my last word to you. You're welcome to add whatever the hell you want after this.

>88 proximity1:

Embarrassed or not, you're defensive about it. Hence the sarcasm.

Everyone who defends themselves can be said to be defensive. I'd hoped by some long shot that the sarcasm would get through to you the point that I and apparently several others here think your posts are ridiculous.

If other much better reasons come to mind, I may add them.

Perhaps people just don't agree with you.

I've been interested in highlighting your "fingers-in-your-ears" attitude here.

Look in the mirror.

I certainly don't owe you my real name on top of that ingratitude.

You certainly don't. And I certainly didn't ask for it.

Most readers simply don't give that much of a damn about anything they read here. But, touch one of their sacred topics--their cats, their knitting, their collections of Cloisonné or Hummel figurines, whatever the matter may be-- and they'll suddenly become very active in the discussion.

Could you be any more condescending and judgmental in your tone? I think not. And although it's more subtle than mine, your use of the word sacred here is sarcastic.

You are not doing me any favors, proximity1. That fact that you think you are reminds me of Mr. Trump complaining yesterday that he wasn't thanked for John McCain's funeral.

trump continues to yammer on about McCain a half year after McCain's death simply because trump is insulted that McCain's family dissed him (trump) by pointedly not inviting him (trump) to the funeral when all other (x)Presidents were invited, and not giving him (trump) credit for McCain's high class funeral.

Who sinks this low? Only ASSHOLES. Giant condemned-by-god Assholes.

trump is the epitome of what depths of depravity a human can achieve if he tries hard enough. trump is beneath the contempt of all ordinary law-abiding and sane human beings.

trump will go down in history as the Biggest Douche in the Universe.

There is no debate or argument to be had on this subject. Those who still love and support trump are lesser beings than even trump is - hard to imagine, but true.

Case fucking closed. Let's move on.

Donnie is trying to argue that the investigative report doesn't matter, because it is 1) being conducted by a person who was not elected, and 2) that person is making a determination on his presidency. Donnie's rambling quote in an interview with Fox Business Network's Maria Bartiromo:

"It's always interesting to me because a deputy, that didn't get any votes, appoints a man that didn't get any votes, he's going to write a report on me. I had one of the greatest election victories in history. Would you say that's true? They came from the valleys, they came from the rivers, they came from the cities, they came from all over, they voted in one of the greatest elections in the history of our country, and now I have a man, because we have an attorney general who -- nobody can even believe he didn't tell me, but he recused himself -- so I have a man who is a deputy who I don't know, who I didn't know at all, and he appoints a man who had just left my office, I didn't give him the job at the FBI, James Comey's his best friend, but listen, you know it better than anybody, you've been very fair in this, but listen, I have a deputy, appoints a man to write a report on me, to make a determination on my presidency? People will not stand for it."

As the article points out, nobody in the Justice Department is ever elected. Appointment vs. elected has no bearing on the matter. And the report is not evaluating Donnie's presidency, but rather potential criminal activity before and during his presidency.

Donnie doesn't know or is willfully ignoring the way the checks and balances in our system are actually supposed to work.

#91--Donald has never been fit for the office he holds. More than that he's never been able to get his head around the fact that in this one election race he ran in his opponent (despite not being a very popular opponent) got almost 3 million more votes than he did. Not only that though--none of the states he didn't win in 2016 are going to give electoral votes to him in 2020---meaning he's got to defend all the territory of all those states which did give him electoral votes last time around and judging by the midterms that's not a great strategy---but not only that but of the current announced candidates none of them have nearly the baggage of the democratic candidate in 2016 but not only that but he has seriously compromised his chances in some of the states he won in 2016 which is to say to me he looks like a sitting duck for pretty much any of the current field of democratic candidates but not only that he's got two more years to fuck up his chances even more--two years of congressional and legal scrutiny. Two years of fucked up decisions which he makes every fucking week because he's a fucking imbecile who is not fit for the job. Yeah--he's got that base support but that base support only goes so far---he's making it easy for whatever democrat gets the nomination in 2020. If that democrat is willing to work a ground game and call him out on his bullshit that's about what it will take to knock him off his pedestal.

>91 amysisson:

"As the article points out, nobody in the Justice Department is ever elected. Appointment vs. elected has no bearing on the matter. And the report is not evaluating Donnie's presidency, but rather potential criminal activity before and during his presidency."

"Donnie doesn't know or is willfully ignoring the way the checks and balances in our system are actually supposed to work."

Telling words. Actually, you don't know the way they work or are supposed to work.

Of course appointment versus election bears on the significance of the office-holders' relationship with the president of the United States. Nearly all appointive-offices within the upper-ranks of the federal government are made by the president or are subject to his approval and these are also subject to the advice and consent of the Senate (this is an example of the Legislative branch's "check" on the Executive branch's powers). That was established in the last-adopted Constitution by the Constitutional convention at Philadelphia in 1787. It was recognized that executive departments and agencies ought, in order to be effective, to be headed and run by people who enjoyed the approval and cooperation of the president and would conduct their duties in accord with, rather than against, the broad policy objectives of the elected president --later, the semi-popularly elected president under the terms of the Electoral college.

_____________________________________

"FBI Director: Appointment and Tenure"
Vivian S. Chu
Legislative Attorney
Henry B. Hogue
Specialist in American National Government

February 19, 2014

Summary

"The Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is appointed by the President by and
with the advice and consent of the Senate. The statutory basis for the present nomination and
confirmation process was developed in 1968 and 1976, and has been used since the death of J.
Edgar Hoover in 1972. Over this time, seven nominations have been confirmed and two have
been withdrawn by the President before confirmation. The position of FBI Director has a fixed
10-year term, and the officeholder cannot be reappointed, unless Congress acts to allow a second
appointment of the incumbent. There are no statutory conditions on the President’s authority to
remove the FBI Director. Since 1972, one Director has been removed by the President." ...

(Congressional Research Service | 7-5700 | www.crs.gov | R41850)

..."the (Mueller) report is not evaluating Donnie's presidency, but rather potential criminal activity before and during his presidency."

