FRIDAY: Kilmeade fights Trump, but also doesn't!

FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 21, 2025

Different parts of the empire strike back: Major parts of the Murdoch empire continue to fight the commander.

Good grief! The New York Post continued to school him about Vladimir Putin right on today's front page. 

You can see the front page by clicking this. Over a photo of Vladimir Putin, the text on the page says this:

PRESIDENT TRUMP:
THIS IS A DICTATOR

That's some cold-blooded stuff! Also, Brian Kilmeade interviewed the commander this morning on his Fox News Radio show —and he too was pushing back hard! 

The commander kept refusing to answer Kilmeade's questions about who is responsible for the war in Ukraine. You can read the text of Kilmeade's questions, and of the commander's evasions, by clicking to this report at Mediaite:

‘That’s Vladimir Putin’s Fault, Don’t You Agree?’ Fox News’ Brian Kilmeade Repeatedly Challenges Trump During Anti-Ukraine Rant 

On his Fox News Radio show, Kilmeade was pushing back hard. That said:

To our ear, Kilmeade had taken a wholly different approach three hours earlier on Fox & Friends, where he serves as co-host. It seems to us that the Fox News Channel may be holding the line in favor of the commander. Here's how the morning went:

As best we can tell, the name "Putin" was never mentioned during the Fox & Friends 6 o'clock hour. 

During the 7 o'clock hour, the friends began playing a short, evasive bit of videotape about Ukraine featuring National Security Adviser Mike Waltz. 

Midway through that hour, there came the moment of truth. It seemed to be a different Brian Kilmeade who meekly submitted to a Trump-friendly presentation by General Jack Keane regarding Putin and Ukraine.  He pushed very hard on his radio show, said nothing on Fox & Friends.

To watch the full Fox & Friends report in question, you can click here, then move to the 19-minute mark. Our question:

Is Kilmeade allowed to let it hang out on his eponymous Fox News Radio show, but not on the Fox News Channel?

We see no sign that Putin was mentioned during the Fox & Friends 8 o'clock hour. 

Some parts of the empire are striking back hard. This morning, in one other part of the polity, it almost seemed that spotless minds were being allowed to endure.

SOCIOPATHY: She was frog-marched into the countryside!

FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 21, 2025

No one could call her a slouch: Conceptually, physical illness is easy. By way of contrast, so-called mental illness ("mental disorder") is relatively hard.

Also this:

As we noted a few weeks back, there seem to be hundreds of (clinical) "mental disorders" within the current medical playbook. This week, we chose to feature "sociopathy" for a particular reason.

Long ago, and far away, we learned to pity the child. In her best-selling book about Donald J. Trump, Mary Trump—the president's niece—focused on "sociopathy" at one critical point.

Mary Trump is a clinical psychologist. That doesn't mean that her assessment are necessarily accurate.

That said, she's been observing the family in question ever since she herself was a child. As we've often noted, this is what she said at one point in her best-selling book about the sitting president:

MARY TRUMP (pages 12-13): None of the Trump siblings emerged unscathed from my grandfather's sociopathy and my grandmother's illnesses, both physical and psychological, but my uncle Donald and my father, Freddy, suffered more than the rest. In order to get a complete picture of Donald, his psychopathologies, and the meaning of his dysfunctional behavior, we need a thorough family history.

In the last three years, I’ve watched as countless pundits, armchair psychologists and journalists have kept missing the mark, using phrases such as "malignant narcissism" and "narcissistic personality disorder" in an attempt to make sense of Donald’s often bizarre and self-defeating behavior. I have no problem calling Donald a narcissist—he meets all nine criteria as outlined in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5)—but the label only gets us so far.

[...]

[Clinical] experiences showed me time and again that diagnosis doesn't exist in a vacuum. Does Donald have other symptoms we aren't aware of? Are there other disorders that might have as much or more explanatory power? Maybe. A case could be made that he also meets the criteria for antisocial personality disorder, which in its most severe forms is generally considered sociopathy but can also refer to chronic criminality, arrogance, and disregard for the rights of others.

The book in question bears this somewhat murky title:

Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man

The title is explained in the book. The book was published in July 2020.

In her detailed, best-selling book, Mary Trump describes her grandfather, Fred Trump, as "a high-functioning sociopath." At substantial length, she describes the challenges which are typically faced—and the price which can routinely be paid—by the children of sociopaths.

