Quote of the Day -- Post-Presidential Edition

 Former CIA Director John Brennan wrote the best, most true and deserving lines on Twitter this past  Monday on this President.

“For four years, I spoke out vigorously against Donald Trump’s craven dishonesty, corrupt pursuit of personal interests, & trampling of our democratic principles. After serving over three decades in national security, I felt compelled to condemn Trump’s depravity & incompetence. My outspokenness has brought criticism, retaliation by the Trump Administration, & threats by those blinded by Trump’s demagoguery,” he continued. “Yes, it is unusual for a former CIA Director to speak out, but when an autocrat descended upon the White House, silence was not an option for me. I now plan to ignore Trump, I leave his fate to our judicial system, his infamy to history, & his legacy to a trash heap.”

Thank you, sir, for your service.

And for these very fair, very deserved words.

I Can't Believe This Man Ever Became President

 Geeminy, God. 

Look at this post, y'all. From what is supposed to be our President. He put this on Facebook, at least, yesterday, last night.

Every corrupt force in American life that betrayed you and hurt your are supporting Joe Biden: The failed establishment that started the disastrous foreign wars; The career politicians that offshored your industries & decimated your factories; The open borders lobbyists that killed our fellow citizens with illegal drugs, gangs & crime; The far-left Democrats that ruined our public schools, depleted our inner cities, defunded our police, & demeaned your sacred faith & values; The Anti-American radicals defaming our noble history, heritage & heroes; and ANTIFA, the rioters, looters, Marxists, & left-wing extremists. THEY ALL SUPPORT JOE BIDEN!

Seriously. This is pitiful. And Pathetic. It just shows all the more reasons why he should never have been in the White House in any government capacity and why he should be voted out now.

Thanks, Republicans. Again, thanks so very much for this man, this buffoon of a President.

Vote, folks. And VOTE BLUE.

#BlueWave2020

86 45

BYEDON

Vote. Him. Out.

 Seriously.

How he got the Presidency.

How anyone, anyone thinks he should have.

How anyone, now, thinks he should get it again for another four years.

Wow.

Let's do this, folks. #Votehimout

Heck, #Votethemout

Vote blue.

#BlueWave2020

86 45

BYEDON

The Trumpster Takes Yet Another Big, Big HIt

Yes Mr. and Mrs. America, this President took yet one more political hit today. This came out.

Wall Street spent over $74 million to back Joe Biden’s run for president, topping Trump’s haul

From the article:

• People employed in the securities and investment industry will finish the 2020 election cycle contributing a notch above $74 million toward Biden’s candidacy, according to new data from the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics
• The sum includes millions given during the first two weeks of October to Biden’s joint fundraising committees and outside super PACs backing his run.
• Biden’s haul from Wall Street easily tops what Donald Trump and Barack Obama raked in...

People in the securities and investment industry will finish the 2020 election cycle contributing over $74 million to back Joe Biden’s candidacy for president, a much larger sum than what President Donald Trump raised from Wall Street, according to new data from the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics.

The sum includes contributions that began in 2019 and continued through the first two weeks of October to Biden’s joint fundraising committees and outside super PACs backing his run. Former Goldman Sachs President Harvey Schwartz gave $100,000 this month to the Biden Action Fund, a joint fundraising committee for the campaign, the Democratic National Committee and state parties.

Biden also received a ton of financial support from leaders on Wall Street in the third quarter. Going into the final two weeks of the election, Biden, the DNC and their joint fundraising committees had over $330 million on hand. That’s $110 million more than for Trump, the Republican National Committee and their joint committees. Biden’s campaign is on track to raise $1 billion in the six days until Election Day.

It seems clear even Wall Street wants our nation to also have calm, clear, steady, intelligent, informed leadership again.

Let's do this, folks.

Vote.

And vote blue.