Special counsels appointed under the authority of the Department of Justice (an executive branch department, under the authority of the president as chief of the executive branch) are not charged with "evaluating" "potential criminal activity."* Their charge, rather, is to investigate evidence* of actual present or past criminal acts, upon reasonable probable cause to believe that a crime has been committed.

There was none of this (i.e. evidence) presenting valid grounds to conduct an investigation of this kind or this length in this case. This case is a transparent one amounting to a politically-motivated witch-hunt. And "liberals" are supposed to be opposed to those--no matter their target-victims.

__________________________________

* Emphasis added

>93 proximity1:

Of course appointment versus election bears on the significance of the office-holders' relationship with the president of the United States. Nearly all appointive-offices within the upper-ranks of the federal government are made by the president or are subject to his approval and these are also subject to the advice and consent of the Senate (this is an example of the Legislative branch's "check" on the Executive branch's powers).

Yes, I know that it bears on the significant of their relationship with POTUS. But the fact that they're appointed has no bearing on whether or not they're "allowed" to investigate things related to the President. Donnie is implying that there's something improper in them writing this report, versus someone who was elected to office. Investigators aren't elected. That's what Donnie doesn't understand, or chooses to ignore.

>94 amysisson:

Perhaps it occurred to you that, since Congress gave the appointed Director-F.B.I. a fixed (by law) term of 10 years, they've effectively produced the result of a president only occasionally coming into office with the prerogative to make a fresh appointment of the F.B.I. director; and that, as a consequence, this is a de facto annulment (at least in this instance) of the president's previously prescribed right to appoint his those who direct the departments and agencies within the executive branch.

It possible that the law which placed the F.B.I. director under the appointment of the president for the first time could be challenged as unconstitutional on that ground. But it appears that the first F.B.I. director, Hoover, wasn't appointed by the president and there was no statutory provision for the presidential appointment of his successor.*

______________________________

* P.L. 90-351, §101; 82 Stat. 197, 236 (1968). The statute did not apply to Hoover, the incumbent at that time, but was
worded to apply to future Directors, beginning with his successor.

"On May 10, 1924, President Calvin Coolidge appointed Hoover as the fifth Director of the Bureau of Investigation, partly in response to allegations that the prior director, William J. Burns, was involved in the Teapot Dome scandal.3031 When Hoover took over the Bureau of Investigation, it had approximately 650 employees, including 441 Special Agents.. ... (from Wikipedia)

>95 proximity1:

Special counsel Robert Mueller’s appointment is valid, federal appeals court rules

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/legal-issues/special-counsel-robert-mueller...

>96 amysisson: "Special counsel Robert Mueller’s appointment is valid, federal appeals court rules"

I guess that's a "moot" point now, since:

( LOL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! )

It's official: Russiagate is this generation's WMD |
The Iraq war “face-plant” damaged the reputation of the press. ”Russiagate” just destroyed it | by Matt Taibbi

_____________________

"Note to readers: in light of news that Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller’s investigation is complete, I’m releasing this chapter of Hate Inc. early, with a few new details added up top.
_____________________

"Nobody wants to hear this, but news that Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller is headed home without issuing new charges is a death-blow for the reputation of the American news media.

"As has long been rumored, the former FBI chief’s independent probe will result in multiple indictments and convictions, but no “presidency-wrecking”* conspiracy charges, or anything that would meet the layman’s definition of “collusion” with Russia.

"With the caveat that even this news might somehow turn out to be botched, the key detail in the many stories about the end of the Mueller investigation was best expressed by the New York Times:

'A senior Justice Department official said that Mr. Mueller would not recommend new indictments.'

"The Times tried to soften the emotional blow for the millions of Americans trained in these years to place hopes for the overturn of the Trump presidency in Mueller. Nobody even pretended it was supposed to be a fact-finding mission, instead of an act of faith.

"The Special Prosecutor literally became a religious figure during the last few years, with votive candles sold in his image and Saturday Night Live cast members singing ‘All I Want for Christmas is You’ to him featuring the rhymey line: “Mueller please come through, because the only option is a coup.’ ” …

* The link is repeated thus in the original article.

What now?

the little golf-championship locker-room door-plaques?

"We'll always have 'West Palm Beach' " *

LOL!
__________________________________

* (FL.) (Trump International Golf Club)"

Simultaneously, the full horror of the Mueller Special Counsel investigation dawns on both Amy and margd:

________________________________

AmyS.: "Oh - my - God!"

margd: "Oh - my - God!"

together, in unison, in disbelief: ..................... "Putin got to Bob Mueller!!!"

>98 proximity1:

Hardly, dear.

I respect Mueller and will accept the conclusions in the report, once I have had the chance to see the entire thing.

It's telling that all we've seen so far is Barr's take on Mueller's findings. Since Barr was appointed by Trump, I'm not going to take his word for anything.

>99 amysisson:

Trump's name-- that-- you can smear without delay. But, taking others' opinions for the upshot of the Mueller investigation that finds no evidence of Trump's involvement in collusion with the Russian government to favor Trump in the 2016 U.S. presidential election--for that you need to wait and see the details! LOL!!

Trump couldn't _buy_ the kind of help you and margd provide him.

Taibbi: As the Mueller Probe Ends, New Russiagate Myths Begin

Donald Trump couldn’t have asked for a juicier 2020 campaign issue

by Matt Taibbi
… …

“Over and over, audiences were told the investigation had hit a ‘turning point,’ after which Trump would either resign or be impeached, because as Brian Williams put it, ‘Donald Trump is done.’

“This manipulative brand of news programming preyed upon the emotional devastation of liberal audiences, particularly the older people who watch cable. It told them the horror they felt over Trump’s election would be alleviated in short order. The median age of the CNN viewer is 60 and MSNBC’s is 65, and these people were urged for years to place their trust in Santa BOB, who knew all and whose investigation would surely lead to impeachment and ‘the end.’

“All you had to do was keep turning in, because the good news could come any minute now! The bombshell is coming! Never mind that this is causing our profits to soar. Don’t wonder about our motives, even though outlets like MSNBC saw a 62 percent bump in viewership in the first full year of Russia-gate coverage. Just keep tuning in. The walls are closing in!

“That was bad enough, but now that the Mueller dream seems to have died, news organizations are acting like they didn’t hype Mueller as savior.