Is it true that Fred Trump was a sociopath? We can't tell you that! But Mary Trump says that her uncle, Donald Trump, might also meets the criteria for the clinical diagnosis which relates to that colloquial term. Also this:

At substantial length, she does explain, in many ways, why we might decide to "pity the child." She doesn't make that specific recommendation herself, but the basis for pity is found all through her book.

In which we can pity the child—pity the five different children—who had to grow up, or who failed to grow up, in the home of Fred Trump and his medically disabled wife.

We would suggest that you "pity the child" who grows up as the child of a sociopath. We suggest you recall what the leading authority on that clinical disorder says about such children:

Antisocial personality disorder 

Antisocial personality disorder (ASPD) is a personality disorder defined by a chronic pattern of behavior that disregards the rights and well-being of others. People with ASPD often exhibit behavior that conflicts with social norms, leading to issues with interpersonal relationships, employment, and legal matters. The condition generally manifests in childhood or early adolescence, with a high rate of associated conduct problems and a tendency for symptoms to peak in late adolescence and early adulthood.

The prognosis for ASPD is complex, with high variability in outcomes. Individuals with severe ASPD symptoms may have difficulty forming stable relationships, maintaining employment, and avoiding criminal behavior...Children raised by parents with ASPD may be at greater risk of delinquency and mental health issues themselves.

[...]

Causes

Personality disorders are generally believed to be caused by a combination and interaction of genetics and environmental influences. People with an antisocial or alcoholic parent are considered to be at higher risk of developing ASPD. 

We've long advised you to pity the child. It's also true that adults afflicted in such ways should have their ability to do harm removed from them where possible.

Was Fred Trump a "sociopath?" How about his son? Is it true that there can be a genetic component to such clinical "disorders?" Can the syndrome in question be inherited?

We can't answer questions like those. Questions like those are not discussed within polite journalistic circles. For better or worse, it's also true that prevailing rules of the game have decreed that such questions have gone unasked in the case of the sitting president, and with respect to some other unusual people around him.

Under prevailing rules of the game, questions like those can't be asked. Fairly obvious possibilities can't be reported or discussed.

This is part of the cultural background within which we the people have managed to drift to our current situation. In the case of Mary Trump, she became a familiar figure on cable news programs after her major best-seller appeared, but she was treated as a standard political pundit. She was almost never asked to discuss the psychological ruminations which occupy the first fifty pages of her high-profile book.

Our public discourse is extremely primitive. Despite the torrents of praise we're inclined to heap on ourselves, we humans aren't "the rational animal" and we never have been.

Within the journalistic tradition, issues of "mental illness" are routinely reported and discussed with respect to a wide array of "street crimes" and associated behaviors. For better or worse, such issues are never reported or discussed with respect to major political figures.

According to the largest study of which we're aware, something like six percent of adult men can be diagnosed with ASPD. But, again for better or worse, we're not allowed to wonder about the way this clinical "disorder" might be affecting the way our national politics works.

All the way back in 2017, one person stepped forward to confront these issues. No one could possibly call her a slouch. The leading authority on this person offers this highly impressive thumbnail:

Bandy X. Lee

Bandy Xenobia Lee is an American psychiatrist whose scholarly work includes the writing of a comprehensive textbook on violence. She is a specialist in public health approaches to violence prevention who consulted with the World Health Organization and initiated reforms at New York's Rikers Island Correctional Facility. She helped draft the United Nations chapter on "Violence Against Children," leads a project group for the World Health Organization's Violence Prevention Alliance, and has contributed to prison reform in the United States and around the world. She taught at Yale School of Medicine and Yale Law School from 2003 through 2020.

[...]

Early life and education

Bandy Lee was born and raised in the Bronx, New York. She is of Korean descent. As a teenager, Lee volunteered in Harlem as a tutor for homeless African-American children. Her grandfather was Geun-Young Lee, a physician who treated patients in need of care after the Korean War, who Lee says inspired her with a belief that practicing medicine also involves social responsibility.

Lee received her M.D. from the Yale University School of Medicine in 1994 and a Master of Divinity (M.Div.) from Yale Divinity School in 1995. Lee completed her medical internship at the Bellevue Hospital Center in New York. During her medical residency at the Massachusetts General Hospital, Lee was designated as the chief resident. She was then a research fellow at Harvard Medical School. Upon completion, she was offered a faculty position at Harvard University but turned it down to return to Yale.

Career

Lee studied the anthropology of violence in East Africa as a fellow of the National Institute of Mental Health and co-authored academic papers on Côte d'Ivoire, Tanzania, and Rwanda. She is a specialist in violence prevention programs in prisons and in the community and worked for several years in maximum security prisons in the United States where she was instrumental in initiating reforms at New York's Rikers Island jail complex. She has consulted with five different U.S. states on prison reform.

