"Watch him go, this psychopathic, gaslighting, brat, preening, pious-posing, egomaniac idiot of a president. Some of us watch in awe, plenty of us in disgust. He can’t be cornered. Never backing down; he always doubles down. If he’s caught lying he tells a bigger lie. If he’s called on hypocrisy he’ll outmaneuver through more audacious hypocrisy. If he’s attacked, he counter-attacks tenfold. He’s a douche bot, a stable genius at only one thing, a one-trick phony." - Jeremy Sherman, blogging today on smirkingshimp.com
"Rs had a huge structural advantage going into 2018. The fact Ds may net 40 seats is a rout, period. The argument that it's not as bad as Obama's 63-seat loss in 2010 is laughable." Amy Walter
Peggy Noonan's recent WSJ column (Nov. 10-11, 'America Could Use Some Deals', p. A13) brings into question her own mental stability or at least the validity of her political perceptions. We don't know for certain, but looking back on a number of her previous columns from last year- in which she analogized Trump to a "weepy", drama queen brat beyond any self-control - it is evident she's done a 180 degree about face. Yes, it is possible for columnists to perform such head snapping changes, but then we must question the basis. Is it an honest turnabout? Or is something more sinister at work, or even a variant of the well-known Stockholm syndrome? Inquiring minds really want to know.
For example, last year she roasted Trump in her column 'Trump Is Woody Allen Without The Humor' (July 29-30, p. A13), writing:
"The president's primary problem as a leader is not that he is impetuous, brash or naïve. It's not that he is inexperienced, crude and an outsider. It's that he is weak and sniveling. It is that he undermines himself almost daily by ignoring traditional norms of American masculinity".
She goes on to clarify what she means (ibid.):
"He's not strong and self-controlled, not low key and determined: he's whiny, weepy and self-pitying . He throws himself sobbing on the body politic. He's a drama queen."
To make her point there was even an accompanying graphic image of a weepy- faced Trump on Mount Rushmore, which she certainly would have had to approve for it to be shown along with her text, i.e.
Over the past week alone, even before her column appeared, we beheld even more Trump drama queen histrionics. For example, that pathetic news conference, where he lacked even the most minimal mental maturity to acknowledge the massive loss of the House to the Dems. Also, castigating and mocking a CNN reporter (Jim Acosta), who attempted to ask a question - and even siccing a lackey to try to take away his mic, e.g.
Is this presidential behavior? Is this the behavior and mental heft of a person who inspires deal making? What about when he deliberately eschewed a visit to an American cemetery for WWI vets because it was raining and he didn't want to get his hair wet? He let John Kelly go in his place, while he holed up in luxury quarters at the American Ambassador's residence in Paris. (He fobbed off his absence with a daft "security" excuse - despite all other leaders being present. As one U.S. security specialist put it: "For such an event there are always alternative ways to work around any weather or security issues." )
Is that dodging of a solemn ceremony marking the 100 -year anniversary of the end of the Great War, presidential behavior? Or is it the behavior of an entitled brat, lout and coward - a "Captain Bonespurs" - who himself dodged military service five times using bone spurs as an excuse?
No, it more falls in line with blogger Jeremy Sherman's take at the top of this post.
Then, over the weekend, we beheld even more infantile, self-obsessed and even cowardly behavior, i.e. trying to undermine our democracy by playing to the Reep goons in FLA when poll workers in Broward country are trying to do a recount in two knife-edge close elections (for Governor, and Senator). Trump also recklessly (and ignorantly) insinuated himself into the Arizona Senate race, demanding (insanely) a "re-vote", not just a recount. This foolishness prompted Joe Scarborough to weigh in this morning:
"Again, all of this caravan talk, all of these racist ramblings by the president right before the election - especially attacking Hispanics- he said it was going to have an impact in Nevada and Colorado and it did. He lost. Trump surprised people in 2016, but now too many believe he will be surprising them for the rest of their lives."
Even in other columns, Noonan acknowledged that Trump - by such childish, divisive and disruptive tactics - was his own worst enemy and not contributing to national civility or unity. Only rank polarization. For example, 2 weeks earlier ('Defuse America's Explosive Politics' Oct. 27-28, p. A1), writing:
"The president knows half the country is watching and dislikes and disdains what it sees. What he doesn't seem to know is that the unstable are watching too. They get revved up, ginned up...there is danger in this."
So what now? She believes since the midterms he's suddenly matured into a real adult? And now because she has suddenly imagined Dotard a statesman the rest of us are supposed to stop in our tracks and welcome "deals". Dream on, Peggy!
One must ask because now in her recent weekend column we find a serious claim suggesting this orange imp has evolved enough for the new Democratic House to be able to make "deals" with him. Noonan writes, for example (ibid.):
"Democrats should understand the president wants a deal. He's in another circus phase, he needs to show he can roll with history's punches. And there's a sense he actually yearns for greatness."
Peggy, you've either lost your mind or left it in a wine bottle somewhere. Yearns for greatness? How about yearns for drama queen status like you claimed a year ago? How about acts like an entitled, peevish brat as you've consistently claimed in a number of columns since Dotard's inauguration?
