By informing our fellow Americans of the threat, we can & must save democracy…We can’t just sit back & let a demagogue leader drive our democracy into the ground. When the prez & his political lapdogs & echo propagandists keep spreading their lies in unison, enough of their psycho-conservative base believe them to the point it does pose a real threat to our free society. No system can survive such an onslaught of lies & conspiracies. We can save our nation from a tyrant if we all do our part that requires informing our fellow citizens, from which this blog can be one of the messaging tools you can use. This kind of threat we face won’t just disappear on its own: american-democracy-cant-
History contains dangerous memories, and this is particularly true for Donald Trump, given the ideological features and legacies of fascism that are deeply woven into his rhetoric of hate and demonization, his mix of theater and violence, a frenzied lawlessness, and his policies supportive of ultra-nationalism and racial cleansing. All the more reason for Trump and his acolytes to treat historical memory as a dangerous threat – one that harbors critical tools for understanding how the present repeats the past and how the past informs the future. Historical memory matters because it serves as a form of moral witnessing, and in doing so becomes a crucial asset in preventing new forms of fascism from becoming normalized, as if the conditions leading to fascism exist outside of history in some ethereal space in which everything is measured against the degree of distraction it promises. Historical memory is especially important in light of the brutality of totalitarian regimes that have marked the history of the 20th century. Without historical memory, there can be no moral awakening to the increasing threat of authoritarianism now sweeping over the United States. The echoes of fascism in Trump’s leadership have been well documented, but what has been overlooked is a sustained analysis of his abuse and disparagement of historical remembrance, particularly in light of his association with a range of current right-wing dictators and political demagogues across the globe. Trump’s ignorance of history was on full display with his misinformed comments about President Andrew Jackson and 19th-century abolitionist Frederick Douglass.
While the mainstream press and others have expressed moral outrage over Trump’s fawning associations with brutal dictators, they have refused to examine these relationships within a broader historical context. What is lost in this form of historical amnesia is that the fascist horrors of the past have the ability to become relevant under new conditions that allow them to crystalize into new forms. Jonathan Freedland is right in arguing that “if the Nazi era is placed off limits, seen as so far outside the realm of regular human experience that it might as well have happened on a distant planet … then we risk failure to learn its lessons.” In an age when totalitarian ideas and tendencies inhabit the everyday experiences of millions of people and create a formative culture for promoting massive human suffering and misery, Trump’s affinity for indulging right-wing demagogues becomes an important signpost for recognizing the totalitarian nightmare that presents us with a terrifying glimpse of the future. At one level, Trump’s support of right wing demagogues and dictators is often acknowledged to be indicative of his refusal to use the office the presidency to defend human rights. What is not pointed to in the mainstream press is that Trump has no interest in human rights and views them as a threat to his own embrace of authoritarian power. There can be no missing the fact that Trump surrounds himself with ideological bedfellows and political loyalists. And it is in the words of some of his high level appointees that we often catch a glimpse of Trump’s admiration for authoritarian rule.
The rise of Donald Trump as a corporate-fueled celebrity troll who courts the favor of autocrats and dictators around the world represents the presence of a noxious disease in the body politic, one whose superficial symptoms betray a deep-seated contempt for a politics guided by empathy and compassion. This contempt is the bedrock of a neoliberal formative culture that, as my colleague David Clark observes, “breeds horrors: the failures of conscience, the wars against thought and the flirtations with irrationality that lie at the heart of the triumph of everyday aggression, the withering of political life and the withdrawal into private obsessions.” The issue is no longer whether politicians such as Donald Trump are about to lead us in into the dark ages. Rather, we should be seeking to locate and challenge the forces that have produced these politicians. When individualized resentment, brute force and scapegoat-centered violence are normalized, we move closer to a police state, and toward an age that has forgotten about the totalitarian impulses that gave us Iraq, legalized torture, a carceral state, war crimes, a plundering of the planet and much more. Trump is only a symptom, not the cause, of our troubles. Let’s hope the planet is around long enough even to begin to rethink politics in light of the election of Donald Trump to the U.S. presidency, which ranks as one of the most sickening events in American political history. Democracy, however flawed, has now collapsed into Trump’s world, its leader a serial liar, nativist, racist and authoritarian.