“ ‘Robert Mueller was never going to end Trump’s Presidency,’ says Vox.

“Matthews, in a tone that suggested he was being the sober adult delivering tough love, completed his thought about how ‘they don’t have him on collusion’ by saying, with a shrug of undisguised disappointment:

“ ‘So I think the Democrats have got to win the election.’ He added, ‘There’s no waiting around for uncle Robert to take care of everything.’

I know no one cares how this sounds to non-Democrats, but this is a member of the media looking sad that Democrats would have to resort to actual democracy to win the White House back.

Given that ‘collusion’ has turned out to be dry well, to the ordinary viewer it will look a hell of lot like the MSNBCs of the world humped a fake story for two consecutive years in the hopes of overturning election results ahead of time. Trump couldn’t have asked for a juicier campaign issue, and an easier way to argue that ‘elites’ don’t respect the democratic choices of flyover voters. It’s hard to imagine what could look worse. … …

____________________________________


(Cover image: by Ed Gabel, Brobel Graphics for TIME magazine: published May 29, 2017)

(From The Federalist | POLITICS |

The Media Have Done Irreparable Damage To The Country |

Journalists used fears over Russia and anger over Trump to try to reverse the results of a legitimate election. |
by David Harsanyi | 25 March 2019

“For the past two years, a large swath of the media engaged in a mass act of self-deception and partisan groupthink. Perhaps it was Watergate envy, or bitterness over Donald Trump’s victory, or antagonism towards Republicans in general—or, most likely, a little bit of all the above. But now that Special Counsel Robert Mueller has delivered his report on Russian collusion, it’s clear that political journalists did the bidding of those who wanted to de-legitimize and overturn Trump’s election.

“While bad behavior from partisan sources should be expected, the lack of skepticism from self-appointed unbiased journalists has been unprecedented. Any critical observer could see early on that Trump-era partisan newsroom culture had made journalists susceptible to the deception of those peddling expedient stories. Our weekly bouts of Russia hysteria all sprung from one predetermined outcome: the president was in bed with Vlad Putin.”
… … …

by Jackson Browne
____________________

I can't keep up with what's been going on

I think my heart must just be slowing down

Among the human beings in their designer jeans

Am I the only one who hears the screams

And the strangled cries of lawyers in love

God sends his spaceships to America, the beautiful

They land at six o'clock and there we are, the dutiful

Eating from TV trays, tuned into to Happy Days

Waiting for World War III while Jesus slaves

To the mating calls of lawyers in love

Last night I watched the news from Washington, the capitol

The Russians escaped while we weren't watching them

like Russians will

Now we've got all this room, we've even got the moon

And I hear the U.S.S.R. will be open soon

As vacation land for lawyers in love

____________________

"Lawyers in love" (July 1983)

>101 proximity1:

Trump's name-- that-- you can smear without delay. But, taking others' opinions for the upshot of the Mueller investigation that finds no evidence of Trump's involvement in collusion with the Russian government to favor Trump in the 2016 U.S. presidential election--for that you need to wait and see the details! LOL!!

First, I did delay, in saying "If it turns out to be true..."

Second, my opinion of Trump is not based on others' interpretations; it's based on audio and video recordings of Trump saying hateful, childish, and known-to-be-untrue things.

P.S. Brevity is the soul of wit.

>102 amysisson:

That's your own conceit. You never "delayed" in anything smearing Trump.

...faster than Spring-time showers,

...more busy than the labouring spider, you.

And I, as for brevity,

... I am for whole volumes in folio.

Since we're quoting things....

bom·bas·tic
/ˌbämˈbastik/Submit
adjective
high-sounding but with little meaning; inflated.
"bombastic rhetoric"
synonyms: pompous, blustering, ranting, blathering;

>104 amysisson:

"Bombast", say you?! Bombast?

Prince Henry:

"Here comes lean Jack. Here comes bare-bone.
—How now, my sweet creature of bombast?
How long is ’t ago, Jack, since thou sawest thine own knee?"

Falstaff:

"My own knee! when I was about thy years, Hal, I was
not an eagle's talon in the waist;
I could have crept into any alderman's thumb-ring:
a plague of sighing and grief!
it blows a man up like a bladder. "...

(Henry IV, Part I, II, iv )
______________________________________

Seriously? I defy you to cite a more imaginative poet--whole work compared to whole work--than the fellow whose wit gave us:

"I could have crept into any alderman's thumb-ring."

____________________________________________

"I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world." W. Whitman

;^)

I wasn't talking about anyone you quoted.

>103 proximity1: 'And I, as for brevity,

... I am for whole volumes in folio.'

I am also a foe of brevity for its own sake, but whole volumes of your cliches?

Article: Trump is spouting nonsense at a greater rate

https://www.cnn.com/2019/04/05/opinions/trump-is-spouting-nonsense-at-a-greater-...

"In any family, a 72-year-old man who spoke this way would be the subject of urgent discussions. Trump's trouble accessing words, summoning long-term memories, and naming a famous man in front of him could indicate mental deterioration. Add the crazy talk about windmills and cancer, coming from the leader of the free world, and you get a situation that ought to alarm everyone.

>108 amysisson:

Oh, uhm, Amy? don't look now, but,



yo' blimp done crashed, 'dear.'



LOL!

>109 proximity1:

How so?

>110 amysisson:

Julie Kelly will explain what you're trying to pretend not to understand ---

Dear Citizen Collusion Truther—You Own This, Too | By Julie Kelly | April 4th, 2019

Hey, what’s up . . . wait, where are you going?

Why the dark glasses? Did you dye your hair? What’s with all the deleted tweets and Facebook posts lately?

Oh, I get it. Now that Special Counsel Robert Mueller didn’t find any evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and the Ruskies to throw the 2016 election, you want to move on. Act like it never happened. Or at least pretend that you weren’t part of the whole damn hoax from the start.

But . . . not so fast.

It wasn’t just the entire American media infrastructure—every broadcast network, cable news outlet, opinion page, political website, blue-checked social media account, washed-up D.C. pundit, unhinged MSNBC host, irrelevant Bush hanger-on, complicit Obama lackey, and Clinton bitter clinger who fell for the Trump-Russia collusion fairy tale. It wasn’t just every Democratic lawmaker and candidate—and a good chunk of the establishment Republican elite—who peddled a bogus story for two years. It wasn’t just every Hollywood actress, producer, legend, fluffer, has-been and late night host who caterwauled for months about Trump’s treachery.