#BlueWave2020

86 45          BYEDON

Psychologists on this President

I saw a terrific article today at Daily Kos, this one, below, that references one in the New York Daily News. While I'm not crazy about the original source, the fact is, two psychologists came to a conclusion that's difficult, if not impossible, to disagree with.

'We are psychologists, and we are convinced Donald Trump is a psychopath'

Here's the original article:

Say it plainly: Trump is a psychopath

A bit from the original article:

“Get rid of the ballots” and “there won’t be a transfer,” said Donald Trump on Wednesday. This comment is a direct and dangerous expression of his anti-democratic intention. If unstopped, Trump may well destroy our 244-year-old democracy.

It is time to stop pulling punches. It is time to stop relying on political pundits to weigh in on Trump’s behavior, which they often soften and even normalize.

We are psychologists, and we are convinced Donald Trump is a psychopath. His malignant behavior over the past four years is growing and escalating right before our eyes. Trump’s psychopathy will change us forever if he is not stopped.

This is not hyperbole. This is not an expression of "a left-wing agenda.” This is a mental health opinion based on thousands of hours of documented behavior by this president.

• He breaks norms, rules, and laws with impunity.
• He lies, on average, 15 times a day.
• He peddles fake conspiracy theories and irrational magical thinking.
• He has been accused of sexually predatory behavior by at least 25 women.
• He blames, scapegoats and gaslights as easily as he breathes.
• He undermines the vital role of the free press because he abhors oversight and accountability.
• His lies and anti-scientific advice and intentional downplaying of the coronavirus pandemic has led to countless American deaths.
• He is callous and cold and unfeeling because he has no conscience.
• He denigrates and humiliates anyone and everyone in his path.
• He has no respect for military heroes or renowned experts.
• He is racist and xenophobic.
• He incites violence and culture wars.
• He is obsessed with power and adoration.
• He is a greedy opportunist.
• He is corrupt to the core.

It goes on. I can't recommend the full, original article enough.

I will repost here only one last line from it.

"Trump is the most psychiatrically disordered president in history."

I say again...

Thanks, Republicans.

Oh, and...  86 45

BYEDON

I Warned, We Warned About This Man, This Donald Trump

Four years ago today I wrote and posted the following on social media, Facebook, to be specific.

An open letter to America.

Fellow Americans,

Please, please don't do anything remotely close to coming anywhere near the election of Republican Party candidate Donald Trump be President. Please don't be anywhere near that irresponsible, that reckless, that foolish. The safety of the nation and, honestly, even the world depends on it.

Sincerely,

Me

I begged. I pleaded.  Lots of us did. Even Republicans and conservatives did, too.

First, I was correct. We were correct.

Second, and most importantly now, let's undo this come November 3.

Vote blue.

Where We Are, America, With this Pandemic

The latest New York Times Magazine's cover story today got me, more than anything, from the description of it.

Why We’re Losing the Battle With Covid-19

And that description.

The escalating crisis in Texas shows how the chronic underfunding of public health has put America on track for the worst coronavirus response in the developed world.

The most cases and the most deaths from this pandemic than any other nation in the world.

We're number one.

And now this.



Thanks, Mr. President.

Thanks, Republicans.

Quote of the Day -- On This President's Legacy

"The heavy price we will pay for Trump’s presidency is not that we will feel bad as a people about his lack of virtue...but that his lies and abuse will leave the government itself, along with the political system and our civic culture, degraded."

--conservative, Republican Bill Kristol @BillKristol

Once again, thanks, Republicans.

Quotes of the Day -- On This President

Today's New York Times is chock full of good, if not, in fact, out and out great and even possibly, very likely important articles on this Republican Party President, his current situation, his tweets and statements and moods and responses, mostly to criticism. He apparently thought once one becomes President, no one evaluates, read: criticizes, that person or his or her Presidency. Whatever.

Anyway, as I said, the paper is full of great articles, this being the first I'll briefly mention today.

Trump and His Henchmen In the Flames

Is this Trump’s public suicide or his genius for survival?