Or, maybe- being generous - Noonan is suffering from the conservo variety of Stockholm syndrome. You know, the variant WSJ op-ed writer Lance Morrow put out there recently ('We've Grown Accustomed To Trump', p. A19, Oct. 19):
"Trump's peculiarities don't seem unusual when compared with the extreme bizarreness, not to mention pathology, on the Left".
Adding, as if in mindless afterthought:
"People can get used to the strangest things, once the novelty has passed... .Familiarity and the passage of time may breed a certain kind of acquiescence, even grudging acceptance. We see a touch of the Stockholm syndrome."
So maybe Miss Peggy has just had too much of the Dotard's dyspeptic antics. Perhaps then she can no longer summon the intestinal fortitude or outrage against the slimeball traitor who tries to pass as "president". Perhaps she's bowed and yielded to his craziness like the once outspoken GOP Senate stalwarts - Lindsey Graham and Bob Corker - who had initially criticized his demeanor and base instincts. But have since acquired the spinelessness and silence of little lambs terrified of a big, bad Wolfie.
No wonder, then, she continues down the rabbit hole of her own Stockholm-syndrome ideation, scribbling:
"Do it with him. Newt Gingrich wasn't the friend of the calculating, louche Bill Clinton, and Mr. Clinton didn't like those mean-minded, selfish right wingers. Yet together they made pretty good music."
Peggy here mixes apples and oranges. At least Bill Clinton- call him out for his lust faults- still possessed a functional brain and rational mind. This allowed him to have a presidential demeanor - especially when it came to conducting press conferences and policy debates. He wasn't awake at 3 a.m. dashing off wild, insane email insults to political opponents. Or, giving in to paranoid ideations and half baked conspiracy memes to do with "caravans" or sinister motives behind his political opponents' every action.
Nor did Bill Clinton make everything about himself. In other words, he wasn't a malignant narcissist saddled with a disruptive, bullying persona. It was this maturity and also degree of self-awareness that allowed Clinton to make deals with the Republican opposition which Trump will never be able to do with the Democrats. In fact, we already beheld Trump's incredible immaturity and incapacity for deals some nine months ago, when one day he agreed to a DACA deal with the Dems, then blew it up the next day. That was after watching FOX News and seeing how his cheering gallery was foursquare against it.
Does Peggy seriously believe the Dotard could just change that much in 9 months? Really?
How the hell would any sane, serious D-legislator be able to make a "deal" with such an unstable, mercurial buffoon? Particularly if all of his previous words and actions disclose he's emotionally and mentally unfit to do so? Well, Noonan seems to lack the minimal mental fitness to be able to explain that - far less how she could also earlier recognize his emotional retardation but now thinks of him as a latter day Winston Churchill.
Noonan's "Dem deal" argument rests on another daft trope: diminishing the blue wave, for whom many cluelsss pundits(e.g. CNN's Jake Tapper) it never occurred. Or to others (WSJ's Kim Strassel) it was confined to "progressive" bastions, thereby revealing again the power of cherrypicking as an art form for pseudo-journalists. To Noonan (ibid.):
"A record 114 million Americans went ot the polls and did what they tend to do in normal presidencies. Since World War II the average loss for the president's party in a midterm is 30 House seats. Mr. Trump's party appears to have lost 35....This wasn't the registering of a national rejection, more like business as usual."
Huh? And in what parallel universe have you managed to pull out that twaddle? Or was it out of your ass, akin to Trump's modus operandi? In fact, as Ari Melber pointed out Saturday night, given the massive machinery of gerrymandering the Republicans had in place, all those House wins, not to mention flipping 7 governorships - represented a massive repudiation of Trump and his policies.
After playing a Jake Tapper clip where he says "This is not a blue wave, this is not something that is knocking out all sorts of Republican incumbents." Melber responds:
"That was on election night. Did we hear that right? The point is this is not which particular people missed the wave, or hyped early predictions instead of waiting to hear what voters actually said. Many outlets in the press did that, including the Washington Post, and we rely on their reporting all the time.
All of this matters because some of the media still don't get it. The media mistake in 2016 was not predicting in the wrong direction, it was trying to predict the outcome at all. And now pundits think their mistake was under estimating Trump in their predictions, and now they're correcting that by underestimating the blue wave in their predictions. Guess what? They're all still predicting instead of listening."
In other words, the pundits are still doing ex post facto predictions, as opposed to learning directly from voters what transpired, in conjunction with the actual data. No wonder there's so much gobbledegook about the blue wave, including that there was no massive repudiation of the human maggot in the White House. As Melber goes on to say, while presenting a graph of 4-yearly election results:
"Listen to the voters, who we only get to hear from every two or four years, and we can hear them rejecting Trump. And choosing Democrat in every race in the past twenty -six years except one. And rejecting Trumpism roundly this week."
(Showing a graph - histogram - indicating 6.1 percent more Americans voted Democratic in the 2018 House race.)