You did it, too, my fellow citizen.

For two years, you helped do the dirty work of the vanquished Hillary Clinton campaign and the sore-loser Democratic Party. You reposted memes ....

You've earned your place in history's dunce-hat corner, Amy. The "Obama-Birthers" will be happy to make room for you---the many. The miserable who've covered themselves in well-deserved ridicule love company. LOL!


The Jimmy Kimmel Show, October, 2016 : (from time-marker 00 hrs. : 05 mins. : 04 secs.)
Barack Obama (on camera, holding a smart-phone and reciting a tweet) :

“ ‘President Obama will go down as perhaps the worst president of the United States, exclamation point; ‘at’ ‘RealDonaldTrump’. Well, 'at' ‘RealDonaldTrump,’ at least I will go down as a president."

(Lets phone fall from hand.) (Laughter is heard from the audience.)

_________________________________________________________________________

(Thursday, November 10th, 2016, White House Oval Office | AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais )



Therapy for the depressed Obama-Clinton fans--

Amy, next time you have the urge to make a fool of yourself by jumping on a "Hey! Let's all 'slime' The Donald'!"-band-wagon, cue up this song. ("Good guys and Bad guys") No important facts shall have changed. Your candidate shall still have lost the election, but you'll feel better.

"So just get high while the radio's on,
Adjust the lights and sing a song ..."

“Do you know where your father was born?” (Or what was his orange? :)

Trump's 'pattern of cognitive decline' alarms psychiatrists
Jerry AdlerSenior | April 6, 2019

...On Tuesday, at a meeting with the secretary-general of NATO, President Trump launched into an impromptu riff on one of his favorite topics, the reluctance of America’s wealthy European allies to pay more toward their own defense. Then, in what might have been a clumsy effort to show no hard feelings, he expressed his love for Germany, the ancestral home of the Trump (or, originally, Drumpf) family:

“My father is German, right? Was German. And born in a very wonderful place in Germany, so I have a great feeling for Germany.”

Trump’s father, Frederick, was born in 1905 in the Bronx, approximately 4,000 miles from Germany, as the accompanying map shows. Trump’s grandfather was born in Germany, but was living in the United States with his wife when Frederick was born.

Of all Trump’s many misstatements, exaggerations, empty boasts and slips of the tongue, this one — which Trump has made at least twice before — stands out for its sheer inexplicability....

“He is rapidly declining,” Lee, the group’s president, said of Trump in an interview. “His rallies have been increasingly less coherent, with greater signs of paranoid responses, increasing attraction to violence, increasing espousal of conspiracy theories. A few weeks ago, there was the ‘Tim Apple’ episode, and the other day he referred to Venezuela as a company, while recently he confused his father’s birthplace with his grandfather’s.

“His mistakes are growing more and more bizarre,” Lee said. “If we match the pattern of his deterioration against pathology, what disease states look like, we can say he is not well.

“Continually we have been seeing that his erratic thoughts and behavior are more consistent with mental pathology than strategy. Now we are seeing a pattern of cognitive decline.”

Shortly after Trump took office, Lee edited a book called “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump,” a collection of essays by mental health professionals, which recently appeared in a second edition. “What we said then was that he was worse than he appeared in public and would grow more dangerous over time. That his mental pathology would spread into his administration and the population.” She referenced a phenomenon called “shared psychosis,” in which delusions spread from one family member to his or her relatives.

“In terms of the presidency,” she said, “the nation is the family. That is what we’re seeing now. One of the first things you lose is the ability to recognize that something is not right and to get help. An increasing proportion of the population is unable to recognize that something is not right. What you do in such a situation is contain the person, remove them from access to weapons and do an urgent evaluation. Then you manage the person in the least restrictive manner according to the results of the evaluation.”

Lee said her organization was “in the process of forming an expert panel that can test fitness for duty” by presidential candidates, pointing out that military officers in control of nuclear weapons undergo regular psychological evaluations. The exam she has in mind tests for such things as the ability to consider the consequences of decisions, to follow a logical train of thought, and to understand and explain back a story or scenario.

I think that would be a good thing to do for Trump, and for any of his would-be successors.

But if I were administering the test, I’d start with one simple question:

“Do you know where your father was born?”

https://www.yahoo.com/news/trumps-pattern-of-cognitive-decline-alarms-psychiatri...

>111 proximity1:

Seriously, dude, please just say what you mean. I don't have time to scroll through a lot of non-relevant quotes.

I'm not talking about Russian collusion. I'm talking about the fact that Trump is almost certainly in a significant cognitive decline.

Here is a direct question. Let's see if you can and will answer it.

Do you think Trump's many gaffes, including saying his father was born in Germany and saying that windmill noise might cause cancer, is evidence of 1) his cognitive mental decline, or 2) his habit of outright lying, or 3) both? Why or why not?

Please answer in your own words.

Also, please refrain from telling me what I am or am not pretending to do or understand. I posted about Trump's mental decline, and you posted a picture of the Hindenburg. I asked why, then you tell me I'm pretending not to understand that I'm a citizen who is a Truther of the equivalent of claiming Obama was not born in the U.S. (Don't forget that Trump was one of those Truthers, which makes your reference even more inappropriate.) Of course I didn't understand immediately what you were getting at; your post had nothing to do with what I said, and I was trying to figure out the connection.

>113 amysisson:

"Do you think Trump's many gaffes, including saying his father was born in Germany and saying that windmill noise might cause cancer, is evidence of

1) his cognitive mental decline,

No.

or 2) his habit of outright lying,

No.

In the windmill instance it's definitely not a matter of lying. He's speaking--as you do--carelesslyabout matters he knows only little about and, that, at second-hand, third-hand or worse.

or 3) both?

Neither 1 nor 2.

"Why or why not?"