Lee was director of research for the Center for the Study of Violence and, with Kaveh Khoshnood, founded Yale University's Violence and Health Study Group. She heads a project group of the Violence Prevention Alliance for the World Health Organization that contributes to increasing the evidence base on interventions that work to prevent interpersonal violence in low- and middle-income countries. She helped draft United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan's chapter on "Violence Against Children" and is the author of the textbook, Violence: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Causes, Consequences, and Cures.

That's what the leading authority says. We can't vouch for the perfect accuracy of every word. 

That said, no one could call this person a slouch. But back in 2017, she tried to create a discussion of certain issues concerning Fred Trump's child back. For doing so, she was eventually frog-marched into the countryside, never to be heard from again.

Will someone "be telling this with a sigh / Somewhere ages and ages hence?" Everything is possible! For today, we offer this as a portrait of the current state of the American discourse. 

Despite the comical volumes of praise we heap on ourselves, we humans have a long way to go. That includes the widely praised academic and journalistic elites who can't find a way to discuss such topics right here in our own self-impressed Blue America.

We advise you to pity the child—to pity the children—who grew up in the home of Fred Trump. (In part, we offer that advice because it would have been the more politically savvy way to go.)

Today, one of those children has surrounded himself with a remarkable array of top aides who also grew up in highly unusual circumstances. (Did your grandmother ever decide to set her sleeping husband on fire?) 

That group has sometimes been described as "a playroom of broken toys." Our major news orgs have gone to heroic lengths to disappear various aspects of their highly unusual childhoods, along with remarkable aspects of their highly disordered adult lives.

Dr. Lee could have been a contender! She might have helped us understand the forces which are brought to bear on the children who grow up in highly unusual homes. 

Instead, she was frog-marched away. Discussions like that aren't allowed!

We leave you today with one last question:

Is a form of "mental disorder" involved in academic and journalistic conduct of that type? How far does a (colloquial) disorder extend within our underfed discourse?

He could be a "sociopath," his own niece flatly said. In many appearances on cable news shows, nobody asked her about that!

THURSDAY: Landslide which wasn't yields disapproval!

THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 20, 2025

"Dictator" unmentioned at Fox: All in all, the early headlines weren't especially good. 

The commander had seemed to say that it was actually Ukraine which had actually started the war. That nation's president was a "dictator," he then unmistakably said.

You didn't have to read the columns which resulted—the headlines delivered the mail. There was quite a lot of disapprobation, including from the editorial board at the Wall Street Journal:

Trump Tilts Toward a Ukraine Sellout
He puts more pressure on Kyiv for a deal than he does on the Kremlin.

 Oof! Even from that perch in the Murdoch realm, that's what the dual headline said—and so too at the New York Post!

Trump is asking for FAR too much ‘payback’ from war-torn Ukraine

That's a Murdoch entity too.

Over at the New York Times, Nicholas Kristof quickly weighed in:

With Trump’s Prostration to Putin, Expect a More Dangerous World

Kristof is center left. At the same newspaper, Bret Stephens is center right, but he was offering this:

Vance’s Munich Disgrace

That column predated the "dictator" play, though only by a few hours. Stephens was savaging the recent speeches in Europe by the guy who invented the story about Haitians eating everyone's pets.

Two voices spoke at The Atlantic. Eliot Cohen has long been a man of the center right. His column appeared beneath this:

Incompetence Leavened With Malignity
The Trump administration’s Ukraine policy is liable to end in disaster.

Tom Nichols had generally been center right too, though he's long been anti-Trump. His dual headline said this:

A Terrible Milestone in the American Presidency
Trump switches sides in the war for freedom.

Over at the Washington Post, David Ignatius doubles as a regular player in the most intelligent discussions seen in American cable news. His headline was negative too:

A Trump outrage that stands apart
The president blames Ukraine for its own brutalization.

So it suddenly went, around the dial, as Trump trashed the great dictator. You'll recall that our digest includes the editorial boards of 1) the Wall Street Journal and 2) the New York Post!

On the programs of the Fox News Channel, silence largely prevailed. Is it true that Ukraine had started the war? Is it true that Zelensky's a dictator? 

