19 VI 2018: Bully-boys at play

What an uproar around children being kidnapped by the U.S. Government. Oh, Trumpie declares he will be resolute and continue to enforce these separations, heartily supported by Jeff Sessions and Trump’s real-life “my Roy Cohn,” Stephen Miller.

Kelly Ann Conway is hard put to explain how a Pro-Family President can split up families with such gusto. She argues it’s written in the law. But when has Trump ever cared about laws? Kelly Ann now must fall back on her famous maneuver, the What about …?, in this case asking: What about Herod?

11 VI 2018: Trumpie über alles!

Well the G7 Conference has been a confusing, troubling business, but a news photo has helped me understand it.

This is a photo of the G7 leaders on one side of a table looking down on Trumpie flashing his sulky glare from the other side, attended by his Cookieduster. There we have all the other kids on the playground confronting Little Donnie who is supported only by Johnny Bolton, a kid so unpopular that only Trump will have anything to do with him. Trump is in his glory.

Disapproval, contempt, tragic consequences for those who depend on him count for nothing whatever compared to all this attention. Trumpie is shown basking in the G6’s loathing. But come on, attention is attention. He is refusing to play with the wholesome kids and has further annoyed them by publicly kissing the ass of the main bully on the playground, his boyfriend, Vladie.

9 VI 2018: “malignant narcissism”

I came upon something that amounts to a description of some of the America’s leaders:

“To unconstrained egos any limit placed on their freedom of action is intolerable, and aggressive individuals will indeed perceive deterrence as an imminent attack – because that is what they would do if the roles were reversed. Rational people are always at a disadvantage when dealing with such people, because compromise is impossible. Concessions are taken as no more than their due and as a sign of weakness, therefore requiring no quid pro quo. It is a psychopathic condition known as malignant narcissism – and the only cure for it is death.”

These are the words of a British author, Hugh Bicheno, from his work Blood Royal: The Wars of the Roses: 1462-1485 (N.Y., London: Pegasus Books 2017) 84-5, that describe the kind of personality that brought about and prolonged England’s civil war of the 15th century.

1 VI 2018: “The King can do no wrong”: Good try, but no!

Trump’s claim of an absolute right to pardon himself at first reminded me of the legal doctrine of crown immunity. It asserts  “The King can do no wrong,” and is therefore immune from legal action. Problem is, of course, that Trump cannot invoke this principle because he is not a King, though he is too ready to arrogate to himself regal powers.

On second thought, Trump’s claim of the right of self pardon, so heartily seconded by the Pardon Party, sc., Giuliani, the Freedom Caucus, et al., seems closer instead to the allegation sometimes brought against sodomite priests in the Middle Ages, that after sodomizing one another they would seek absolution by confessing their sodomy to one another.

1 VI 2018: Lynch mob! Lynch mob!

Read in today’s paper of Giuliani’s talk of a LYNCH MOB! chasing after poor Trumpie. I suppose there are not enough hours in the day for Trump to tell all the lies he thinks he needs to maintain his position, hence his squad of surrogate liars where Giuliani has joined the other starters: Kelly Ann, Fox News, David Nunes, Sarah Sanders, the “Freedom Caucus” et al. A seasoned lawyer and politician, Rudy has long experience in lying, this in addition to his natural gift for it, so he gets no time on the bench, but goes from interview to interview peddling new items from his pack of falsehoods. Yes, he does seem occasionally to drop a bit of truth, but these are truthlets calculated ultimately to deceive.

30 V 2018: “Poor little innocent guy!”

President Trump is using the occasion of Roseanne Barr’s fall from grace to complain of the unfairness of the media to HIM. His tweet for Memorial Day became a celebration of his glorious achievements, and now his tweet about Roseanne is a lament for “the media saying the most horrible things about this president,” to use the words of his mouthpiece, Sarah Sanders.

Really? Trump says in public the sorts of things Nixon used to say in private and then resents the fact that he is criticized! Trump acts the bully when he can get away with it and indulges in self-pity when he can’t. I imagine our President was a bully/sissy bipolar when he was a little boy, and he relies now on what he learned then.

Memorial Day 2018: Read all about it!

At 4:17 a.m. today President Trump posted a tweet in which he charged the Wizard of Oz with espionage, a disclosure that will, he said, bring about the biggest scandal the Emerald City has ever seen. Trump claims he has discovered that the Wizard had embedded Toto in the Trump Campaign to dig up dirt on Trump. This scheme was thwarted by the Trump and his Team. Toto found so many crooked people producing so much dirt that Toto was unable to decide what to include, what to exclude from his report, and thus missed the last balloon to the Emerald City. He was soon apprehended, and after several days of enhanced interrogation finally confessed. However, Trump says he is prevented by national security concerns from publishing all of Toto’s confession, and so will be making available only a redacted version to select members of the House of Representatives.

David Nunes announced that the House Intelligence Committee is going to hold hearings about what he calls “an act of war.” Nunes maintains that it has been a false assumption that Toto is an American dog because he comes from Kansas. He [Nunes] has obtained classified documents that suggest that Toto is, in fact, an immigrant. However, Trump’s Evangelical Advisory Board disagrees, maintaining that Toto had been a wholesome American dog, but was beguiled by the attractions of the lewd way of life in the Emerald City, and then bribed by the promise of citizenship there to undertake this criminal breach of faith. Mr. Newt Gingrich claimed in an interview this morning on Fox News that he knew all along that Toto is a Democrat. Dick Cheney has called for an immediate invasion of the Emerald City to bring about a regime change. John Bolton, National Security Adviser, declared in a release this morning that unless the Wizard agrees to step down, he will hit the Emerald City so hard that nothing but a Munchkin colony will remain.

27 V 2018: Oh, just ignore him, because he’ll never shut up.

I am puzzled and, indeed, quite angry at the way the news media keep falling into the traps Trump sets for them. It is, I think, clear that Trump’s principal tactic is to drive attention away from one outrage by committing another outrage that will be snapped up by the media and fill the news until Trump’s next offense. These maneuvers of Trump’s are the real “fake news,” and the media should be ashamed that they are treating them as something real.

How about a boycott of Trump’s lies and stunts? He needn’t be excluded from the news altogether, but reports might be limited to, e.g., “President Trump Twittered three times this weekend,” and the curious or naive sent off to hunt up Trump’s tweets for themselves.

Most of what Trump does and says is calculated to deceive, is demonstrably in one way or another a lie. By reporting Trump so assiduously the media are complicit in distributing “fake news,” are enabling deceit.

24 V 2018: Biggest political scandal in history?

President Trump has boasted that “SPYGATE could be one of the biggest political scandals in history!” This is wonderful not only because of the originality of the coinage Spygate, but also because yet again he is claiming a superlative for himself, even as he describes everything that has to do with him in superlatives: the most votes, biggest crowd at inauguration, biggest number of accomplishments in first year of presidency, probable winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, etc., etc.

This reminds me of the Elder Seneca’s (d c39 A.D.) story of a remark he made when he heard Lucius Cestius (a vainglorious orator) boasting that he would be the best in any field: “‘If I were a Thracian gladiator, I would be Fusius; if I were a pantomime dancer, I would be Bathylus; if I were a racehorse, I would be Melissio.’ I could not contain myself and shouted: ‘If you were a sewer, you would be the Cloaca maxima!’,” sc., the “Biggest Sewer,” the name given to the principal sewer of ancient Rome.

“Biggest political scandal in history” is not applicable to Spygate, whatever that is, but would fit the President & Co. perfectly and so Trumpy can claim yet another superlative for himself.