Not necessarily evidence of either of these, no, I don't. He was speaking off the cuff about the matter of windmills and, characteristically, when he referred to "noise" as a potential cause of cancer, he almost certainly meant the static-electric charges (and their "fields") which these wind-turbines create and build up as the blades rotate on the towers' axes. That's not a terribly far-fetched concern. The electric fields built up are real and they pose dangers. The same basic phenomenon occurs from a helicopter's rotor blades. When people are rescued by hovering helicopters, they have to be carefully brought into the helicopter without touching any charged surface in the process--because the rotors' revolutions create powerful and dangerous static-electric charges. Lowered lines from the copter to a victim at sea must be of a non-conducting material or somehow insulated so that grabbing the line doesn't relay the static-charge to the person being rescued.

At most, Trump speaks off the cuff and without careful preparation, referring to things he's read or heard but which he doesn't always recall completely or accurately. I admit that much. Does that show me that he's mentally unsound or unfit for his office? No, by itself--and even taken together with a host of similar instances, no-- it doesn't.

Trump's paternal grandfather (Frederick) was born in Bavaria, part of what is today Germany. His father, also named Frederick, wasn't but it's possible to imagine that Trump had in mind his paternal grandfather Frederick when he referred to his father, Frederick.

He misspoke. Dementia? Nothing like Ronald Reagan's. George W. Bush made many gaffes no less astonishing. Was Bush mentally unsound to the point of being unfit for his office?

A U.S. president's main mental work concern his or her exercise of judgment. Memory plays some part in this but it is not the sort of thing which others around the president cannot observe and correct in their advising of their boss. Trump's basic judgment is, if anything, demonstrably better than Hillary Clinton's and, in a number of cases, better than that of Barack Obama.

>114 proximity1: '...and, characteristically, when he referred to "noise" as a potential cause of cancer, he almost certainly meant the static-electric charges (and their "fields")...'

Almost certainly!

'Trump's paternal grandfather (Frederick) was born in Bavaria, part of what is today Germany. His father, also named Frederick, wasn't but it's possible to imagine that Trump had in mind his paternal grandfather Frederick when he referred to his father, Frederick.'

Yesyes! Who doesn't? How many times have I MEANT to say I never met my grandfather on my father's side, and I actually just blurted out, I never met my dad!

>114 proximity1:

Thank you, I appreciate your straightforward answer. We clearly disagree on this, but I understand your reasoning process.

I do object to you saying that I speak carelessly about matters I know little about. Saying "they say windmill noise causes cancer" is carelessly speaking about something one knows little about. Me saying that I think Trump shows evidence of mental decline; repeatedly giving examples that are verifiable by anyone with an Internet connection (even if they disagree with my interpretation); and referring to the published opinions of medical experts, is not carelessly speaking about something I know little about. (I'm a medical librarian these days, by the way. That doesn't make me a medical expert, but I do know how to find credible medical literature in the vetted databases.)

trump could take out his tiny little mushroom penis during a press conference and shake it at the cameras and scream " I AM THE GREATEST PERSON WHO HAS EVER LIVED AND MY PENIS IS THE HUGEST PENIS THERE EVER WAS OR WILL BE." and his support by about forty percent of voters would remain about the same.

We who are the sane sixty per cent must accept this inexplicable yet obvious widespread form of abnormal psychology in this minority of slack-jawed micro-cephalic yahoo numb-nuts. We need to focus now on voting our majority in 2020 to end the insanity.

It is really our last god damn chance.

>116 amysisson:
Saying "they say windmill noise causes cancer" is carelessly speaking about something one knows little about. Me saying that I think Trump shows evidence of mental decline; repeatedly giving examples that are verifiable by anyone with an Internet connection (even if they disagree with my interpretation); and referring to the published opinions of medical experts, is not carelessly speaking about something I know little about.

Yes. A necessary distinction here.

Also, locally speaking, the fact that you even have to bring it up is symptomatic of an ongoing problem on LT talk threads.

It used to be easier to assume this distinction, and then argue about a subject (whatever subject).

Now much space is occupied by trollish squabble that bogs down exchange, that feels somehow affronted that an exchange might take place if (perish the thought!) with a view that is perceived as unfounded or unworthy.

Paradoxically, as the tone becomes harsher, the conversation becomes more rarefied and prissy.

And quickly dull.

I suppose I shouldn't be too nostalgic about the way it was before. It was often messy, and there were major dust-ups. But it was a hell of a lot more interesting, and I learned some stuff.

>116 amysisson:

That's right. We disagree. And, now, where a fruitful and useful discussion might have begun, this sterile and useless one ends in the way that is utterly typical at this venue. Closed minds are the rule here.

Disagreement is easy to find: disagreement from dishonest, self-serving complacency and self-delusion are everywhere to be found while its opposite is everywhere more and more rare. Disagreement as a prelude to a fair and honest search for better understanding of differences --that is something that is being wrung out of our contemporary political life because the dominant technologies through which we interact are inimical to it.

I sit, killing time, in train stations, watching as the local version of humanity's freak-show passes.
It leaves me depressed and angry. It leaves me ashamed to be a member of this, our stupid, vicious, species.

"I do object to you saying that I speak carelessly about matters I know little about. Saying "they say windmill noise causes cancer" is carelessly speaking about something one knows little about. Me saying that I think Trump shows evidence of mental decline; repeatedly giving examples that are verifiable by anyone with an Internet connection (even if they disagree with my interpretation); and referring to the published opinions of medical experts, is not carelessly speaking about something I know little about. (I'm a medical librarian these days, by the way. That doesn't make me a medical expert, but I do know how to find credible medical literature in the vetted databases.)"

"I do object to you saying that I speak carelessly about matters I know little about. "

But you've repeatedly done just that.

..." repeatedly giving examples that are verifiable by anyone with an Internet connection (even if they disagree with my interpretation); and referring to the published opinions of medical experts, is not carelessly speaking about something I know little about. (I'm a medical librarian these days, by the way. That doesn't make me a medical expert, but I do know how to find credible medical literature in the vetted databases.)"

But that material is wasted on you because, one, you're not making respectable uses of it here and, two, your reasonings from it aren't valid. To take just one of the simplest and most obvious examples, your posts claim that Trump's public remarks are valid evidence of (I quote) "mental decline." But to reach that kind of conclusion you'd need, among other minimal data, some base-line from which to work. You have done this part of the research, haven't you? No respectable scientific analysis of Trump's mental health would proceed without it. That analysis would begin with a clear exposition of the basis for the base-line view of his mental capacity before going on to present the evidence of the deterioration in his condition.