Democracy is a precious yet fragile gift
I’m fairly confident we can defeat his fascist instincts & save democracy, since almost on a daily basis the American people are witnessing the president’s reckless chaos & deplorable character, so his rising unfavorable ratings can help keep him in check. Plus as explained in is-donald-trump-too-
With each new juicy and jaw-dropping anecdote from Bob Woodward’s bombshell book Fear: Trump in the White House, which will be released next week, the truth about President Trump becomes ever more clear: He is the most unprepared and unworthy president in American history. This is a man who reportedly called his own attorney general “mentally retarded,” with the accent of a “dumb Southerner”; who felt condemning white supremacists was his “biggest f—ing mistake”; and who rather casually mused about want to “f—ing kill” Syria’s Bashar al-Assad. (Trump, of course, says the whole book is full of “made up frauds, a con on the public.”)
This much is clear: Almost every day President Trump violates a different norm or governing procedure. Whether it’s contemplating a pardon that hasn’t gone through the normal process or weighing in on policy because he saw something on Fox News, Trump routinely ignores decades or even centuries of precedents shaped by presidents of both parties. Each time this happens, the left, and some on the right, react with alarm. They correctly observe that most of the safeguards in our democracy owe to norms and traditions, not legal barriers. They also point to ominous parallels from the past when democracy collapsed, replaced by dangerous authoritarians or fascists.
But these warnings miss something crucial: More evidence points to Trump being a petty, woefully unprepared person than a budding authoritarian with a master plan. Rather than trying to crush democracy, he is just trying to run the country as he ran his family company. This doesn’t make Trump any less bad or less dangerous, but understanding and acknowledging this difference is critical to persuading those Americans who have doubts about Trump, but don’t hate him, of the danger he poses. And winning over these voters is crucial to electing Democrats in 2018 and Trump’s eventual challenger in 2020.
He’s Nuts!
Trump’s increasingly apparent mental instability could stem from psychopathy, early-stage dementia or simply being a despicable person, which a correct diagnosis may someday be verified. It doesn’t take a psychological professional to know someone that erratic & has told us nearly 5000 provable lies since his January 2017 inauguration is mentally unfit. But as confirmation, it is instructive to hear from a professional psychiatrist in these excerpts from thousands-of-mental-
Bob Woodward’s new book, “Fear,” describes a “nervous breakdown of Trump’s presidency.” Earlier this year, Michael Wolff’s “Fire and Fury” offered a similar portrayal. Now, an op-ed in The New York Times by an anonymous “senior White House official” describes how deeply the troubles in this administration run and what effort is required to protect the nation. None of this is a surprise to those of us who, 18 months ago, put together our own public service book, “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President.” My focus as the volume’s editor was on Trump’s dangerousness because of my area of expertise in violence prevention. Approaching violence as a public health issue, I have consulted with governments and international organizations, in addition to 20 years of engaging in the individual assessment and treatment of violent offenders. The book proceeded from an ethics conference I held at Yale, my home institution. At that meeting, my psychiatrist colleagues and I discussed balancing two essential duties of our profession. First is the duty to speak responsibly about public officials, especially as outlined in “the Goldwater rule,” which requires that we refrain from diagnosing without a personal examination and without authorization. Second is our responsibility to protect public health and safety, or our “duty to warn” in cases of danger, which usually supersedes other rules.