The word "dictator" has barely been uttered on Fox News Channel programs. That said, Brit Hume, the channel's chief political analyst, managed to smuggle a samizdat out. You can read all about it in this report at Mediaiite:

‘Music to Vladimir Putin’s Ears’: Fox News’ Brit Hume Reacts Ominously to Trump’s Latest Anti-Ukraine Screed

It isn't that everyone has to agree, in every way, with the views which were generally expressed by this array of observers. But over at the Fox News Channel, the usual suspects engaged in discussions of other topics and sometimes fell back on sheer clowning.

The open misogyny continued apace on the gruesome Gutfeld! show. As usual, the women of The View were quickly compared to whales. 

As usual, things went downhill from there. They pry the lid off this braindead garbage can at 10 p.m. every night!

Along the way, the landslide which actually wasn't a landslide was sliding toward disapproval. The Washington Post reports:

Many of Trump’s early actions are unpopular, Post-Ipsos poll finds

President Donald Trump has opened his second term with a flurry of actions designed to radically disrupt and shrink the federal bureaucracy, but reviews from Americans are mixed to negative on many of his specific initiatives, and 57 percent say he has exceeded his authority since taking office, according to a Washington Post-Ipsos poll.

Overall, 43 percent of Americans say they support what the president has done during his first month in office, with 48 percent saying they oppose. Those who strongly oppose outnumber those who strongly support by 37 percent to 27 percent.

The president’s supporters applaud him for deporting undocumented immigrants and cutting government waste. Those unhappy with the direction he is taking the country say they fear Trump is allowing billionaire Elon Musk to dismantle critical government programs.

[...]

Overall, the Post-Ipsos poll finds 45 percent of adults approve of the way Trump is handling his job, while 53 percent disapprove. That net-negative rating is worse than findings in other public polls. A Washington Post average of February polls shows 47 percent approving and 49 percent disapproving. Whether the difference reflects normal variation in public polls or a more negative reaction to recent actions is not clear.

So how about it? Is it 43-48 negative, or 45-53? As always, different questions yield different results in this most complex of all possible worlds. 

That said, neither set of numbers looks amazingly good. Very few presidents (if any?) have ever managed to go in the hole as fast as this one has.

Can you hear them cuckoos hollerin'? At present, the answer is starting to look like a yes. 

What kind of reaction might larger disapproval occasion? It all depends on the extent of the possible madness which has largely gone unnamed and has, lacking a name, largely been under-discussed.

SOCIOPATHY: Millions of corpses are getting those checks!

THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 20, 2025

Also, what the president wants to tell Putin: Yesterday, was the madness general over this flailing nation? 

We'd be inclined to say yes. Let's start with an announcement which is receiving little notice. 

The announcement was made by Pete Hegseth. Here's the start of a brief news report in today's New York Times:

Hegseth Orders Pentagon to Draw Up Plans for Cuts

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has ordered senior military and Defense Department officials to draw up plans to cut 8 percent from the defense budget over each of the next five years, officials said on Wednesday.

Mr. Hegseth said in a memo issued on Tuesday that a number of branches within the military and the Pentagon should turn in budget-cutting proposals by next Monday, two officials said. The memo listed some 17 exceptions to the proposed cuts, including military operations at the southern border.

Say what? Defense spending would be cut by eight percent in each of the next five years? Factoring in inflation, that would mean that defense spending had been cut roughly in half by the end of that period—and by substantially more as a percentage of GDP.

That seems like a very surprising proposal! But that's precisely the target which was adumbrate only last week by Hegseth's boss, as CNBC reported:

Defense stocks drop after Trump says Pentagon spending could be halved

Defense stocks dropped sharply Thursday afternoon after President Donald Trump suggested the U.S. could massively cut defense spending.

Trump said Thursday at the White House the U.S. could cut defense spending in half at some point in the future. The comments came in the context of Trump discussing a potential conference on defense spending with China and Russia.

“At some point, when things settle down, I’m going to meet with China and I’m going to meet with Russia, in particular those two, and I’m going to say there’s no reason for us to be spending almost $1 trillion on the military...and I’m going to say we can spend this on other things,” Trump said.

“When we straighten it all out, then one of the first meetings I want to have is with President Xi of China and President Putin of Russia, and I want to say let’s cut our military budget in half. And we can do that, and I think we’ll be able to do that,” he added.

After he gets Ukraine straightened out, the commander wants to meet with Putin to tell him that we'll be cutting American defense spending in half! 

Given the context of the real world as it really exists, this seems like an astonishing prospect. It's a marker of the breadth of the general madness that this proposal by the commander has received almost no notice.

