Elections; 2024
POSTED BY: THG
UPDATED: Friday, November 21, 2025 00:12
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"Trump derangement syndrome" is real — but it's not what they say it is
In an epic case of projection, followers of Trump accuse their foes of a mental disorder
By Kirk Swearingen | December 10, 2023, 9:00AM (EST)
https://www.salon.com/2023/12/10/trump-derangement-syndrome-is-real--b
ut-its-not-what-they-say-it-is/
Like the boastful schoolboy he will forever be, Donald Trump smirkingly twists apt descriptions of himself and his often cartoonishly deranged acts against those who point out his transgressions. And as in a game of Follow the Leader, his fellow Republicans continue to project their own psychopathies on the truth-tellers.
Thus the all-too-accurate pejorative "Trump crime family," describing decades of phony charitable and educational scams, purposeful misstatements of property values and massive grifting during the White House years, becomes mock-outraged references to the “Biden Crime Family.”
Call one of his ravings sent out in the wee hours on his social media platform Truth Central deranged, and he’ll latch onto that word to use as invective against his political opponents.
As Salon’s Heather Parton recently noted, Trump is even trying to turn the tables on the increasing number of historians, journalists and politicians who warn that the former grifter in chief is an obvious threat to the continuation of our democracy. Yes, the twice-impeached ex-president who lies about and despises the free press and talks about suspending the Constitution now regularly claims that he is somehow protecting all of us from “Joe Biden’s war on democracy.”
As it turns out, Trump’s exhortation to insurrection, “Fight like hell or you won’t have a country,” turned out to be a warning to all non-faux patriots, the great majority of Americans, who now are now forced to be conservative, whatever else they may be —conservative about preserving the Constitution, political norms, the rule of law and freedom of the press — because no one else seems willing to do that any longer.
That the 77-year-old former president who is still attempting to overturn the 2020 election simply makes use of the “I know you are, but what am I?” taunt of a pre-teen is laughable (Parton calls it “his latest tribute to the late great Pee-wee Herman”) and also repugnant, because he’s supposed to be an adult. But, like all con men and authoritarians, who are also essentially swindlers, he knows that if you repeat something often enough, an amazing number of people will come to believe it.
Or they’ll believe it because they just want to believe it. As Paul Simon long ago wrote in the classic “The Boxer”: “A man hears what he wants to hear/ and disregards the rest.”
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Here's a reminder of why lots of people are afraid of Trump's authoritarian streak:
• He tried to violently overthrow the 2020 election.
• He often speaks admiringly of foreign dictators.
• He has explicitly promised to use the Justice Department to go after his enemies.
• He wants to eliminate big chunks of the civil service so he can appoint his own loyalists instead.
• He writes about "rooting out" all the vermin who don't support him.
• He laughs about being a dictator on "day one" and then stopping.
These aren't merely points of ordinary partisan disagreement. They are the signs of a man who will at least try to bring down the rule of law for his own aggrandizement. He may not succeed, but it won't be for lack of desire.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Here's a reminder of why lots of people are afraid of Trump's authoritarian streak:
• He tried to violently overthrow the 2020 election.
Lie.
Quote:
• He often speaks admiringly of foreign dictators.
Your President behaves like one.
Quote:
• He has explicitly promised to use the Justice Department to go after his enemies.
Your President and his team have done this for 3 years now, and for the entire 4 years before he was elected.
Quote:
• He wants to eliminate big chunks of the civil service so he can appoint his own loyalists instead.
Just like every President who gets elected does every time power changes hands.
Quote:
• He writes about "rooting out" all the vermin who don't support him.
This your guy, fucktard?
Quote:
• He laughs about being a dictator on "day one" and then stopping.
Taken extremely out of context, and you know it.
Quote:
These aren't merely points of ordinary partisan disagreement. They are the signs of a man who will at least try to bring down the rule of law for his own aggrandizement. He may not succeed, but it won't be for lack of desire.
I guess we'll find out in about a year, huh?
Oh... and now you're plagerizing Asshole Kevin Drum, huh?
https://jabberwocking.com/whos-the-real-dictator-here/
Quote:
Who’s the real dictator here?
Author Kevin DrumPublished on December 11, 2023 – 3:06 pm13 Comments on Who’s the real dictator here?
The latest version of "No, you are" comes from Allysia Finley, a member of the Wall Street Journal editorial board, who says that Biden is the real dictator. Her evidence is the usual farrago of right-wing nonsense: Biden signed some executive orders she doesn't like; he put in place some protections from oil drilling that she doesn't like; he has border policies she doesn't like; and most laughably, a lunatic federal judge said he was bullying social media platforms, an allegation so ridiculous that even the Fifth Circuit largely overturned it. Oh, and Biden's Justice Department has gone after Donald Trump on "trumped up charges." Uh huh.
This is all nonsense. Some of it is just stuff Finley disagrees with while the rest is a figment of her imagination. Conversely, here's a reminder of why lots of people are afraid of Trump's authoritarian streak:
He tried to violently overthrow the 2020 election.
He often speaks admiringly of foreign dictators.
