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Author Topic: The American Dream  (Read 1813 times)

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Surly1

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The Lyin' King
« on: August 28, 2019, 09:10:22 am »


That-Was-The-Week-That-W-That-Was-The-Week-473964gc2smFrom the keyboard of Surly1
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Originally published on the Doomstead Diner on August 26, 2019

“The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to such a pass that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others. And having no respect he ceases to love, and in order to occupy and distract himself without love he gives way to passions and coarse pleasures, and sinks to bestiality in his vices, all from continual lying to other men and to himself.” 
 ― Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov


Madness occasionally asserts itself on the world stage.

"The Madness of King George" is a stage and film production about Britain's George III, known through history as "the mad king who lost America." George III was king of Great Britain during some of the nation’s most challenging and tumultuous years, including those of the American Revolution. By accounts he was a dutiful, steady monarch who guided Britain through the French revolution and later Napoleon's rise and fall. In 1788, illness brought on his mental breakdown, but he briefly recovered for a time. His later escalating bouts of insanity led Parliament to pass a Regency Act, by which the fate of the empire devolved to his oldest son, Prince George. This young man was faced with the unenviable position of having to govern according to the increasingly erratic whims of his batty father. It is thought by some that George's erraric behavior had its roots in disease, but this assessment is by no means unanimous.

Do a search for, "the Madness of King Donald" and you'll find a number of articles speculating that the so-called Leader of the Free World appears to be batshit crazy, a speculation not necessarily recent, but brought into sharp relief by statements that the Burnt-umber Buffoon made this week. The record is filled with what appears to be Trumpian signs of cognitive disorder, pre-dementia or even sheer delirium, whether it is the series of incoherent tweets, the ranting and unhinged raving at media briefings, or taking off on rabbit-hole tangents at public rallies to the applause and adoration of his bobblehead followers.

Some might think that such speculation is baldly partisan, and as a nearly-bald partisan I might agree. But the level of barking-mad, batshit-crazy reached a fever pitch this week...

King Lear is one of our most popular exemplars of power and madness. Like Trump, Lear is susceptible to the flattery of daughters, who fawningly profess their love, and Lear rewards them in kind. His youngest daughter, Cordelia, does not play that game, and is disinherited by her erratic and petulant father. They are eventually reconciled, but the peace comes too late in the arc of the story for it to end in anything but tragedy. It is too soon to know whether Lear and Trump equate, but the tragedy that unfolds is more for the American people than a mad king.

The madness of King Donald: is Trump really losing his mind?

So people are actively asking this question. The problem is that those people are not among his ironclad supporters, who still believe every word he says. The fact that Trump's penchant for pathological lying is now under being examined in the context of his sanity is explained away as, "fake news." 

If Rick Reilly’s new book Commander in Cheat: How Golf Explains Trump is anything to go by, Trump “cheats like a mafia accountant”.

Among many eye-catching anecdotes, he cites caddies at a New York golf club nicknaming Trump “Pelé”, after the Brazilian soccer legend, because of the president’s habit of kicking his ball out of the rough and up the fairway to win at all costs.

Increasingly, mental health experts have been getting increasingly vocal in crossing that Rubicon known as the "Goldwater Rule," enacted by the American Psychiatric Association in 1973 to avoid armchair diagnoses by mental health pros expressing their own political biases in psychiatric terms. This was enacted in the wake of the 1964 presidential campaign between Lyndon Johnson and Barry Goldwater, in reaction to a magazine survey of psychiatrists which attempted to question Barry Goldwater’s mental fitness.

[I]t is unethical for a psychiatrist to offer a professional opinion unless he or she has conducted an examination and has been granted proper authorization for such a statement”

Yet for all that, some are calling for an examination to assess whether Trump is actually losing his mind.


TRUMP DECLARES HIMSELF “KING OF ISRAEL,” THE “SECOND COMING OF GOD

The president is sick of “disloyal” American Jews, who apparently don’t know what’s good for them or how to properly vote. But “Jewish people in Israel love him,” according to the crazed conspiracy theorist Trump quoted on Twitter.

It all started with a classic Trump humblebrag. “Thank you to Wayne Allyn Root for the very nice words,” Trump said before quoting something the evangelical Christian Root had said.

“President Trump is the greatest President for Jews and for Israel in the history of the world, not just America, he is the best President for Israel in the history of the world … and the Jewish people in Israel love him … like he’s the King of Israel. They love him like he is the second coming of God,” the quote said.

Root, who lives in Las Vegas, says he founded the Republican Jewish Coalition chapter in Nevada. He had also previously been hired by Sheldon Adelson (the casino magnate and a major funder of the RJC and Republican candidates along with Jewish causes,)to write a column for the Las Vegas Review-Journal after buying the newspaper in 2015. Root is also the author of the book “Angry White Male: How the Donald Trump Phenomenon is Changing America,” also published in that year.