To what wider madness do we refer? For now, forget about Ukraine. Instead, consider this:

Yesterday, the commander spoke in Miami. According to Mediaite, he made the peculiar remarks which are quoted in this news report—and the videotape is included:

Trump Baselessly Claims Millions of People Born in the 1800s Are Getting Social Security Checks

[...]

On Sunday, White House adviser Elon Musk claimed his “Department of Government Efficiency” found that more than 20 million Americans over the age of 100 have been receiving checks from the Social Security Administration. He alleged the figure included people who were born in 1875...

Speaking at a conference of investors in Miami on Wednesday, the president reiterated Musk’s baseless claims about Social Security and appeared to add some embellishments of his own.

“But listen to this—3.6 million people are on Social Security rolls from the age of 110 years old to 119,” he said. “Do you think there are really that many? Those people are seriously old. But it gets worse—3.47 million people are on Social Security from the age of 120 years old to 129 years old, 3.9 million people are on Social Security from 130 years old to 139 years old.”

Trump later added that there are “3.5 million people from the age 140 to 149 years old” on Social Security, and that “1.3 million people are on Social Security from age 150 to 159. And over 130,000 people are on Social Security over the age of 160 years old, OK? Including 1,039 people—think of it—over one thousand people between the ages of 220 to 229. And one person between the age of 240 years old and 249. And the record topper, there is one person on Social Security who is 360 years old, which is approximately 110 years older than our country.”

The assembled crowd cheered Trump’s performance.

"Think of it," the president said. He then claimed that the Social Security Administration has been mailing checks to "over a thousand people between the ages of 220 to 229"—even to "one person between the age of 240 years old and 249."

Does anyone really believe that many millions of fraudulent checks are being mailed to such non-existent people? Is it a form of madness when the president makes such a series of claim, with an audience cheering him on?

Was it a form of madness when Elon Musk made the original claim—the original claim which the commander now appears to have embellished?

Full disclosure! In that report for Mediaite, Michael Luciano links to this report in the Washington Post—a report which claims to explain the highly peculiar claims which were first made by Musk. 

As we've mentioned in the past, the Post's explanation involves certain quirks which are built into the programming language known as COBOL That said, have we entered a realm of general madness when  a cheering crowd is being told that the Social Security Administration has been mailing checks to many millions of people whose birthdates makes it clear that such people would have to be dead?

Was a madness present in that hall? On the level of the upper-end press, have you seen anyone ask that question?

The commander is planning to tell Putin that he'll be cutting the military in half. He also seems to think that deep state flunkies at Social Security have been sending checks to millions of people who were born in the 1800s.

Due to the general madness over the land, those items have been receiving very little attention. In our own Blue America, attention is being paid to the commander's recent claims that President Zelensky is "a dictator" who started the war in Ukraine and who stands at four percent the polls.

One question might go like this: 

Are issues of "mental health" and "mental disorder" involved in any of this? With respect to the commander, are we looking at behavior which resembles the lunacy which is said to have occurred when the emperor Caligula is (apocryphally) said to have named his favorite horse to the Roman senate?

Are issues of health and disorder involved? If so, we're looking at a tragic loss of human potential. But according to current rules of the game, such questions can't—and won't—be asked. 

For better or for worse, such questions are forbidden. We still want to remind you about the person who advised a different course eight years ago, but we'll close for now by linking you to one last news report.

This report appears at The Daily Beast. A paywall blocks us from reading it.

That said, the headline raises our question again. As you can see by clicking this link, the headline in question says this:

MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell Rages at ‘Utterly Insane’ Image of Trump as King

Yesterday, the commander seemed to refer to himself as "the king." The White House quickly posted a photo showing him wearing a crown.

Lawrence used the word "insane" as he discussed this behavior. That said, "insane" is not a clinical term. 

Our question:

Is it possible that clinical issues are involved in the possible realm of madness into which we the people have possibly fallen? And if clinical issues are involved, what exactly does that mean?

Severe issues of "mental disorder" involve a tragic loss of human potential. For all of us, our potential is limited right from the start.  Certain types of clinical "disorder" are said to make matters much worse. 

The commander wants to tell Putin that he's cutting the military in half. Also, many millions of people who died long ago are still receiving monthly Social Security checks.

It was Zelensky who started the war. Also, American public school kids are the worst students in the whole world! (See yesterday's report.)

Is it possible that something might be "wrong" in all this? Under prevailing rules of the game, our journalists don't know how to ask!