He has explicitly promised to use the Justice Department to go after his enemies.
He wants to eliminate big chunks of the civil service so he can appoint his own loyalists instead.
He writes about "rooting out" all the vermin who don't support him.
He laughs about being a dictator on "day one" and then stopping.
These aren't merely points of ordinary partisan disagreement. They are the signs of a man who will at least try to bring down the rule of law for his own aggrandizement. He may not succeed, but it won't be for lack of desire.
You're pathetic.
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Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.
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Quote:6ix, you could make a decent life for yourself after you drop your delusions. Here is one of many to drop: Trump is Superman.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
You're pathetic.
The President Is Not Superman
By Tom Nichols | Dec 11, 2023
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/opinion/the-president-is-not-superman/a
r-AA1lm2R3
America is facing an existential authoritarian threat from Donald Trump and the Republican Party in 2024, in part because voters have for too long thought of the presidency as an omnipotent throne.
President Joe Biden is trying to run for reelection on a record of policy successes. In modern American politics, this is a nonstarter: Many Americans no longer tie policy successes or failures to individual politicians. Instead, they decide what they like or don’t like and then assign blame or credit based on whom they already love or hate. Donald Trump understands this problem and exploits it. Whatever his other emotional and intellectual failings, he has always grasped that many American voters now want a superhero, not a president.
The public’s cultish fascination with celebrity is not a new problem, but it’s getting worse. Back in 1992, I was a young professor living in New Hampshire. I was teaching political science back in those days, but I had several years of practical experience from working in city, state, and federal politics. Nonetheless, I was unprepared for the madness that settles over the Granite State during the presidential primaries. I went to several events, and I started to worry about how dysfunctionally Americans regard the office of the chief executive.
As various contenders — including the right-wing populist Pat Buchanan — made their way through the state, I got to hear voters directly addressing the candidates. As far as I could tell, they had one overriding message for the people contending to be the Leader of the Free World at a time of tremendous global instability, and it sounded something like this:
“I am an unemployed pipe fitter from Laconia, and I would like to know when you’re going to get me a job.”
Say what you will about Bill Clinton, but he got it. He’d bite his lip and exude kilocalories of well-practiced empathy. George H. W. Bush — who defeated Massachusetts Governor Mike Dukakis four years earlier by depicting the Duke as a liberal android with antifreeze in his veins — took his turn in the barrel, checking his watch during a debate and trying to get across a message of caring by saying “Message: I care.”
I always knew that a fair number of voters would form “parasocial” relationships with presidents, a phenomenon — one that is perfectly normal, within limits — in which people think they are connected to, and know, celebrities. What I was not prepared for, however, was to see up close how ordinary citizens think of the American president as Superman (or, if you prefer, the Green Lantern), a nearly omnipotent being who can create new realities through sheer willpower. In 1992, and again during the less contentious 1996 election, I came to understand better how the presidency in the postwar era — and especially during the Cold War — had become so large and its reach so broad that the glare of its powers wiped out the ability of voters to see any office below it.
When I would sit through events in northern New England, I was stunned that the local citizenry seemed unaware of any other level or branch of government. As an occasional talking head on New Hampshire television, I would sometimes try to engage some of these folks. I would ask: Do you have a mayor? A city council? Who is your state representative? (New Hampshire has one of the smallest ratios of voters to legislators in its House of Representatives in the union.) Have you called your state senator? What about the governor? How about your member of Congress?
Sometimes, people knew who these other officials were, and sometimes they didn’t. But in the end, there was an unshakeable faith that if you were unemployed in New Hampshire, the buck stopped
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:6ix, you could make a decent life for yourself after you drop your delusions.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
You're pathetic.
I have no complaints.
Quote:
The President Is Not Superman
By Tom Nichols | Dec 11, 2023
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/opinion/the-president-is-not-superman/a
r-AA1lm2R3
Oh good. We're not plaguerizing today then.
--------------------------------------------------
Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.
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A Texas case shows that abortion ban exemptions are a sham by Republican Party
Soon after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last year, horror stories started emerging of women denied medically urgent abortions for pregnancies gone dangerously awry. In response, the anti-abortion movement (that is another way to say the Republican Party) developed a sort of conspiracy theory to rationalize away the results of their policies.
Abortion rights activists, they argued, were deliberately misconstruing abortion laws, written by the Republican Party, leading doctors to refuse to treat women who obviously qualified for exceptions. “Abortion advocates are spreading the dangerous lie that lifesaving care is not or may not be permitted in these states, leading to provider confusion and poor outcomes for women,” said a report by the anti-abortion Charlotte Lozier Institute, a wing of the Republican Party. The Catholic conservative Richard Doerflinger, a Trump-lover, accused “pro-abortion groups” of spreading “false and exaggerated claims in order to ‘paralyze’ physicians and discredit the laws.”
Whether this argument stemmed from genuine denial or a cynical desire to mislead the public, a shattering case in Texas shows how absurd it is. Late last month, Kate Cox, a 31-year-old mother of two, learned that her latest, much-wanted pregnancy was doomed because of a severe genetic disorder. If the pregnancy continued, she was likely to have a stillbirth, and if she didn’t, the baby had virtually no chance of surviving long outside the womb.