This is the most scathing, but true, summation of this man, his Presidency and administration I've seen this week. A bit from the article:

We have hit uncharted political territory. An unstable president has lurched under the pressure of an impeachment inquiry into a form of madness that is either a very public suicide or some weird genius for survival. Trump is Robert De Niro, armed with a gun, in “Taxi Driver” gazing into the mirror repeating: “You talkin’ to me?”

We are. Nixon wanted his profanities deleted from transcripts. Trump has no such qualms. He trumpets his view of the Democrats’ impeachment inquiry on Twitter: “BULLSHIT.” He will not be a one-term president! That’s weak, like Carter, like Bush One! He cannot be WEAK like them! He cannot lose! It’s all an attempted “coup”!...

...The White House, I hear, now operates like the 26th floor of Trump Tower during the campaign. There’s no structure or plan. There’s no war room or communications cell. People wander in and wander out, except they’re all lawyered up now, no doubt. They’re not even in crisis mode. Trump just goes out and shoots his mouth, as he has from Day 1. Like a good Mafia boss, he now has everyone complicit. They’re all in this together — Vice President Mike Pence, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, acting Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney, and the rest. Since John Kelly escaped in January, Trump’s henchmen are all that’s left.

...Polls show a plurality of Americans now supporting impeachment and Trump’s approval rating sinking as low as 41 percent. He is vulnerable in several states he won in 2016, including Ohio. If he shrinks to his core unshakable support, he probably has no more than a third of the vote.

So what does he do? Double down! If there’s any guiding principle it seems to be: If Trump says often enough in broad daylight that he tried to get foreign powers to interfere in our election to his benefit, how can it be wrong? “China should start an investigation into the Bidens,” says Trump, as he leaves the White House to go to Florida.

The remark is met with justified outrage. This is abuse of power. This is abuse of foreign affairs authority. These are impeachable acts. But, guess what, everyone starts reporting and writing on what Biden and his son Hunter did or did not do in China. Trump is a mass-media magician. He got McLuhan — “the medium is the message” — without reading McLuhan.

The term self-impeachment is now doing the rounds. As with a self-immolation, it can be hard to watch Trump’s blathering at its current crazed pitch. Can this be anything but the long-awaited and very public self-destruction of a man unfit for office? It may well be, but I am not entirely convinced.

As always with Trump, the rational and the Cartesian bump up against his fiendish antennae for the mass hypnosis of our age. He has his finger on the pulse of the technological character of evolution — even though he knows nothing about it. Repeat something often enough, brazenly enough and aggressively enough to people dazed enough by the cacophony around them, and they will lose their bearings enough to believe anything, even that his conversation with Zelensky was “perfect.”

There is no down range for this president. He’s too disorganized. There is only the next minute. Let’s talk Trump and golf for a minute. He likes to say, “I’m a feel player.” He’s not a believer in going to the driving range. Drop it and hit it. Fire and forget. Just hit the effing thing! Well, fire-and-forget got him to the White House, so why would he stop believing in it, even now?

Because, if Trump could manage a glimpse over the towering heights of his ego, he might see that Speaker Nancy Pelosi has him in her sights. She knows he will grow madder and madder under the pressure of the impeachment inquiry. As that happens, those working-class white women and suburban housewives who voted for Trump in large numbers in 2016 may well desert him: Derangement is not really their thing. Can the 53 Republicans of the Senate be far behind?

Then there is this.

Trump Governs by Grudge

Californians don’t vote for Trump, and he’s showing them what he can do about it.

For the last few weeks, Mr. Trump has been deep into retaliation mode, occasionally for reasons of policy, more often out of pique. His decision last month to try to revoke California’s historic right to set its own fuel efficiency and greenhouse gas standards was largely a policy matter, part and parcel of his effort to roll back President Obama’s aggressive clean car rules. That effort would be rendered incomplete as long as California maintained the right to set its own higher standards, which govern a huge chunk of the car market now and would do so going forward unless somehow Mr. Trump, in plain violation of the original Clean Air Act, got rid of it.