Tomorrow: No one can call her a slouch

Concerning those annual eight percent cuts: Last evening, on Anderson Cooper 360, Beth Sanner discussed those improbable spending cuts.

Sanner served as a Deputy Director of National Intelligence—under President Trump no less. She said eight percent takes us to two percent! To read what she said, click this.

"Back out of all this now too much for us?" Is there a path out of this mess?

WEDNESDAY: Ukraine is said to have started the war!

WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 19, 2025

Except on Fox & Friends: The madness is back with a vengeance! For viewers of Blue America's cable news, it started yesterday afternoon, when the commander made the statement shown below.

In his statement, he's referring to President Zelensky's complaint about the U.S.-Russkie peace conference taking place without Ukraine being present.

In the view of Blue America, the undisguised madness started again when the commander said this:

TRUMP (2/18/24): I think I have the power to end this war, and I think it's going very well. But today I heard, "Oh, we weren't invited." 

Well, you've been there for three years. You should have ended it—three years. You should have never started it. You could have made a deal. 

(For a fuller transcript, see below.)

"You should have never started it," the commander said, plainly seeming to be scolding (and blaming) Zelensky. Over here in Blue America, that was widely taken to be an extremely strange remark.

This morning, on the Fox News Channel, the spotless minds of Red America were shielded from what Trump had said. In the full four hours of the Fox & Friends franchise, we can find no sign that the peculiar statement by the commander was quoted or discussed or played on videotape.

For viewers in Red America, the remark had never been made! The closest anyone came to reporting the statement came right at the start of the day—at 5:05 a.m. 

Even then, viewers were shielded from the plainly puzzling part of the commander's statement. At the start of Fox & Friends First, co-host Todd Piro offered a notably shortened version of what the commander had said:

PIRO (2/19/25): Secretary of State Marco Rubio, closing out his tour of the Middle East this morning with a meeting...It all comes after Rubio and other top Trump officials met with their Russian counterparts yesterday and agreed to work toward ending the war in Ukraine, something President Trump says should have happened years ago:

TRUUMP (videotape): I think I have the power to end this war, and I think it's going very well. But today I heard, "Oh, we weren't invited." 

Well, you've been there for three years. You should have ended it—three years. 

At that point, the video ended, and co-host Piro moved on. The statement was clipped right before Trump seemed to say that Ukraine and Zelensky were the ones who had started the war!

If you were watching at 5:05 a.m., you saw that truncated statement. As best we can tell, Trump's statement was never mentioned in any way during the full three hours of the regular Fox & Friends broadcast, which started at 6 a.m.

So it went in the two Americas in the wake of Trump's remark:

In Blue America, the comment was aggressively discussed this morning, right from 5 o'clock forward. Over in Red America, the statement had never been made.

Was Blue America making a mistake—putting too much emphasis on a single offhand comment? Apparently not! Later this morning, on Truth Social, the commander lowered the boom on Ukraine, calling Zelensky a dictator and engaging in some absurdly inaccurate factual claims.  It remains to be seen how the workers at the Fox News Channel are going to handle that.

Under current planning, Canada is destined to be America's 51st state. After this morning's angry remarks, is that expanded polity possibly destined to become Putin's newest republic?

Slightly fuller transcript: Here's a slightly fuller transcript of what the commander said:

TRUMP (2/18/24): I think I have the power to end this war, and I think it's going very well. But today I heard, "Oh, we weren't invited." 

Well, you've been there for three years. You should have ended it—three years. You should have never started it. You could have made a deal. 

I could have made a deal for Ukraine that would have given them almost all of the land, everything, almost all of the and no people would have been killed, and no city would have been demolished, and not one dome would have been knocked down. But they chose not to do it that way.

This morning, the commander went whole hog, with insults and wild misstatements thrown into the mix.

Above, you see what the commander said yesterday—unless you were watching Fox.

SOCIOPATHY: The commander made an odd remark!

WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 19, 2025

And we don't mean about Ukraine: We start today with a news report in the New York Times. At issue is the mental / cognitive / intellectual functioning of the whole human race—of "the whole wide universe."

In fairness, everybody makes mistakes! Remarkably, it sounds like the "super geniuses" at DOGE may even have made a mistake:

DOGE Claimed It Saved $8 Billion in One Contract. It Was Actually $8 Million.
The biggest single line item on the website of Elon Musk’s cost-cutting team appears to include an error.

The Department of Government Efficiency, the federal cost-cutting initiative championed by Elon Musk, published on Monday a list of government contracts it has canceled, together amounting to about $16 billion in savings itemized on a new “wall of receipts” on its website.

