Liberal Forum

TRUMP HAS A DANGEROUS DISABILITY
By George F. Will

It is urgent for Americans to think and speak clearly about President Trump’s inability to do either.

This seems to be not a mere disinclination but a disability.

It is not merely the result of intellectual sloth but of an untrained mind bereft of information and married to stratospheric self-confidence.

In February, acknowledging Black History Month, Trump said that “Frederick Douglass is an example of somebody who’s done an amazing job and is getting recognized more and more, I notice.”

Because Trump is syntactically challenged, it was possible and tempting to see this not as a historical howler about a man who died 122 years ago, but as just another of Trump’s verbal fender benders, this one involving verb tenses.

Now, however, he has instructed us that Andrew Jackson was angry about the Civil War that began 16 years after Jackson’s death.

Having, let us fancifully imagine, considered and found unconvincing William Seward’s 1858 judgment that the approaching Civil War was “an irrepressible conflict,” Trump says:

“People don’t realize, you know, the Civil War, if you think about it, why?
People don’t ask that question, but why was there the Civil War?
Why could that one not have been worked out?”

Library shelves groan beneath the weight of books asking questions about that war’s origins, so who, one wonders, are these “people” who don’t ask the questions that Trump evidently thinks have occurred to him uniquely?

Presumably they are not the astute “lot of,” or at least “some,” people Trump referred to when speaking about his February address to a joint session of Congress:

“A lot of people have said that, some people said it was the single best speech ever made in that chamber.”

Which demotes Winston Churchill, among many others.

What is most alarming (and mortifying to the University of Pennsylvania, from which he graduated) is not that Trump has entered his eighth decade unscathed by even elementary knowledge about the nation’s history.

As this column has said before, the problem isn’t that he does not know this or that, or that he does not know that he does not know this or that.

Rather, the dangerous thing is that he does not know what it is to know something.

The United States is rightly worried that a strange and callow leader controls North Korea’s nuclear arsenal.

North Korea should reciprocate this worry.

Yes, a 70-year-old can be callow if he speaks as sophomorically as Trump did when explaining his solution to Middle Eastern terrorism:

“I would bomb the s--- out of them. . . . I’d blow up the pipes, I’d blow up the refineries, I’d blow up every single inch, there would be nothing left.”

As a candidate, Trump did not know what the nuclear triad is.

Asked about it, he said:

“We have to be extremely vigilant and extremely careful when it comes to nuclear.

Nuclear changes the whole ballgame.”

Invited to elaborate, he said: “I think — I think, for me, nuclear is just the power, the devastation is very important to me.”

Someone Trump deemed fit to be a spokesman for him appeared on television to put a tasty dressing on her employer’s word salad:

“What good does it do to have a good nuclear triad if you’re afraid to use it?”

To which a retired Army colonel appearing on the same program replied with amazed asperity:

“The point of the nuclear triad is to be afraid to use the damn thing.”

As president-elect, Trump did not know the pedigree and importance of the one-China policy.

About such things he can be, if he is willing to be, tutored.

It is, however, too late to rectify this defect: He lacks what T.S. Eliot called a sense “not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence.”

His fathomless lack of interest in America’s path to the present and his limitless gullibility leave him susceptible to being blown about by gusts of factoids that cling like lint to a disorderly mind.

Americans have placed vast military power at the discretion of this mind, a presidential discretion that is largely immune to restraint by the Madisonian system of institutional checks and balances.

So, it is up to the public to quarantine this presidency by insistently communicating to its elected representatives a steady, rational fear of this man whose combination of impulsivity and credulity render him uniquely unfit to take the nation into a military conflict.

Huey » 04 May 2017 6:35 pm » wrote:

Misty » 04 May 2017 7:40 pm » wrote: No he was not, fill in the blank.
Why would Nancy Pelosi have said that about the ACA in 2009?