Our conclusion was overwhelmingly that our responsibility to society and its safety, as outlined in our ethical guidelines, overrode any etiquette owed to a public figure. That decision led to the collection of essays in the book, which includes some of the most prominent thinkers of the field including Robert J. Lifton, Judith Herman, Philip Zimbardo and two dozen others. That decision was controversial among some members of our field. We already know a great deal about Trump’s mental state based on the voluminous information he has given through his tweets and his responses to real situations in real time. Now, this week’s credible reports support the concerns we articulated in the book beyond any doubt. These reports are also consistent with the account I received from two White House staff members who called me in October 2017 because the president was behaving in a manner that “scared” them, and they believed he was “unraveling”. They were calling because of the book I edited. Once I confirmed that they did not perceive the situation as an imminent danger, I referred them to the emergency room, in order not to be bound by confidentiality rules that would apply if I engaged with them as a treating physician. That would have compromised my role of educating the public.
The psychology behind the chaos…The author of the New York Times op-ed makes clear that the conflict in the White House is not about Trump’s ideology. The problem, the author sees, is the lack of “any discernible first principles that guide his decision making . . . his impulsiveness [that] results in half-baked, ill-informed and occasionally reckless decisions that have to be walked back, and there being literally no telling whether he might change his mind from one minute to the next.” These are obviously psychological symptoms reflective of emotional compulsion, impulsivity, poor concentration, narcissism and recklessness. They are identical to those that Woodward describes in numerous examples, which he writes were met with the “stealthy machinations used by those in Trump’s inner sanctum to try to control his impulses and prevent disasters.” They are also consistent with the course we foresaw early in Trump’s presidency, which concerned us enough to outline it in our book. We tried to warn that his condition was worse than it appeared, would grow worse over time and would eventually become uncontainable. What we observed were signs of mental instability — signs that would eventually play out not only in the White House, as these accounts report, but in domestic situations and in the geopolitical sphere. There is a strong connection between immediate dangerousness — the likelihood of waging a war or launching nuclear weapons — and extended societal dangerousness — policies that force separation of children from families or the restructuring of global relations in a way that would destabilize the world.
Getting worse…My current concern is that we are already witnessing a further unraveling of the president’s mental state, especially as the frequency of his lying increases and the fervor of his rallies intensifies. I am concerned that his mental challenges could cause him to take unpredictable and potentially extreme and dangerous measures to distract from his legal problems. Mental health professionals have standard procedures for evaluating dangerousness. More than a personal interview, violence potential is best assessed through past history and a structured checklist of a person’s characteristics. These characteristics include a history of cruelty to animals or other people, risk taking, behavior suggesting loss of control or impulsivity, narcissistic personality and current mental instability. Also of concern are noncompliance or unwillingness to undergo tests or treatment, access to weapons, poor relationship with significant other or spouse, seeing oneself as a victim, lack of compassion or empathy, and lack of concern over consequences of harmful acts. The Woodward book and the New York Times op-ed confirm many of these characteristics. The rest have been evident in Trump’s behavior outside the White House and prior to his tenure. That the president has met not just some but all these criteria should be reason for alarm.
Other ways in which a president could be dangerous are through cognitive symptoms or lapses, since functions such as reasoning, memory, attention, language and learning are critical to the duties of a president. He has exhibited signs of decline here, too. Furthermore, when someone displays a propensity for large-scale violence, such as by advocating violence against protesters or immigrant families, calling perpetrators of violence such as white supremacists “very fine people” or showing oneself vulnerable to manipulation by hostile foreign powers, then these things can promote a much more widespread culture of violence. The president has already shown an alarming escalation of irrational behavior during times of distress. Others have observed him to be “unstable,” “losing a step” and “unraveling.” He is likely to enter such a state again. Violent acts are not random events. They are end products of a long process that follow recognizable patterns. As mental health experts, we make predictions in terms of unacceptable levels of probability rather than on the basis of what is certain to happen. Trump’s impairment is a familiar pattern to a violence expert such as myself, but given his level of severity, one does not need to be a specialist to know that he is dangerous. At least several thousands of mental health professionals who are members of the National Coalition of Concerned Mental Health Experts share the view that the nuclear launch codes should not be in the hands of someone who exhibits such levels of mental instability.