I've already cited Daniel Kahneman's work, popularized in his book, Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011) for its exposition of the kind of reasoning errors your posts exemplify. In your place, I would stop my posting here and go take up that book and read it carefully.

>119 proximity1:

But that material is wasted on you because, one, you're not making respectable uses of it here and, two, your reasonings from it aren't valid.

That's your opinion, nothing more. In particular, you're not the arbiter of "respectable uses."

>120 amysisson: This man is putting a PhD's worth of effort into proving to you that are simply not up to thinking on a LibraryThing level. I think the least you could do is marry and divorce him in order to provide some context to his animus.

>121 RickHarsch: Wow. This thread is already impressive in its nastiness. But to randomly insert the implication that an LT user who (as your opening words demonstrate that you know) to be male is, actually a woman, descends to a whole new level of malice.

>121 RickHarsch:

OK, that made me laugh!

What to make of--

'I sit, killing time, in train stations, watching as the local version of humanity's freak-show passes.
It leaves me depressed and angry. It leaves me ashamed to be a member of this, our stupid, vicious, species.'

I would suggest that this degree of negativity deserves a trip to a psychiatrist. I would also suggest that whether you like it or not we are all inextricably linked to each other--not just the best but also the not so best and maybe you should look for the good in at least some where you only see bad. There is usually some good to be found in everyone.

> 124

"There is usually some good to be found in everyone."

With a few obvious exceptions that is true. Since you used the modifier "usually" I see you understand this.

>122 -pilgrim-: I think you misunderstood what RickHarsch wrote.

>122 -pilgrim-: I think so too?

Donald Trump has been a public figure for a long time, and while comparing his words to those he used in the 1990s may reveal that he's been an asshole for a long time, they also reveal that he managed to correctly use complex sentence structure at that time, which he was failing at in his campaign speeches.

>122 -pilgrim-: If Proximity is a woman I will apologize.

I sit, killing time, in train stations....
There goes solitary!
Is that poor over there?
Nasty and brutish, together as always,
where's short? We're short short...

Ah, here comes scrofulous
keeping his umbrella from mean
Tuburcules coughs past
but i'm short, short short...

Quel goujat!

Whatever Trump Is Playing, It Isn’t Golf
Rick Reilly | Apr 7, 2019
Author of Commander in Cheat: How Golf Explains Trump.

...He cheats. He lies. He kicks. And not just his ball—yours, too. He props up a 2.8 handicap that’s faker than WrestleMania 35. He wins tournaments he never even played in. He wins tournaments that weren’t even held...

...He drives his golf cart on greens. He drives it on tee boxes. He never, ever walks, even on the courses he owns that have banned carts (Trump Turnberry.)

...He always hits first, never mind who won the last hole, and then jumps in his Super Mario Kart with his caddy and peels off before you’ve even hit, the better to be 150 yards ahead of you so the two of them can foozle, fudge, and foot-wedge in private.

...He plays only at clubs with his name on them and only with caddies who love his $200-a-round tips.

...He plays only in those awful two-sizes-too-small cotton Dockers with the 1995 pleats. (Does he own golf shirts in any other color than white?) He plays only with rich people, and almost entirely with men, and not one Democratic member of Congress yet.

...Trump will cheat to win $20 from his friends

...Trump will lie and say one of his courses is worth $50 million while at the same time suing the local tax board for valuing it at more than $2 million—we feel you, Ossining, New York

...Trump says he’s won 20 club championships. (He hasn’t.) The truth is, he played a lot of those “championships” by himself, the first day his latest course opened, and declared himself the champ. How do I know? He told me the day we played together in the early 2000s.

...Trump thinks climate change is a hoax...Except in Ireland, where his lawyers petitioned to have a 2,000-foot sea wall to fight the “rising sea levels” caused “by climate change.”

...did you know Trump keeps eight goats in a pen on his Trump Bedminster course to get an $80,000 farm tax credit?

...Every golfer I know finishes his round and—even before his beer—immediately posts his score in the GHIN computer, so everybody knows a bet with him will be fair, except him. In 2018, Trump played an estimated 60-plus times. He posted one score.

...Whenever he’s played in front of cameras (Pebble Beach Pro-Am, Tahoe Celebrity), he’s not once made a cut or finished in the top half among the celebs...

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/04/donald-trump-made-golf-gross-a...

1. Golf is stupid.
2. trump plays golf.
3. Q.E.D.

Plus he cheats and everyone knows it.

What a putz.

Putin should be ashamed of himself.

1. 2. 3.--I agree.

OTOH I think Putin is having a fine old time laughing at the shambles our democracy has become.

Really all the noise we made about Crimea and the Ukraine and here we are interfering all over the middle east and in Venezuela. The hypocrisy is not hard to see.

The royal 'We' plus a 'hereby': the old boy is close to jumping the shark, if not already.
Also, refugee applicants ('caravan') are not yet immigrants and they aren't illegal.
'Illegal immigrant': PLEASE, Br'er President, don't fling me in dat sanctuary city. (Apologies to Br'er Rabbit.)
Sanctuary city: please send them before census.
Republicans borrow a page from Fidel Castro, the Mariel Boatlift ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mariel_boatlift )
Mueller time = diversion time.

Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump | 9:47 PM - Apr 13, 2019:

Just out: The USA has the absolute legal right to have apprehended illegal immigrants transferred to Sanctuary Cities. We hereby demand that they be taken care of at the highest level, especially by the State of California, which is well known or its poor management & high taxes!

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

White House Considered Releasing Migrants in ‘Sanctuary Cities’
Michael D. Shear and Zolan Kanno-Youngs | April 11, 2019

...The idea was floated in an email by a top White House policy adviser in November, when Mr. Trump was furiously condemning migrant caravans from Central America headed toward the southwestern border, the people, including two government officials, said.

In the email dated Nov. 16, with the subject line “Sanctuary City Proposal,” May Davis, the deputy White House policy coordinator, raised the idea with officials from the Department of Homeland Security, Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection.