And the ACHA was created by Republicans without any allowed input from Democrats and was passed without any Democrat voting for it.
Also unlike the ACA, with hardly any hearings or debate and without being scored by the CBO.
An award that will soon be bestowed upon 45, who promised everyone would be covered and it would be much better care and much cheaper.

Misty » 04 May 2017 7:24 pm » wrote:Look at these three.
With the amount of time they spend in this thread, you would think that this was the only thread on this forum.


I'm not running from anything.
I stopped answering my notifications a long time ago, because I found that I was spending all of my time here replying to the three of you obsessive freaks who pound out posts like you're getting paid piece work.

So if I happen to see one of your posts, I might reply, but you shouldn't expect, nor do you deserve, any more consideration than that.

Misty » 05 May 2017 1:29 am » wrote:TRUMP HAS A DANGEROUS DISABILITY

By George F. Will


WOW!
Tell us what you really think Mr. Will.
No wonder FOX News fired him.

Misty » 04 May 2017 11:53 pm » wrote:House Republicans being bussed to the White House to celebrate the passage of the ACHA is like a baseball team running out on the field after the first inning to celebrate because they scored a run.

Misty » 04 May 2017 10:34 pm » wrote:Another useless Executive Order

A Half Measure on Religious Liberty
Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/4 ... -amendment

Misty » 04 May 2017 10:34 pm » wrote:Another useless Executive Order
For Huey,
It's late, I'm tired and it's a long piece, so I am not going to go point by point.
Suffice it to say that while I do not agree with David French on everything, he does make some excellent points.

Huey » 04 May 2017 1:45 pm » wrote: The problem is, unforetunately, it is a law. And unless challenged in court or congress passes a law repealing it Trump should not pull an Obama and tell the IRS to look the other way.

Obama did that **** and it was wrong. On the other hand lefties CA NOT bitch about it.

Sec. 2. Respecting Religious and Political Speech. All executive departments and agencies (agencies) shall, to the greatest extent practicable and to the extent permitted by law, respect and protect the freedom of persons and organizations to engage in religious and political speech. In particular, the Secretary of the Treasury shall ensure, to the extent permitted by law, that the Department of the Treasury does not take any adverse action against any individual, house of worship, or other religious organization on the basis that such individual or organization speaks or has spoken about moral or political issues from a religious perspective, where speech of similar character has, consistent with law, not ordinarily been treated as participation or intervention in a political campaign on behalf of (or in opposition to) a candidate for public office by the Department of the Treasury. As used in this section, the term "adverse action" means the imposition of any tax or tax penalty; the delay or denial of tax-exempt status; the disallowance of tax deductions for contributions made to entities exempted from taxation under section 501(c)(3) of title 26, United States Code; or any other action that makes unavailable or denies any tax deduction, exemption, credit, or benefit.

Misty » 05 May 2017 12:37 pm » wrote:

His home in Bedminster?
I guess he lives on a golf course.

He thinks he's fooling people with that ****.
If he really wanted to save the country some money, and not cause a disruption, he would stay in the White House where he is supposed to live.

Mar-a-Lago was the 'winter White House.'
Now that the season is over there, Bedminster is going to be the 'summer White House.'
He treats the White House in DC like it's just a place to crash between golf games.

Misty » 03 May 2017 12:26 am » wrote:I have criticized him for his inappropriate behavior with Monica Lewinsky, for some of his policies and for the bone headed move to board Loretta Lynch's plane that day on the tarmac in Arizona among other things.

Bad news for the Trump-Russia tinfoil-hat brigade
By Paul Sperry May 4, 2017 | 7:58pm | Updated

During a Capitol Hill hearing this week over his investigation into allegations President Trump worked with the Kremlin to steal the election, FBI Director James Comey showed his hand, and he’s not holding any aces. In fact, he’s got a whole lot of nothing.


In an exchange with Democratic Sen. Al Franken, Comey revealed the assumptions undergirding his investigation, which started in the heat of the 2016 presidential campaign, despite any specific evidence of a crime.