This is a national emergency…
or close to it! There are unique times when drastic steps are needed, especially for something so important as to literally save democracy. This posting is the conclusion to why-intelligence-officers-
These questions must be taken seriously. If we lose the trust of those who receive our information and analyses, the intelligence community will be seen as just another calculating player in the Washington political game — and our national security will suffer. So what has pushed us out of our comfort zone? How can we ensure that our claims of objectivity and neutrality are believed in the future? Let’s take these one at a time. First, we are reacting to today’s extraordinarily unprecedented context, one that transcends traditional party politics. (Most of us have served administrations led by both parties.) For many of us, keeping our mouths shut about what we see in our own country would be akin to not alerting our government to a threat from abroad. Failure to warn is the ultimate sin in the intelligence world. It feels equally sinful in the world of citizenship.
A colleague from another field said to me recently: “For you and others the normal rules no longer apply, because we are all in upside-down-world today” — a world where most of the normal rules of civic discourse no longer work. Witness the unnamed Trump administration insider who just let loose in the New York Times about the president’s dangerous behavior. Of course, we would all love to be back in right-side-up world, where it would be unimaginable for a president to advocate jailing an election opponent, assail the Justice Department and the FBI, call a free press “the enemy of the people,” insult allies, and, most important, refuse to combat a well-documented covert foreign attack on U.S. elections — in the process weakening efforts by others to do so and encouraging Russia to keep it up. And although all politicians spend time in the spin room, how wonderful it would be if our president’s basic truthfulness were not automatically suspect.
All of us in intelligence have been shaped by careers assessing societies where free speech, democratic institutions and rule of law don’t exist or are under attack — places such as Russia and China. We have also seen how fragile democracy can be and how it can be eroded almost imperceptibly — consider Turkey and parts of Central Europe. So our senses are finely tuned to the classic warning signs: attacks on institutions, neutralization of opponents, cowed legislatures, publics numbed by repeated falsehoods. All those are now visible here to various degrees. While others may say our democracy can’t erode that way, we know we’ve heard that before, somewhere else. The stakes are too high for complacency here.
Second, how can intelligence professionals come through this still meriting trust in our objectivity? Many people will just conclude we can’t. But we have to hope most people will understand why we reject silence: It’s because this is a threat that we cannot combat silently, as we have been able to do with foreign threats — overseas and out of the public’s eye. Those who don’t see a threat will of course reject that argument, and there’s nothing we can do about that. Meanwhile, we should take care, as we would in foreign intelligence assessments, to limit our comments to what the facts can reasonably support in the minds of most Americans — what we can all indisputably see, hear and document. And if and when assaults on our institutions cease, you can expect most of us to just slip quickly back into our traditional comfort zone, stepping away from domestic politics and, with relief, returning our attention mainly to the world beyond our shores.
To save democracy, here’s an article thomas-paine-knew-how-
America has become careless with its democracy. So careless, it seems, that it is allowing the return of the very institution that it had to remove in the course of its birth as a free nation: an absolute monarchy. We have a man in the White House with all the inclinations of an unhinged monarch who on a daily basis acts as though he is above the law. And, as though in a medieval court, he is surrounded by a conniving bunch of supplicants and robber barons. It is a good time, therefore, to remember that the principles of American democracy were crafted as a response to the outrages of kingly powers, in the person of George III. One of the authors of those principles described the threat that had to be faced: “Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly; ‘tis dearness only that gives everything its value.” What would that writer say now, as so many of America’s political leaders are abjectly failing to defend democracy in the face of a new tyrant?