Wayne Allyn Root—a self-described “Jew turned evangelical Christian”—is an unhinged conspiracy theorist who believes the 2017 Las Vegas shooting was a “coordinated Muslim terror attack” by ISIS and that George Soros paid actors to stage the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville that included Nazi chants like “Jews will not replace us.”

Quoting Wayne Allyn Root is quite a feat. For the non-initiate, Root has been snout-to-rear end with trump for years. Root, the Libertarian Party’s vice presidential nominee in 2008, announced a devoted (and some moight say slavish) support for the failed businessman nearly as soon as Trump announced he was running in June 2015.

As Charlie Pierce observed,

(The last time "King of the Jews" trended, things did not end well.) 

Trump, incredibly, seems to believe that he’s going to win over Jewish voters by telling them they don’t know what’s good for them. Perhaps he's been influenced by the fact that Jews went for Hillary Clinton. in 2016. 

Biographer Tony Schwartz, who ghost-wrote Trump’s The Art of the Deal puts it, the fact that most of us are “constrained by the truth” gives Trump a “strange advantage” through his complete disregard for it. It certainly works with his supporters, as he polls at a consistent 90 per cent approval among republicans...

Many news organizations have attempted to document the number of trump lies, which by now number over 12,000 such misstatementsDonald Trump has lied an average of 13 times a day since becoming president, one analysis finds. This body of vile work has become a fact-checking chore for journalists and an alternative reality for his supporters. According to a Slate article, one in six Americans believe what he says no matter what he says.

Between the day of his inauguration (Jan. 20, 2017) and Aug. 5, 2019, Trump has made 12,019 statements that were either false or misleading, according to the Washington Post. While that averages out to 13 such statements a day since Trump assumed office, the number has increased recently. Since April 26, when Trump made his 10,000th false or misleading statement, he has averaged 20 such statements every day, or one every 72 minutes.

One example breaking this week was this Pied Piper fantasy: 

Trump said doctors left operating rooms to greet him after mass shootings. Hospitals in Dayton and El Paso say that’s not true.

Speaking to reporters on the White House’s South Lawn on Wednesday, President Trump claimed he was warmly welcomed at hospitals in the wake of recent mass shootings in El Paso and Dayton, Ohio, and intimated that surgeons had even deserted their patients to meet him.

“The doctors were coming out of the operating rooms,” Trump said. “There were hundreds and hundreds of people all over the floor. You couldn’t even walk on it.”

But the hospitals he visited say that isn’t what happened — and that doctors would never pause surgery to greet the president.


The "Chosen One" says he wanted to give himself the medal of honor but his staff talked him out of it.

“That was a big day, Medal of Honor. Nothing like the Medal of Honor,” he continued. “I wanted one, but they told me I don't qualify, Woody. I said, 'Can I give it to myself anyway?' They said, 'I don't think that's a good idea.'” 💡 

Amid scattered chuckles, Trump concluded: “Great, great people. These are great, great men and women that get congressional Medal of Honor. Thank you, Woody.”

The president’s assessment that he should receive the nation’s highest award for acts of military valor followed his statement earlier Wednesday afternoon that he is “the chosen one” in relation to his administration’s trade conflict with China — a proclamation he turned to the sky to deliver. 

Trump never served in the military and was granted five draft deferments — four for college and one for bone spurs in his heel.


Why does Trump continue to lie, with the lies becoming more baroque and more frequent? Salon offers one theory:

One possible explanation for the increase in the number of Trump's lies is that as the president has continued to lie with relative political impunity, he has grown desensitized to the instinctive reluctance most people feel about saying that which they know to be severely exaggerated or flat-out untrue.

People become inured to lies in the same way they do to perfume or medications. Whatever you may think of him, Trump has been a shatterer of norms, an upender of precedent, a flouter of both law and established procedure. Our collective purchase on reality may just be another norm shattered, There are true believers, those who think his continual gaffes, lies and blunders are part of a grand plan, like the Q-Anon people who believe that Trump and Robert Mueller are collaborating on a plan to take down the "deep state" and the pedo ring being run out of the non-existent basement of Comet Pizza by Hillary Clinton.

Trump's real effect is to exact a massive toll on us all, in terms of time, attention and energy stolen from decent souls obliged to pay attention to rage tweets, helicopter-wash press gaggles, and on-again, off-again policy pronouncements. "Trump fatigue syndrome" is a real thing, and perhaps the point; while most of us find ourselves mentally and spiritually exhausted by the serial idiocy of the Tweeter-in-Chief, and turn away from the news in disgust, the better for his appointed foxes to loot every henhouse.


banksy 07-flower-thrower-wallpaperSurly1 is an administrator and contributing author to Doomstead Diner. He is the author of numerous rants, screeds and spittle-flecked invective here and elsewhere. He lives a quiet domestic existence in Southeastern Virginia with his wife Contrary. Descended from a long line of people to whom one could never tell anything, all opinions are his and his alone, because he paid full retail for everything he has managed to learn.


 

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