This is also where Noonan's superficial trope of "normal" results in midterms flounders, because she takes no account of the more sophisticated gerrymandering (using micro data from voters and computer models) that has come into play. As pointed out by guest Lawrence O'Donnell:
"Flipping the House is the hardest thing you can do in politics by far, especially when the party in power is capable of the kind of gerrymandering we've seen. We're talking twenty first century gerrymandering. In the twentieth century for example they didn't have computer modeling. They didn't have all the assets, and all the incredible micro-data about the individual voters. So the twenty-first century Republicans are the best gerrymanderers in history. So to run against that and somehow pull out a win is huge. And even where they didn't pull out wins they made every Republican in the country feel insecure. If you are not safe as a Republican senator in Texas then you are not safe anywhere. So these are massive changes."
All this shows how little Peggy Noonan knows that she can write such pablum about there being no real rejection. As Lawrence O'Donnell put it, "Given the economy was doing well, it wasn't the economy the voters were rising against it was Donald Trump.".
But even that blue wave "down spin" pales beside the next set of Noonan balderdash:
"The Democrats will launch new probes, in part because they can't help themselves. It's in their DNA and they're all jacked up on Watergate retrospectives in which the herioic congressman finds the searing truth.."
Uh no, you stupid ninny. The Dems will launch probes because they are long overdue. Because the GOP lapdogs and quislings have simply bent over for Dotard and not done one thing to check his most abominable policies - whether on DACA, separating immigrant families and locking kids up, or using his office as an ATM, along with his Trump Hotel not far from the WH. And let's not even get into how he's kept his tax returns under wraps, like the still unreleased files from the JFK assassination.
The Democrats, in other words, will finally ensure our government is divided as the Founders intended, as opposed to a rubber stamp, one party state run by an unqualified, TV- Twitter addicted, tyrant dictator - as well as a traitor. But it is delusional patter like this that allows Noonan to try to make the specious argument that they need to make deals with Dotard. Hell, she even offers this bit of "advice" after insisting that a "better path" than "fruitless fighting" (recall Noonan is the one who originally called Trump a whiny brat!):
"But Democrats first need to change their style."
Referring to abandoning "post-Clintoniam era hissing at hearings and wearing pink hats making them look like fools."
Wait! You are conflating Dem LAWMAKERS in the House with the people - the American women mainly - that Dotard has repeatedly insulted. But they aren't the ones in a position to make deals with Trump, you ignoramus! These "pink hats" women (who you blithely call "fools") are the ones who just sent a real blue wave message to your new hero's sorry, maggot ass, i.e. that pussy grabbing will not be rewarded!
But see, her conflation of House reps like Adam Schiff et al (who will actually wield the power to conduct probes) with the Democratic voters - who've had to put up with Trump's antics the past 2 years - serves her purpose of scapegoating Dem legislators. It was this last spiel insulting millions of American women that made me believe she's not so much mentally deficient now, as showing she's been a Trump lackey all along. All those columns blasting his weepy, childish, selfish ways? Mere posturing to try to pretend - or have her readers pretend - that she's "objective".
This is in many ways as off the wall and detached from reality as the losing GOP faction here in Colorado (victims of a real blue tsunami not just wave) wailing in the press (Denver Post yesterday, p. 1A) how badly they lost, and ruminating on the changes they need to make - especially with independent (unaffiliated) voters who now comprise the largest voter segment in CO.
True to their clueless, intellectually unmoored form, we see them arguing - as Jeff Hunt (president of the conservtive Centennial Institute did,- that, get this:
"Conservatives need to do a better job of translating Trump to the state's unaffiliated voters."
As if these unaffiliated voters - like yours truly -don't already know Trump is a deranged, self-serving, authoritarian asshole. In other words, we need no "translation" of this odious imp, we just need him out of our lives. But those like Noonan and Hunt will never ever see that. Only that if they must explain the Dotard a wee bit better for the rest of us - the sane (but enraged and outraged) contingent. Newsflash! No amount of "translation" or explanation will make us detest Trump any less, or make him acceptable. He isn't fit to barter for the preservation of junkyard dogs, far less make deals with the Democrats.
In fact, only one Colorado Republican (Ken Buck) in that Denver Post piece had the honesty and fortitude to tell the unvarnished truth of why the GOP lost big in the Centennial State:
"Republicans have lost their brand. For example, the party claims to be fiscally conservative but it has racked up a trillion dollar deficit"
In other words, the Repukes have joined themselves to Trumpism, so much so they have mutated to become Trump's party- and only a sallow, pitiful shadow of what a proper conservative party used to be. Trump and his lackeys like Noonan and Hunt will likely say the only way for their corrupt party to survive is to finally tie their fates to his will and insanity. Then castigate Democrats for finally reinstating a government of checks and balances.
But that way lies a complete debacle in 2020 when we finally get rid of Trump, Trumpism and the GOP mutants and toadies that now feed off Dotard's toxic effluent - as they pollute our national media landscape. And splinter the body politic into rival warring tribes.
See also:
And:
Europe is "Praying That Trump is a One-Term President"