Attacks on the Media
We see from christiane-amanpour-on-
This is different because it’s a constant barrage and it’s magnified by social media. When you start being called “the enemies of the people,” that’s a line where you have to stand up and resist. Because we are obviously not. We are obviously the friends of the people, we are the servants of the people, the explainers of the people. We are the people who get up and go to those distant lands where it’s too dangerous or too expensive or too difficult or too time-consuming for the people to go to, for our viewers, our readers, our online users. We go there and put ourselves at risk to get the truth and the facts and the evidence and that is an indispensable role. And we perform an indispensable service for the American people and for the people of the world. So we reject out of hand the idea that we’re enemies of the people. People who tell lies are the enemies of the people. There’s a whole tranche of so-called media that tell lies, yes, that’s fake news, is the enemy of the people [is] fake news, but not us. I’m now going to use a phrase that is not my original phrase, because a colleague wrote this in The European: we need to implement our own Article 5, like in NATO — an attack on one is an attack on all. Sometimes we make mistakes. Sometimes we do need to be corrected. Sometimes we must apologize for doing something wrong or making mistakes, etc. But to be unfairly, politically and small-mindedly be attacked like this, if one of us is singled out unfairly we all need to stand up for each other.
These next excerpts reveal Trump’s deep dark desires of wanting to physically attack journalists or encouraging others to do so, seen inside trump-jokingly-praises-
President Trump on Thursday night ratcheted up his not-so-veiled attacks on the media, making light of an assault perpetrated by a Republican member of Congress on a journalist and suggesting it was done on behalf of his state. At a rally in Billings, Mont., Trump ran through the state’s GOP elected officials before landing upon Rep. Greg Gianforte. “I’ll tell you what: This man has fought — in more ways than one — for your state. He has fought for your state,” Trump said. “Greg Gianforte. He is a fighter and a winner.” Trump enunciated the “in more ways than one” in a manner that made clear what his reference was to. Gianforte is not a military veteran, which would be about the only valid explanation for the idea that a politician “fought in more ways than one for your state.” But again, the video shows Trump was clearly pleased with his veiled reference.
In June 2017, Gianforte pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor assault on Guardian reporter Ben Jacobs that took place 24 hours before the end of a special election campaign. He was given a 180-day suspended sentence and was required to do community service and pay a fine. He also was forced to attend anger-management classes. Jacobs tweeted at the time that Gianforte had “body-slammed” him after Jacobs asked him repeatedly about the cost of the GOP’s health-care bill. The Guardian released a tape of the incident, and Fox News reporters who were also present confirmed Jacobs’s account. On Thursday, a president who has increasingly labeled “fake news” reporters as the “enemies of the American people” made his assault of a journalist into a laugh and applause line.
More lies from Trump & his anointed media
As we keep hearing repeatedly the provable lies coming from Trump, Fox & the rest of the echo, much of the firestorm & chaos they create are done to mask the truth: why-do-people-share-
Oxford Dictionaries’ International Word of the Year for 2016 was “post-truth,” defined as “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.” Use of the word in English language text spiked 2,000 percent in 2016 compared to the previous year. Oxford said in its news release that the spike was driven “by the rise of social media as a news source, and a growing distrust of facts offered up by the establishment.” Numerous scientific studies have confirmed what is obvious to anyone who has discussed politics with a committed partisan: facts rarely matter to an ideologue who has made up his or her mind. Most of us are familiar with the concept of cognitive bias, where people seek only information that confirms their preconceived opinions. Even when shown neutral news coverage of a political issue, partisans are likely to view the coverage as biased and hostile to their viewpoint, choosing to focus their attention on the parts of the story that don’t conform to their way of thinking. In the same way that a sports fan evaluates a referee’s call, based upon which team the call favors, political activists will reject factual evidence that casts doubt on the claims of their party’s leaders.
Politicians are notorious for telling voters what they want to hear. This is because the most partisan political activists simply are not persuaded by the facts. Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt puts it this way: “If you ask people to believe something that violates their intuitions, they will devote their efforts to finding an escape hatch — a reason to doubt your argument or conclusions.” This is the problem facing fact-checking organizations today. The audience that most needs to hear the fact-checkers’ conclusions — the ideological partisans — often are the people least likely to believe them. The problem is compounded by the fact that polls have shown trust in the media to be near an all-time low. Political activists — particularly those on the right — have determined that they don’t like the news coming from fact-checking organizations and the mainstream media, so they dismiss their reporting altogether. As a result, popular websites and social media accounts have been created with the expressed purpose of undermining the conclusions of fact-checking organizations.