Almost half of those line-item savings could be attributed to a single $8 billion contract for the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency. But it appears that the DOGE list vastly overstated the actual intended value of that contract. A closer scrutiny of a federal database shows that a recent version of the contract was for $8 million, not $8 billion. A larger total savings number published on the site, $55 billion, lacked specific documentation.

Dual headline included, that's the way the report begins. For the record, and speaking of various kinds of mistakes:

The principal headline says that DOGE did make a mistake. The sub-headline says it only may have.

At any rate, whatever! DOGE was claiming that it had saved $8 billion by canceling a project it didn't think was worthwhile. In fact, the actual figure may be only $8 million! That would be one one-thousandth of the reported amount. 

Later, the Times report notes that $2.5 million of the $8 million has already been spent on the disfavored project. That means that the actual saving would be only $5.5 million—roughly one twelve-hundredth of the total claimed.

Meanwhile, and for the record: Is it possible that the canceled project was actually worthwhile? That, of course, is a matter of judgment! Sometimes, money can be saved in ways which may not be wise.

Was $8 billion saved by DOGE—or was it really $5.5 million? At this point, only The Shadow knows! 

The Shadow knows, plus every poor soul in "the whole wide universe" who watched The Five last evening. Not to mention the things which were said on the Gutfeld! program a mere five hours later.

Sad! Yesterday, at 5 p.m., the most watched program in American "cable news" started by heralding the claim that $55 billion had been saved by the "super geniuses" at DOGE. 

(DOGE "estimates they have saved taxpayers $55 billion and counting." That was enthusiastically said in the program's opening minute.)

Moments later, Harold Ford—an appalling shell of his former self now that the commander has been elected—went ahead and acted like that "estimate" was an established fact. As you may know, Ford is cast as the liberal in the group—as the one who's supposed to push back!

(For the record, Ford has become an utter embarrassment with President Trump back in office. It's long past time to frog-march him away from the set of this imitation "news" show.)

At any rate, sad! That estimate became an established fact for those who were watching The Five. Five hours later, the gruesome host of the Gutfeld! program opened his show with an astonishing array of unfounded claims attributed to the same outfit.

Has DOGE really saved $55 billion? If so, has it done so by terminating contracts for programs which may actually be worthwhile? 

No such questions will ever be asked on Fox News Channel programs. Also, the New York Times will never report or discuss this fact about this powerful "cable news" channel. Within the dueling madnesses of our discourse, it simply isn't done.

Bob Dylan was hot a month ago. We think today of the lines he wrote when he was still very young:

And for every strung-out person in the whole wide universe
We gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashin'.

One of those freedoms has become the unfettered freedom to play remarkably fast and loose with the most elementary facts! Yesterday, we saw the commander make an extremely odd factual claim—and at this point, we aren't even discussing what he said about Ukraine!

What did the commander say on last night's Hannity program? The program was taped late last week. What did the commander say?

Before we show you what he said, we want to show you some established facts. These facts concern a matter no one actually cares about. We refer to the performance by American students in the most recent administrations of the two major international testing programs, the PISA and the TIMSS. 

How did American kids stack up against the rest of the world in those testing programs? We'll let the NCES tell you. Here are the basic scorecards from those most recent tests:

Performance by U.S. students, 2023 TIMSS:
In 2023, U.S. 4th-graders’ average score on the TIMSS mathematics scale was higher than the average scores of their peers in 28 education systems and lower than the scores of those in 21 education systems.

In 2023, U.S. 8th-graders' average score on the TIMSS mathematics scale was higher than the average scores of their peers in 18 education systems and lower than the scores of those in 19 education systems.

In 2023, U.S. 4th-graders’ average score on the TIMSS science scale was higher than the average scores of their peers in 39 education systems and lower than the scores of those in 11 education systems.

In 2023, U.S. 8th-graders' average score on the TIMSS science scale was higher than the average scores of their peers in 27 education systems and lower than the scores of those in 11 education systems.

That's the way it went on the TIMSS.  As always happens on these major international tests, American students outperformed their peers from some other nations, were outperformed by some others. 

In the dying realm of actual fact, it went the same way on the most recent PISA:

Performance by U.S. students, 2022 PISA:
Compared to the 80 other education systems in PISA 2022, the U.S. average reading literacy score was higher than the average in 68 education systems, lower than the average in 5 education systems, and not significantly different from the average in 7 education systems.

