The psychological aspects of this campaign are fascinating, but they certainly seem to be effective on the highly uneducated so appreciated and targeted by Trump. This is a candidacy all about projection. His jihad against Hillary Clinton's e-mail scandal is something he knows something about-- not about her being guilty of destroying e-mails, but about he doing exactly that a decade ago. Yes, Paul Singer reported in USAToday Monday that in 2006 "when a judge ordered Donald Trump's casino operation to hand over several years' worth of emails, the answer surprised him: The Trump Organization routinely erased emails and had no records from 1996 to 2001. The defendants in a case that Trump brought said this amounted to destruction of evidence, a charge never resolved." His primitive little mind assumes everyone behaves the way he does.Also Monday, James Fallows, writing for The Atlantic, did a pastiche of Trumpist campaign outrages-- like pulling the credentials of the Washington Post-- this weekend because he didn't like factually accurate report on how Trump had called President Obama a traitor in regard to ISIS. Is there any wonder why the American intelligence establishment is in a tizzy about providing him with sensitive daily briefings? "Loose cannon" does not properly describe what this person is.Fallows wrote that he isn't "aware of any modern precedent of a major-party nominee publicly accusing an opponent, let alone a sitting president, of treason. Sure, each side has harbored dark fantasies about the other... [I]n the conscious lifetimes of today’s adult Americans, no major-party nominee has, before today, publicly suggested that his opponent might actively be a traitor. You could see this as a linear extension of Trump’s “other-ing” of Obama, through his earlier insane birth-certificate crusade. But the step he has now taken should be noted. He is suggesting that a serving president is not just possibly foreign-born but also perhaps a foreign agent. This is the man Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell, Reince Priebus, Marco Rubio, Chris Christie, John McCain, Bob Dole, and the rest of the Republican “establishment” say deserves their support."David Graham tried dealing with the bizarreness of Trump's call for President Obama to resign over his responsibility-- direct reponsibility in the Trump mind-- for the Orlando massacre, not of negligence, but of intent. This Trump is a truly dangerous man, not especially dangerous to ISIS or to any foreign powers, but dangerous to America and to Americans. The comparisons to Hitler and Mussolini don't do him justice. He's likely-- if Hillary blows this thing-- to be far worse than either. This is the reporting that got the Post banned from covering the lunatic's events. Other journalists-- and especially the TV networks-- should just serve notice that they will cease covering him as well until the Post is reinstated-- hopefully never. Let Fox News and Alex Jones have him all to themselves. They deserve each other.
In an almost entirely unprecedented moment, Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee for president, suggested in interviews Monday morning that President Obama may have somehow been involved in Sunday’s massacre in Orlando.Trump’s suggestion came by implication, but the message is unmistakable: The president may have somehow known about or been involved in the shooting.“He doesn’t get it or he gets it better than anybody understands-- it’s one or the other and either one is unacceptable,” Trump said on Fox News. He had already called in a statement Sunday for Obama to resign from office. Trump added on Monday:Look, we’re led by a man that either is not tough, not smart, or he’s got something else in mind. And the something else in mind—you know, people can’t believe it. People cannot, they cannot believe that President Obama is acting the way he acts and can’t even mention the words “radical Islamic terrorism.” There’s something going on. It’s inconceivable. There’s something going on.The idea the president is a Manchurian candidate, a mole or agent for jihadism is a stunning accusation, even by the standard of a presidential campaign in which Trump has delivered a series of breathtaking statements, from comparing a rival to a child molester to being unable and unwilling to differentiate one of his policy ideas from Nazi policies.Such conspiratorial beliefs are not unheard of in American politics, but they are typically banished to the margins. For example, some “Truthers” argued that President George W. Bush was either involved in or turned a blind eye to the 9/11 attacks. There’s no substantiation for those claims, and the people who hold them are generally viewed with derision. So, too, are those who have claimed that mass-shooting events such as the Sandy Hook massacre are “false flag” attacks, designed to drum up support for gun-control measures. The fringe radio host Alex Jones has already labeled Orlando a false flag, offering a sense of who Trump’s allies are on this issue.What is unprecedented here is that the claims are coming from a major party’s presumptive nominee for president, but unhinged beliefs about Obama are not especially new, nor are they nearly so fringe. The conservative writer Andrew McCarthy argued in a 2010 book that Obama was part of a conspiracy with radical Islamists to subvert the U.S. government. More banally, many people have claimed that Obama is a Manchurian candidate (or a Manchurian president, perhaps), a non-U.S. citizen who is ineligible for the presidency. That claim, too, is bogus, contradicted by a raft of evidence, including Obama’s birth certificate and contemporaneous birth announcements in Hawaii newspapers. Nonetheless, polls as recently as this year have found a majority of Republicans questioning Obama’s citizenship.These “Birthers” have been encouraged by supporters in upper echelons of politics. In 2011, for example, a prominent businessman began voicing doubts about Obama’s citizenship. He even said he had bankrolled investigators, sending them to Hawaii to look into the matter. (Whether he really did is unclear.) He even claimed that they’d turned up incriminating information. In the end, of course, no such evidence turned up, although the pressure did apparently convince Obama to release his “long-form” birth certificate, a white whale for birthers. Despite what might have been a discrediting experience for the businessman in the eyes of the public, he didn’t slink away and stay quiet. Instead, he ran for president in 2016, and he’s now the GOP nominee: Donald Trump.
As NBC Trump correspondant Katy Tur has been making abundantly clear, Trump is one sick puppy. "Trump's real-time Twitter reaction to tragedy," she wrote, "offers a rare and telling glimpse into the mind of the candidate. Tragedy after tragedy, Trump has quickly pivoted from the appearance of mourning to self-aggrandizement or petty attacks."Everything is about Trump. It's all me, me, me. Narcissistic Personality Disorder-- characterized by grandiosity; an expectation that others will recognize one’s superiority; a lack of empathy, lack of truthfulness, and the tendency to degrade others-- barely does him justice.I'm not sure of this but it appears that the Orlando shooters family came to Florida while Reagan was president, fleeing Soviet oppression. Reagan in 1982:
Today, we recognize a nation of unsung heroes whose courageous struggle is one of the epics of our time. The Afghan people have matched their heroism against the most terrifying weapons of modern warfare in the Soviet arsenal…Their heroic struggle has carried a terrible cost. Many thousands of Afghans, often innocent civilians, women and children, have been killed and maimed. Entire villages and regions have been destroyed and depopulated. Some 3 million people have been driven into exile-- that's one out of every five Afghans. The same proportion of Americans would produce a staggering 50 million refugees.We cannot and will not turn our backs on this struggle.
What a RINO!