Reading time – 2:45; Viewing time – 3:46 . . .
Crude alert: This post contains a little crudeness near the end. Sensitive readers should squint while reading those parts.
Parents are cautioned to separate the person from the deed, such that when little Johnny kicks the dog he’s not a bad boy. It’s just that he did a bad thing. It’s important that we don’t crush his budding self-esteem by giving him any “You’re not an okay person” message that would carry into adult life and at last cause him to be a doormat for others or a “hit you back first” abuser or a milquetoast failure.
And so it is with our president. It’s important that we don’t label him with personality damaging, ego bruising labels. For example:
He wasn’t a liar, thief and cheat when he repeatedly refused to pay his contractors; he just did a bad thing. Repeatedly.
He’s not a sexual abuser and misogynist; he just crudely brags about abusing women and publicly demeans them. Those are bad things, too.
It’s important that we not call him a traitor; we should at least wait for the FBI report about his conspiring with the Russians and then be gentle and say that perhaps he did some questionable things.
Again, it’s important that we not call him a traitor; he just publicly pinpointed two of our ultra-stealth nuclear submarines, so we should offer positive correction. And too bad for the crews of those subs and our entire military.
He’s not a liar; he just uses special math for his budget that he calls balanced but which adds $2 trillion to our debt. We’ll get him a math tutor.
He’s not a liar; he’s just a little misguided about his promised healthcare plan that will be better and cheaper but instead is a scheme to send billions of dollars to rich people by preventing tens of millions of Americans from having any healthcare at all. Just a little oops. Anyone could make that mistake.
You already know that this list could be very, very long, but in each instance it’s important that we describe the act and not demean the person, right?
Oh, screw that. Trump is a cruel, amoral cheat and liar, a betrayer of the first order (just ask the Israelis) and without any qualities required of a president or even a satisfactory human being. He’s a back-stabber of friends and allies and a supplicant to tyrants and murderers.
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Honestly, I don’t care a bit if Trump’s fragile ego gets bruised. I just want him out of power so that he can’t hurt America or Americans like you and me. I want him in a place that’s safe, say, Danbury Federal Correctional Institution or the New York State Psychiatric Institute. Either one. And for a really long time.
Back in the Vietnam War days when Richard Nixon was president there were lots of protests against the war and against the president who continued it because as he said, “I’m not going down in history as the first American President who lost a war.” That is to say, it was all about Nixon’s self-image, which was far more important to him than the lives of the additional 28,000 men and women who would die because of his self-obsession. A sign commonly found at street protests then read, “Dick Nixon before he dicks you.”
And now we have another president who is similarly all about himself. You and I better stay clear about that and take action before this president dicks us all.
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Ed. note: There is much in America that needs fixing and we are on a path to continually fail to make things better. It is my goal to make a difference – perhaps to be a catalyst for things to get better. That is the reason for these posts. To accomplish the goal requires reaching many thousands of people and a robust dialogue.
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3 Responses to Nixon Again?
Dan Wallace May 30, 2017
Jack, every article I’ve read on the subject suggests that the Orange Marmoset On Head In Chief suffers from “Malignant Narcissism,” which is described in the DSM-V as a particularly aggressive form of Narcissistic Personality Disorder that includes the sociopathic traits and lack of impulse control that are on full display here. (That’s a complex sentence, but once again, I have managed to avoid using our current President’s name and the name of the office together. 5 months, still holding fast to that.) I’m not a psychiatrist, I haven’t examined him, etc., etc., but the signs are all there. I wrote a blog post about this before the election. The bottom line: “The correct response to people like this is to feel sorry for them and to help them if we can. It is not to elect them President of the United States.” In my view, nothing has changed.
Interesting, though. . .I heard a radio snippet from a reporter who has been covering him for years. Wish I could remember her name. (“Sources say.” Fake news?) Her point was that he has lived an entire 70-year life having suffered absolutely no negative consequences for his bad, rash, boorish behavior, his ignorance, bluster and bullshit, etc. As she said, “You have to understand, in his mind, he actually doesn’t think he’s done anything wrong.” It’s not like it’s all wrong and he knows it. He genuinely doesn’t know it.
Back to the bottom line of my blog post.
Jack Altschuler May 30, 2017
The reporter to whom you referred might be Ana Marie Cox. I saw her on Lawrence O’Donnell’s program about 3 weeks ago and she talked about how the Orange Marmoset has never suffered consequences for his actions. Bankruptcies, contractor stiffings, his fraudulent university, marital infidelities – he’s received not much more than a slap on the wrist for any of his malfeasance.
The issue for us is not whether he sees that he is doing wrong; the issue is whether we will leave short term, partisan self-interest behind and do what is needed for survival. There will, indeed, be consequences for all of us if we allow yet more dismissing of allies, betrayal of foreign intelligence and our own military, turning the EPA into a eunuch organization in favor of yet more fossil fuel burning and all the rest. Did I mention rattling sabres at nuclear North Korea and sucking up to Vladimir Putin?
Dan Wallace May 30, 2017
Might have been Ana Marie Cox, but I don’t think so. Someone I didn’t know. . .I think.
I agree completely. I guess my point is that it’s not about expecting the OMOHIC to wake up and realize the many errors of his ways because that simply, even biologically, isn’t going to happen. It’s only a question of how long he’s in office. Unexcited as I am about the prospect of a President Pence, he strikes me as someone who falls, barely inside the range of “wrong, fake, phony, but at the end of the day, not crazy.” Which would be a major upgrade.