First Trump

• Tries to revoke California's right to set its own fuel efficiency and greenhouse gas standards that they've historically had so they can clean their admittedly dirty air then he
• Accuses the state of failing to meet federal air quality standards and threatens to withhold billions in federal highway funds if California did not do more to clean its air.

The guy is nuts. Vindictive and crazy.

Links:

Did Donald Trump Just Self-Impeach?

The Cruelty Is the Point

Poll: Majority of Americans approve of Trump impeachment

Probably the Most Important Article on this Presidency We Can Read Today

The latest of just what we’re getting with and from this Republican Party President.

‘A presidency of one’: Key federal agencies increasingly compelled to benefit Trump

“The president’s personal concerns have become priorities of departments that traditionally have operated with some degree of political independence from the White House — and their leaders are engaging their boss’s obsessions.”

“Barr and Pompeo are stuck in the fog machine. They seem captives of the president’s perverse worldview,” said Timothy Naftali, a historian and former director of the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum. “Authoritarian regimes have this problem all the time . . . when all government activity is the product of the id of the leader. But in a republic, that’s unusual.”

Trump was sworn in as the 45th president with less governmental experience than any of his predecessors. His advisers tried to tutor him about the three branches of government and the constitutional balance of powers. The general ethos among Trump’s top aides then was to protect institutions and moderate some of the president’s swings — to resist rather than follow his impulses, as described by one former senior White House official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share a candid assessment.

Since then, Trump has become more emboldened to make decisions and has systematically dispensed with much of his early team, including former defense secretary Jim Mattis, former secretary of state Rex Tillerson, former White House chiefs of staff Reince Priebus and John F. Kelly, former White House counsel Donald McGahn, former national security adviser H.R. McMaster, former economic adviser Gary Cohn and others.

“I’m not sure there are many, if any, left who view as their responsibility trying to help educate, moderate, enlighten and persuade — or even advise in many cases,” the former senior official said. “There’s a new ethos: This is a presidency of one.”

“It’s Trump unleashed, unchained, unhinged,” this official added. “He continues to go further and further and further, and now I don’t think there’s anybody telling him, ‘No.’

That, all that, is dangerous. It's certainly no way to run a nation. Not a first world nation, anyway. A Banana Republic, maybe, not the United States of America.

Then, as though that’s not enough, there’s this that hit today, too.

A Trump hotel mystery: Giant reservations followed by empty rooms

This is what’s being examined:

House investigators are looking into an allegation that groups — including at least one foreign government — tried to ingratiate themselves to President Donald Trump by booking rooms at his hotels but never staying in them.

It’s a previously unreported part of a broader examination by the House Oversight Committee, included in the Democrats’ impeachment inquiry, into whether Trump broke the law by accepting money from U.S. or foreign governments at his properties.

“Now we’re looking at near raw bribery,” said Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.), a House Oversight Committee member who chairs the subcommittee with jurisdiction over Trump’s hotel in Washington. “That was the risk from day one — foreign governments and others trying to seek favor because we know Trump pays attention to this.... It’s an obvious attempt to curry favor with him.”

The investigation began after the committee received information that two entities — a trade association and a foreign government — booked a large quantity of rooms but only used a fraction of them, according to a person familiar with the allegation but isn't authorized to speak for the committee.

Emoluments Clause of our Constitution, anyone?

Finally, this happened:

Trump Completely Loses His Mind At Press Conference With Finland's President

What a guy.

Thanks, Republicans!

We Are, As a Nation, Normalizing the Insanity and Irresponsibility That Is Donald J Trump

Lots of us swore we would not, could not let this happen. That is, we swore we would and could not possibly let the normalization of Donald J. Trump and all his petulance and non-logic and emotionalism and rantings and ravings and tweets and self-centeredness and narcissism. We were sure we wouldn't all "go there."

But it's happening. Sure as he's called President, to this day, it's happening.