Compared to the 80 other education systems in PISA 2022, the U.S. average mathematics literacy score was lower than the average in 25 education systems, higher than the average in 43 education systems, and not significantly different from the average in 12 education systems.

Compared to the 80 other education systems in PISA 2022, the U.S. average science literacy score was higher than the average in 56 education systems, lower than the average in 9 education systems, and not significantly different from the average in 15 education systems.

For the record, U.S. students always rate most poorly on the PISA math exam. Here's the way their scores shook out in 2022 when compared to OECD nations only:

Compared to the 36 other participating OECD members, the U.S. average in mathematics literacy was lower than the average in 21 education systems, higher than in 6, and not significantly different from 9.

Our students were outscored by 21 of the other 36 nations. On every other PISA / TIMSS test, U.S. students ranked substantially better than that.

That brings us to what we saw the commander say on last night's Hannity program. Determined to fix our American schools, he authored these puzzling comments:

PRESIDENT TRUMP (2/18/25): School! I want to bring school back to the states so that Iowa, Indiana—all these places—Idaho, New Hampshire—there's so many places and states. 

I figure 35 really run well. And right now, it's Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, China—China, can you imagine, has top schools! We are last! 

So they have a list of forty countries. We're number 40. Usually, we're 38, 39. And the last time, we were number 40.

Hannity just sat there and took it! He probably knew that what was being said seemed to be crazily wrong.

"Usually, we're 38, 39. And the last time, we were number 40?" Where in the world did those numbers come from? No one will ever ask! 

Meanwhile, and just for the record:

The four states mentioned by the commander don't stand out, in any particular way, on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), the gold standard of domestic public school testing. (White kids in three of those states score below the national average for that demographic.)

Also, if 35 of the fifty states are "running really well," it's hard to figure how we could have ended up dead last around the world. 

(As far as we know, when China participates in these programs, it still tests only in a small set of high-end jurisdictions. But so these pseudo-discussions go.)

None of this made any sense, but this is who and what we are. Also, this is who and what the commander unmistakably seems to be at this point in time. 

This is a function of who and what our very primitive "public discourse" has been down through the years. No one actually cares about this general topic, and no one ever has.

Yesterday, alas! Viewers of The Five were offered that claim by DOGE as an established fact. 

Also, viewers of Gutfeld! saw the program's astonishing host rattle off an array of utterly bogus claims, right at the start of his program. None of his guests voiced a peep of complaint. None of his guests ever do.

Viewers of Hannity saw the commander make a set of very strange claims about American students. Then too, we come to what the commander seemed to say about who started the war in Ukraine!

This is the business we have chosen, in part through the failure of our major news orgs in Blue America. We that, we offer a question: 

Is any form of "mental disorder" involved in any of these claims or previous practices? In a way, we're sorry we headed down that long and winding road this week. We say that for two basic reasons:

For starters, our journalists are never going to consider possible mental illness ("mental disorder") in their discussions of political figures. Also, it's as we told you yesterday: 

"Mental illness" is hard! Conceptually, mental illness is very hard—hard but fascinating.

We'd love to see the fascinating topic discussed at substantial length. Is there even such a thing as clinical "mental illness?" (Some professors have said there isn't.) Assuming that there is, what does some such diagnosis actually tell us about the person in question?

We'd love to see that discussion, but it's never going to happen. Despite the praise we heap on ourselves, our public discourse is too primitive to handle any such topic.

Simply put, we humans aren't especially sharp, and we never have been. That's even true in the Lake Wobegon of our flawless Blue America, where the journalists are all above average.

Early in his first term in office, claims were made about the alleged mental illness of President Trump. Tomorrow, we'll return to what was said at that time—and those claims were made in the clinical sense, not in a colloquial manner.

Is something wrong with the gentleman's mental health? How about with our own? How about with "every strung-out person in the whole wide universe?"

Over here in Blue America, our own failures to deal with reality have helped bring us to the current dangerous place. In our view, those failures became extreme over the past several years, as a Democratic president seemed to be in a fairly obvious state of decline.

With respect to the person who played a key role in the prior discussion of the commander, no one could possibly call her a slouch! But the woods, though lovely, are dark and deep, and we the people have wandered about in a state of incomprehension.

Did Ukraine really start the war with Russia? It sounds like that's what the commander has now said! 

As for us, we're going to take the rare earth metals! Russia will take some land.

Is this the world we've somehow chosen? Have we been like the fictional townsfolk of Oran? Has "mental health," or the lack of same, somehow been involved?

Tomorrow: No one could call her a slouch