Here we see the problem is not just the constant lying, but the lies keep getting repeated throughout the echo: donald-trump-liar-dont-
So Petty
How is it possible an American President with all his important responsibilities, could have been so obsessed over something like this. See excerpts from donald-trump-
It can be hard, especially amidst the current administration, to pinpoint those truly remarkable, scandal-ridden days upon which an entire presidency hangs in the balance — but yesterday, September 6, is a strong contender. Between the disastrous Brett Kavanaugh hearings in the Senate, the fallout from an anonymous New York Times op-ed written by one of Trump’s own senior officials, and the continuing slow drip of damning excerpts from a new tell-all book by renowned journalist Bob Woodward,Thursday was a real doozy. And that’s before we even got to the latest revelations in the Trump administration’s very first scandal: the size of Trump’s inauguration crowd.
When this administration first took over (I think this must have been back sometime during the Bronze Age), the very first press briefing by then press secretary Sean Spicer focused on one very simple and easy-to-answer question: Was the audience for Donald Trump’s inauguration the largest ever? The answer, of course, is no. It’s not even close. During the event itself, most Americans got a good laugh when photos began circulating comparing the sparse attendance of Donald Trump’s inauguration with the first inauguration of President Barack Obama eight years prior. No expert analysis or meticulous inspection of the photos was needed: The National Mall in Washington, D.C. was barely visible beneath a sea of people in 2009. In 2017, on the other hand, you could fit a few pickup football games in the empty fields where people normally would stand.
The photos were embarrassing to be sure, especially for a man as thin-skinned as Donald Trump, who has sued people for insinuating he is not as rich as he lets on. But had the White House simply taken the L and moved on, the story would have been lost to memory after a few days. Instead, Trump demanded his loyal sherpa Sean Spicer appear on national television and lie repeatedly. Which brings us to a report in the Guardian on Thursday that uncovers new details, some 20 months later, of just how far the administration — including Donald Trump — was willing to go to deceive the American people. Newly released documents obtained by the Guardian show that while most White House staff were still moving into their new offices, Donald Trump himself was demanding the National Park Service — which is responsible for, among other things, taking official photographs of events held on the National Mall — edit pictures taken during the inauguration to make the crowd appear less empty.
With the benefit of hindsight, these revelations might not register as much of a surprise. Since Day 1 of his campaign, Donald Trump has lied about virtually everything, from the height of his buildings to his involvement in payments to the adult film star he had an affair with. But these newly disclosed, behind-the-scenes machinations by government officials do point to something more nefarious than simple fabrication — they offer a glimpse of just how far Donald Trump and the people in his orbit will go to buttress their lies. It is not a large leap to go from doctored photographs to digitally manipulated video or audio in the service of muddying the truth. And that is the point at which the federal government will have engaged in actual, non-hyperbolic propaganda against its own citizens.
Trump’s base of extremely online white supremacists already engage in a primordial version of this on a daily basis — crudely photoshopping screenshots of cable news and changing a few numbers on a poll to make Trump appear more popular than he is. Among the perpetrators: Trump’s large adult sons, who shared one such screenshot comparing their father favorably to President Obama, before quietly deleting it hours later. Knowing this is what allows Donald Trump to stand on stage and recite wholly fabricated poll numbers as fact. Since the White House’s insistence — in the face of photographic evidence — that Donald Trump outdrew Barack Obama on inauguration day, the lies have somehow gotten more brazen and, predictably, more volatile. When the eulogy for the Trump Administration is finally written, its original sin will be but a footnote in a large saga of corruption, incompetence, and moral emptiness. But thanks to Trump’s unfathomable insecurity, it won’t be forgotten.