Ms. Davis suggested that migrants who had been apprehended and were slated to be released into border towns could instead be taken to one of several sanctuary cities, which limit how local law enforcement can cooperate with federal immigration officers.

The proponents of the idea inside the White House argued at the time that it would help with overcrowding at nonprofit shelters in border towns by transferring the migrants to cities that already embrace the idea of having more immigrants, one official said.

Once there, the migrants would be released onto the streets — potentially sending a message to the Democratic politicians who oppose Mr. Trump’s immigration agenda and his demands for a wall along the border with Mexico.

“The idea has been raised by one to two principals that, if we are unable to build sufficient temporary housing, that caravan members be bused to small- and mid-sized sanctuary cities,” Ms. Davis wrote to the officials at the agencies. She added, “There is not a White House decision on this.”...

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/11/us/politics/sanctuary-cities-trump.html

‘I Do Not Remember’: Trump Gave a Familiar Reply to the Special Counsel’s Queries
Peter Baker | April 20, 2019

...More than 30 times, he told the prosecutors that he had no memory of what they were asking about, employing several formulations to make the same point.

“I do not remember.”

“I do not recall.”

“I have no recollection.”

“I have no independent recollection.”

“I have no current recollection.”

He did not remember learning about a Trump Tower meeting held in June 2016 by his son, son-in-law and campaign chairman with visiting Russians promising “dirt” on Hillary Clinton from the Russian government. He did not remember being told in advance of Russian hacking of Democratic emails before the stolen messages were posted online.

He did not remember any particular conversations with Roger J. Stone Jr., a longtime adviser, during the last months of the campaign, much less discussions with him about WikiLeaks. He did not remember discussing a possible trip to Russia to promote a proposed tower project in Moscow. He did not remember an invitation from Russia’s deputy prime minister to attend an economic forum in St. Petersburg.

...Mr. Trump rarely lacks for certainty in his public statements on camera, but has shown more caution when under oath.

He said, “I don’t remember” 24 times during a 2012 deposition in a lawsuit involving his now-defunct Trump University and 35 times during another deposition related to the university suit three years later, not counting 10 more times in the two interviews that he said, “I don’t recall” or “Can’t remember.” (He eventually settled the legal claims for $25 million.)...

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/20/us/politics/trump-mueller-memory.html

Trump gets jacked watching Kellyanne and Sarah (amongst others) make fools of themselves covering for him. It is similar to his stating women let him touch their intimate parts.

Nothing to worry about, I guess. Stable genius. Young, vibrant. :D

Trump: I am a young, vibrant man (2:07)
Erin Burnett | April 26, 2019

President Donald Trump taunts, "I am a young, vibrant man" to bait former Vice President Joe Biden. CNN's Jeanne Moos wonders, "Who's more vibrant?"

https://www.cnn.com/videos/politics/2019/04/26/donald-trump-vs-joe-biden-young-a...

Exclusive: Trump, the billion-dollar loser — I was his ghostwriter and saw it happen
Charles Leerhsen | May 9, 2019

...The one thing he is above-average at is compartmentalization.

...Each day was a string of such nonsensical moments.

...He seemed unusually subdued during this period (bankruptcy), understandably. One day he told me a sobering story about seeing a homeless person on the street and realizing that man was better off than he was because the homeless man had nothing while he, Trump, had less than zero. Because Trump doesn’t ever walk down the street, would never notice a homeless person if he did and the story involved a degree of introspection, I knew it couldn’t be true and that he was probably parroting something he’d heard someone else say. Still, I included it in the revised introduction...

https://news.yahoo.com/trump-the-billiondollar-loser-his-ghostwriter-recalls-the...

President Fox News Grandpa Just Went Ballistic Outside the White House and We All Just Act Like It's Thursday

And then the president started raving, face shining tomato-red even as he's backlit, about how it was really Hillary who was colluding with The Media, and the Russians. And then he started skulking around the scrum, talking about how nobody talks about Russia, Russia, Russia anymore.
…
Then it was time for some Impeachment Talk... "To me it's a dirty word, the word impeach," says the President of the United States. "It's a dirty, filthy, disgusting word. And it had nothing to do with me."
…
And then it was time to flex the Constitutional Knowledge.: "Some day you ought to read a thing called Article 2. Read Article 2. Which gives the president powers that you wouldn't believe. But I don't even have to rely on Article 2. There was no crime."
…
Do you notice how the president switches topics and trains of thought almost constantly, often without finishing a sentence? He jumps around to points of attack and defense, some related and some not, trying to drown the audience in a disorienting swell of misinformation and nonsense. After all, he can scarcely keep track of all of it. His only hope these days is to flood the zone with bullshit and snake oil, the currencies he's traded on his whole life, so that the truth about what he's done might be obscured in the public consciousness, too deep for enough people to find.

Yale psychiatrist Bandy Lee: Trump's mental health is now a "national and global emergency"
Chauncey DeVega | June 14, 2019

Dr. Bandy Lee convened experts to study the Mueller report. They conclude that Trump "can no longer see reality"

...Beyond the particulars of Trump's likely illegal behavior, the Mueller report is also a compendium of Donald Trump's state of mind.

Dr. Bandy Lee, who is a professor of psychiatry at the Yale School of Medicine and editor of the bestselling book "The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump" convened a panel comprised of leading mental health experts to evaluate Donald Trump based upon his behavior as detailed in the Mueller report.

Their definitive conclusion: Trump is mentally unfit, a threat to the United States and the world, and as such should have his powers severely restricted while he is put under a doctor's care. At the invitation of several Democratic members of Congress, Lee and other mental health professionals will present their findings about Donald Trump's mental health in a public meeting in Washington next month...

https://www.salon.com/2019/06/14/yale-psychiatrist-bandy-lee-trumps-mental-healt...

>140 margd:

"can no longer see reality" might have applied to you except for one thing: it is not clear when, if ever, you could see reality.

_____________________________

How many votes do the collective of psychiatrists--who, in violation of all the respectable standards of their profession's practice, try psychoanalysis through the pages of a special-prosecutor's report about their analysis-subject?

Pffffffffffft.

Physician, heal thyself!