An example?

This past week.

Donald Trump's last 7 days are just 

mind-bogglingly bad

And then, today, there's this.

Trump calls negotiations with North Korea a waste of time, says U.S. will ‘do what has to be done’

He has no idea, I expect, that he's flirting with some sort of nuclear disaster, at minimum, if not out and out nuclear war.

Bravado is one thing when you're in the locker room and disrespecting women. God knows that's bad enough. But as President of the most ridiculously powerful nation on the planet to, again, flirt with nuclear warheads being rained down on some part of the planet--anywhere, really--is just outrageously stupid, even childish but certainly irresponsible.

We, the United States, can't allow, hell, exist with this, again, irresponsible dolt as leader.

The planet can't, either.

No exaggeration.

Donald Trump, USA President, Today

From former NPR reporter Jacki Lyden today, from her Facebook page.

What did you do with your morning?

Kiss the kids, hug the spouse, walk the dog, pour coffee for the friend, chat to the neighbor?

Phone abroad, pull a weed?

In some way, be glad you were alive?

The leader of the free world (I’m fairly certain) did none of that.

In a 15-tweet-tweetstorm, the day before a UN roll-out, amid N Korea threats and Prez Taunts (now we’re down to taunts like Rocket Man) and post-Irma & Harvey, he woke up with tweet indigestion.

He put misogyny into the mix, re-tweeting from an anti-Semitic account fantasizing that this oaf could possibly swing a golf club hard enough to Hillary Clinton in the back, without getting a hernia. The meme splices in a clip of Clinton visiting Yemen.

Jealousy over Clinton's book reception likely triggered it (as well as raging jealousy over her accomplishments as a female Secretary of State-- (heaven help Ivanka) but -- racism and misogyny and paternalism/white supremacy are absolutely at the core of Donald Trump's id. (I would never reflect on the state of his soul. That remains to be developed.)

Every single day, Americans who worry about the myriad obliques and angles threatening modern life, must additionally worry that this unstable man will further undermine what remains of our democracy, society, and civility.

Every hour.

Columnists write columns about their rising blood pressure (see Dana Milbank, "Trump is Killing Me).

The best antidote, of course, is to prevail with those principles Trump cannot affect -- morality, civility, decency, and courage. It's not about "moving past" Trump's latest outrage -- it's burned into our psyches already. Short of removing this completely unfit human from public office, we must do all we can to hang on to our own characters, which are, of course, already going to be tested by the ungrateful kid, horrid neighbor, food poisoning and dog that bites. 

My point being that life is a series of intended and unintended feints and parries, an equilibrium forever poised on the precipice of eclipse, but with this president we can count on poison and only on poison. 

There are no legislative political accomplishments, and of course, he is politically impotent. 

And knows it. 

Remember we need health care, mental health parity, community need, a fight against ethnic cleansing, fairness for the the frail amongst us, an environment and planet health we must improve. 

Perhaps the test for us is that in addition to never overlooking his sickness--for he is a sick man, very sick--we must expand our empathy gene in direct opposition to Trump’s failure to affect anything except hatred. 

We must speak out. 

That to me is indeed but one good reason to get up in the morning and carry on-- because someone this sick and desperate can make everyone a little more sick and desperate and would revel in doing so if it made him feel powerful. 

There is no moral compass there, just an id. 

So onward friends, in the engagement of your best self, best talents, best friends, best heart. We struggle, but at least, we struggle together.

Links:

Jacki Lyden

President Trump is killing me. Really

Quote of the Day -- Timely II

“If ever a time should come, when vain and aspiring men shall possess the highest seats in Government, our country will stand in need of its experienced patriots to prevent its ruin.”

― Samuel Adams

If Your Pet Were Libertarian

On Being--and Looking---Donald Trump

And then, of course, there is that hair. You have to have the hair, too. Right?



Again, God help us.

Enjoy your Sunday, y'all.

And GO CHIEFS!!