Is Trump the leader of the GOP or the Nazi’s?
And it’s getting harder to tell the difference. The prez has no respect for the law as he keeps wanting to improperly use the DOJ as his Americanized gestapo to go after his opponents. He’s obsessed with finding that whistle-blower within his own administration, but it’s ridiculous to ask the Justice Dept. or Congress to investigate the matter, or demand the NY Times turn over that person’s identity. He’s also blowing his stack over the Bob Woodward book. So threatening investigations, lawsuits or lie-detectors are absurd, as there is no evidence of an actual crime here with either the book or NY Times op-ed. Not only does his fury & lashing out again expose his dictatorial instincts, but an ulterior motive is to find reasons to justify firing Sessions: trump-sessions-
Bob Woodward book now available
There are so many details in the book, it’s beyond the scope of this blog to list them all. Listen to or read the real media this week for all the anecdotal incidents the book reports about various White House episodes. Overall, Trump comes across as a raving lunatic & a buffoon. Trump & Woodward are engaged in a war of words over whose accounts of the current White House are most accurate. To any rational thinking person, there is no debate which of those two is trustworthy. Woodward is regarded as one of the most reputable, credible & meticulous journalists out there (& also nonpartisan), as he’s the gold standard of reporting. Trump is regarded as a chronic liar. He’s closing in on 5000 documented/provable lies since entering the White House. Yet, Trumpeters tend to believe Trump no matter what despite irrefutable evidence to the contrary. We even had a picture of a typical Trumpeter in last Friday’s post from our blog page: https://www.thevoracs.
Veteran journalist Bob Woodward said Monday in an exclusive interview on NBC News’ “Today” that President Donald Trump is “detached from reality” and jeopardizes American national security. “I’ve never seen instance when the president is so detached from the reality of what’s going on,” Woodward said. Woodward depicts widespread White House dysfunction in “Fear,” raising explosive allegations of a paranoid president whose own staff believes is unhinged and erratic. The book’s findings were amplified when The New York Times published an anonymous op-ed from a senior administration official, claiming the president’s staff seeks to thwart his “more misguided impulses.” The book will be released on Tuesday. “This has not been treated seriously enough,” Woodward said on “Today.” “The things that Trump did and does jeopardizes the real national security.” The famed journalist also pushed back on criticism that his book relies entirely on unnamed sources and the White House insiders and others who have claimed his reporting is inaccurate. “The incidents are not anonymous. It gives a date, it gives a time, who participates, most often the president himself and what he says,” Woodward said. Asked if the Trump showed signs of mental defect, Woodward said “my job here is not to psychoanalyze, it’s to describe what happened. On specific dates, in specific moments.”
Bad Choice for the Supreme Court
In keeping with my pledge to limit the number of outbound links, you can look up this list of articles about Judge Kavanaugh on your own. Bottom line is, he seems to be the wrong judge at the wrong time for America. And the public agrees, as Kavanaugh pulls in the worst polling numbers of any Supreme Court nominee in decades. In the USA Today article, he’s referred to as a vanilla ice cream cone, not disclosing what he really thinks of any issue during the hearings (& may have even perjured himself) while plenty of his documents remain hidden. Of grave concern are Kavanaugh’s previous writings willing to give a criminal president impunity. In the Daily Beast article, we see how religion has been politicized. And based on Trump’s visible personal traits, it looks as though any professed religious conversion by him was just a calculated & convenient ruse to garner evangelical support. The Salon article shows a twist of irony, as Judge Garland, the one a GOP Senate shunned in 2016 for the highest court, may need to rule on a potential perjury charge against Judge Kavanaugh:
The Hill: judicial/405764-the-kavanaugh-
The Hill: david-brock-kavanaugh-
USA Today: brett-kavanaugh-
Daily Beast: trumps-god-talk-is-
Salon: merrick-garland-asked-
Our Future: kavanaughs-disdain-
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