David Frum @davidfrum | 7:26 PM - 15 Jun 2019:
Here are the key NYT paragraphs about the president being cut out of the chain of command
because of his untrustworthiness

U.S. Escalates Online Attacks on Russia’s Power Grid
David E. Sanger and Nicole Perlroth | June 15, 2019

...Two administration officials said they believed Mr. Trump had not been briefed in any detail about the steps to place “implants” — software code that can be used for surveillance or attack — inside the Russian grid.

Pentagon and intelligence officials described broad hesitation to go into detail with Mr. Trump about operations against Russia for concern over his reaction — and the possibility that he might countermand it or discuss it with foreign officials, as he did in 2017 when he mentioned a sensitive operation in Syria to the Russian foreign minister.

Because the new law defines the actions in cyberspace as akin to traditional military activity on the ground, in the air or at sea, no such briefing would be necessary, they added...

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/15/us/politics/trump-cyber-russia-grid.html
______________________________________________________________

David Frum @davidfrum | 7:16 PM - 15 Jun 2019:
If the military is wrong about the president, if he should be trusted,
then we have here the worst breach of civilian supremacy over the military since ... ever, right?

But if the military is right ... what do we have then?

"But if the military is right ... what do we have then?"

Well, "right" or wrong, Mr. Frum, you moron, you have an open invitation for the U.S. to join the legion of nations which suffer from the blight of
chronic military coups d'état, that's what your idea, almost unbelievably stupid--but, in these times, it is no longer possible to call something "unbelievably stupid"--promises in mischief.

For those who'd thought it simply couldn't get worse, think again.

The American public, now already lost in amazing feats of political stupidity, could actually easily wreak further havoc on the body politic. Inviting, as some sort of salvation, a military-led deposing of a duly-elected president of the United States is one of the few avenues of insane self-destruction still untried in this mess of idiocy. And David Frum proposes it.

FUCKING.A-MAZ-ING.

When do Trump's lynch-mob actually shake themselves and have a good Goddamn look at themselves in all their sordid derangement?!

> 142

In a nutshell:

The enemy of of my enemy is my friend.

At this point there is no compromise possible.

It is the insane emperor (in his head) trump and his toadies against all the rest of the human race, i.e., the anti-trump majority, i.e., those who are utterly anti-institutional insanity/ignorance/stupidity.

There will be a winning side and a losing side - the ultimate in the Aristotelian law of the excluded middle.

Hard to tell who will be the winner at this juncture.

Watch this space.

Erin Burnett @ErinBurnett | 7:36 PM - 8 Jul 2019

Trump met Kim three times after Kim called him... a ‘mentally deranged, dotard, gangster, frightened dog’.
Darroch (merely) called Trump admin clumsy and inept. Trump rewards one with lavish praise of love letters, bans the other.

>145 margd: "Trump rewards one with lavish praise of love letters, bans the other."

And the evident political good-sense in such a strategy completely escapes you. No surprise there. Others, both in and outside of the Trump White House shall have understood how, in each case, Trump behaved astutely. You really need this explained to you because you clearly don't get it. But I see no evidence that your mind is open enough to learn from your ignorance.

Darroch : foreign diplomat/ U.K. ambassador to the U.S.; eminently replaceable.

Kim: North Korea's potentially even-more-dangerous dictator who, by all evidence, is not going anywhere for a very extended time.

Re-elect Donald Trump.

For a neophyte "dummy", Trump consistently makes his most adamant critics and his partisan-adversaries look like hapless morons.

U.K. Unable to Find Replacement Ambassador Who Does Not Think Trump Is an Idiot

Andy Borowitz | 7/10/2019

LONDON (The Borowitz Report)—Following the resignation of its Ambassador to the United States, Kim Darroch, the government of the United Kingdom has disclosed that it has been unable to find a replacement for Darroch who does not also think that Donald J. Trump is a blithering idiot.

...“We will search high and low until we find someone in this country who doesn’t think Donald Trump is a nitwit,” she said. “We’re starting by interviewing people who don’t think Boris Johnson is a nitwit.”

While affirming her government’s determination to find someone in the U.K. who does not think Trump is an unmitigated bonehead, May warned that the difficulty of the task must not be underestimated. “This is turning out to be harder than Brexit,” she said.

https://www.newyorker.com/humor/borowitz-report/uk-unable-to-find-replacement-am...

‘It Could Have Been Any of Us’: Disdain for Trump Runs Among Ambassadors
David E. Sanger | July 10, 2019

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/10/world/europe/kim-darroch-trump.html

A Tweet:

Donald J. Trump
‏
Verified account

@realDonaldTrump
13h13 hours ago
More
...or a very nervous and skinny version of Pocahontas (1/1024th), as your President, rather than what you have now, so great looking and smart, a true Stable Genius! Sorry to say that even Social Media would be driven out of business along with, and finally, the Fake News Media!

So moronic, on so many levels....

Great looking?
A "true Stable Genius"?
Social media can be "driven out of business" even though social media is not a company? If we have a new President in 2020, social media will die? What, will we go back to the Stone Age completely because only Dimwit Donnie can keep civilization going?

Trump is doing to America what the planes did to the Twin Towers on 9/11. The difference is this 9/11 is reoccurring daily.

Trump speaks at level of 8-year-old, new analysis finds
Emily Shugerman | 9 January 2018

Mr Trump scores the lowest of any of the past 15 presidents

An analysis of the President's first 30,000 words uttered in office found Mr Trump speaks at a third- to seventh-grade reading level – lower than any other President since 1929. Mr Trump’s vocabulary and grammatical structure is “significantly more simple, and less diverse” than any President since Herbert Hoover, the analysis found.

The comparison is based on interviews, speeches and press conferences for every president dating back to 1929, compiled by online database Factba.se. Analysts at Factba.se studied the “off-script” remarks of all 15 men – essentially, everything but their prepared speeches – to compare and contrast their speaking skills.

Analysts ran the records through eight different tests for vocabulary complexity, diversity, and comprehension level. In every single test, Mr Trump scored the lowest.

Mr Trump averaged significantly fewer syllables per word than the last 14 Presidents, and used significantly fewer unique words...

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/trump-language-lev...

Somehow this doesn't come as a shock to me....