“What is your assessment of why the Russian government had a clear preference for President Trump?” Franken asked.


“One is he wasn’t Hillary Clinton,” Comey replied, “who [Russian President Vladimir] Putin hated and wanted to harm in any possible way; and so he was her opponent, so necessarily they supported him.”


Also, “Putin believed he would be more able to make deals . . . with someone with a business background,” the FBI chief added. But, a disappointed Franken pressed, wasn’t it also because Trump was “ensnared in their web of patronage?” No, said Comey.


So there you have it. The conclusion that Russia tried to steal the election for Trump is based on pure speculation about how Putin thinks. The notion Trump was in Putin’s back pocket doesn’t even factor into it.


There’s more bad news for Franken and other tin-foil-hat-wearing Democrats peddling the theory Trump is Putin’s Manchurian candidate. It turns out the FBI probe doesn’t even focus on Trump or his key campaign aides. It centers almost exclusively on a former Merrill Lynch executive who was based in Moscow a decade ago.


His name is Carter Page, and he never formally worked for the Trump campaign. In fact, he first showed up on the FBI’s radar three years before Trump announced his candidacy.


Page is the main investigative target and apparently the only one remotely tied to the Trump campaign to have his communications targeted with a FISA warrant. To obtain that surveillance warrant, the FBI relied on a discredited dossier, which will make it hard to prosecute Page.


The opposition research firm behind the dossier, which alleges nefarious collusion between Trump and Putin, is Fusion GPS, which conducts “political disinformation campaig
ns” — sometimes for Moscow. “The relationship casts further doubt on an already highly dubious dossier,” Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley wrote the Justice Department in a recent letter....


So nine months in, this is where the FBI’s investigation stands: No evidence of collaboration between the Trump campaign and Moscow, something even Obama’s intelligence czar verified. No charges against any Trump aides for espionage. And one case against a single, tangentially connected suspect built on tenuous evidence at best.
http://nypost.com/2017/05/04/bad-news-f ... t-brigade/

Termin8tor » 04 May 2017 4:14 pm » wrote: Where in the actual Constitution is there a "wall between church and state," Dim?

Quote it.

But you won't, because you're a leftist liar and a blowhard.

Termin8tor » 05 May 2017 2:36 pm » wrote:Where in the actual Constitution is there a "wall between church and state," Dim?

Quote it.

But you won't, because you're a leftist liar and a blowhard.

The Trump White House just got a stark reminder that everyone is innocent until proven guilty.

“The idea that this occurred is shocking, disturbing, horrific,” White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer said at a briefing last March, in response to rape allegations against two immigrant teenagers.

He added that “part of the reason that the president has made illegal immigration and crackdown such a big deal is because of tragedies like this.”

It was a charged moment, where the White House itself tried to pin the alleged sins of two young men upon millions of immigrants throughout the nation.

And, it appears, it was also rooted in false facts.

Prosecutors in Maryland announced on Friday that they will drop rape charges against the two teens, after concluding that “the original charges cannot be sustained and prosecution is untenable.”

Among other things, prosecutors uncovered text messages between one of the teens and the alleged victim which suggested that she consented to have sex with him.

[.......]

Spicer’s story of dangerous rapist immigrants preying on innocent young girls appears to have fallen apart.

Nevertheless, the White House remains unapologetic for allowing its rhetoric to get ahead of the facts.

At Friday’s press briefing, Deputy Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said that “Sean was speaking about what he knew at the time” and declined to “retract anything without further information in front of me.”

Huey » 05 May 2017 11:58 am » wrote:Repost for misty. Note the date and time stamp. Comments made before you ASSumed my positon:
If you read or asked questions you would not be wasting my time with your lengthy replies.

Termin8tor » 05 May 2017 10:21 am » wrote:Will is sometimes thoughtful, but on balance he's a squish and a loser.
So who cares?