She’d made several trips to the emergency room for severe cramping and what seemed to be leaking amniotic fluid. Her doctor told her that carrying the pregnancy to term could jeopardize her future fertility, and Cox very much wants more children. So she, her husband and her doctor sued the state, seeking a court order to allow her to terminate her pregnancy in Texas. If the Texas abortion ban had workable medical exceptions, it’s hard to see how they wouldn’t apply to Cox. But it doesn’t, and the state attorney general, Trump-lover Ken Paxton, fought the Cox family and their doctor every step of the way.
This case is unusual for Cox’s willingness to wage a legal fight while suffering a medical catastrophe, but not for the cruel bind the Republican controlled state placed her in. The day Cox received the terrible news about her fetus, the Texas Supreme Court (all justices are Trump-lovers) was hearing oral arguments in Zurawski v. Texas, a suit brought by two doctors and 20 women who had been denied medically necessary abortions and were seeking to clarify the scope of emergency exemptions to the state’s ban. Among the plaintiffs is Amanda Zurawski, who was 18 weeks pregnant after a year and a half of fertility treatments when her water broke. Although her pregnancy had no chance of surviving, she was denied an abortion until she became septic. Zurawski ended up spending days in an intensive care unit and has been left with damage to her reproductive tract that will most likely make it harder for her to become pregnant again.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Supreme Court to decide whether to restrict abortion drug nationwide
Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar appealed the decision to the Supreme Court, arguing in legal briefs that “more than half of American women who choose to terminate their pregnancies rely on mifepristone to do so.”
The decision means the court, controlled by Trump appointees, will again wade into the abortion debate after Trump appointees overturned Roe v. Wade last year, altering the landscape of abortion rights nationwide and triggering states controlled by Trump-lovers to outlaw or severely restrict the procedure.
US District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, an appointee of former President Donald Trump, issued a ruling that would have halted the FDA’s 2000 approval of the drug.
The judge said that the FDA failed to consider “the intense psychological trauma and post-traumatic stress women often experience from chemical abortion.” The term “chemical abortion,” which is preferred by abortion opponents, was repeatedly invoked by the judge in his ruling, as was “abortionist” and “unborn human.”
https://www.cnn.com/2023/12/13/politics/supreme-court-to-decide-whethe
r-to-restrict-abortion-drug-nationwide/index.html
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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Trump on Hannity’s show: 24 false or misleading claims in 5 minutes
A bogus claim every 12 seconds, on average. That’s what a single five-minute clip of former president Donald Trump speaking in Iowa on Dec. 5 yielded. In the clip, from a Fox News “town hall” hosted by Sean Hannity and brought to our attention by the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CFRB), Trump ludicrously asserts that American oil and natural gas resources — “liquid gold” in the ground — could solve Social Security’s looming fiscal imbalance. That claim comes toward the end of the clip; to get there, a listener must first hear falsehood after falsehood in rapid succession.
Hannity tees up Trump by noting that he had mentioned energy. Hannity says that with $34 trillion of debt, the United States is paying $1 trillion in annual interest costs — a correct statement — and says “that is unsustainable.” (If you own Treasure Bonds, you expect to be paid that interest, sustainably until the bond matures when the face value of the bond must be repaid. Seems pretty simple to me. Also simple: a trillion dollars in taxes are not paid because the IRS does not have enough funding to coerce people like Trump, who can afford to hire lawyers to stall the IRS, to pay their taxes.)
We went through a transcript of Trump’s response, noting each false or misleading statement in boldface and providing a time stamp. The first falsehood comes in the 43rd second.
More at https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/trump-on-hannity-s-show-24-fal
se-or-misleading-claims-in-5-minutes/ar-AA1lomDJ
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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The IRS has plenty of funding.
But instead of going after rich people, they're going after people who make more than $600 selling used stuff at garage sales.
--------------------------------------------------
Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.
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A Republican president could ban abortion nationwide without enacting a single new law by exploiting the puritanical Comstock Act of 1873.
Republicans want to ban all abortions throughout the country. To do so, they argue that the Comstock Act of 1873, a notorious anti-vice law, already outlaws access to reproductive care. One section of the statute makes it a federal crime to send, through the mail or any common carrier, “every article, instrument, substance, drug, medicine, or thing which is advertised or described in a manner calculated to lead another to use or apply it for producing abortion.” Taken literally, and read in isolation from other provisions, this section would seem to make virtually all abortions unlawful. Mifepristone is a “drug” that causes abortion, as is misoprostol, so mailing medication abortion (to a patient, or to a doctor’s office or pharmacy) would be a criminal offense. But so would the shipping of any “article,” “instrument,” or other “thing” used for procedural abortion. The basic medical supplies necessary to perform abortions in-clinic would suddenly become contraband, their suppliers subjected to criminal penalties. This ban would cut across state lines, applying to red and blue states alike.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2023/12/supreme-court-mifepristone
-abortion-pill-case.html
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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