THURSDAY, AUGUST 27, 2026
So says the sitting president: We had planned to focus our reports this week on Michelle Goldberg's column for the New York Times.
In our view, Goldberg is an increasingly valuable observer of the increasingly dangerous scene. In print editions, her column appeared in last weekend's Sunday Opinion section.
Online, headline included, the column grows from this basic overview:
Why Do We Keep Imagining a New Civil War?
[...]
For at least the last decade, a florid, aggressive contempt has been a constant in our politics. Donald Trump, after all, doesn’t just shower liberal cities and states with insults (and, in a demented A.I. video he posted, with excrement). His presidency has been devoted to punishing the places that didn’t vote for him, including by withholding health care and disaster funding. One of the things his voters have long loved about him is the humiliation and despair he causes their fellow citizens.
Many of those Trump partisans are still smarting over Hillary Clinton calling some of them “deplorables.” For decades they’ve been seething at the disrespect they feel emanating from America’s cultural capitals. It seems obvious to me that blue America is more abused than abuser, but that doesn’t really matter; the impossibility of coming to any agreement about the commensurability of our grievances just underlines the toxicity of the relationship.
An aggressive contempt has been a constant in our politics, Goldberg says. She refers to "the toxicity of the relationship" between our Reds and our Blues.
Also, the headline above her essay refers to a civil war.
We don't necessarily agree with every word in Goldberg's column. For example, depending on where your chronology starts, we don't think it's obvious that Blue America "is more abused than abuser."
That said, we agree with Goldberg on this—at this point, a question like that "doesn’t really matter."
It seems to us that the situation is dire, and that the bulk of the problem, at this moment, involves the fury of the sitting president—the "insults" and the "demented" conduct in which he often engages.
We got knocked off course from what we had planned to do this week. We now expect to build next week's reports out of Goldberg's column.
As for the sitting president, his peculiar behavior continued yesterday. So did the endless normalization as the high-end press corps keeps refusing to report his weird behavior.
Lesser orgs still report! Concerning yesterday's weirdness, the Daily Beast starts like this:
Trump Fires Off 46 Posts in Manic Two-Hour Spree
Donald Trump apparently found a two-hour break in his presidential schedule Wednesday to fire off 46 posts in rapid succession on Truth Social.
Trump's manic posting spree covered a range of topics. At one point, he was airing his unprompted frustration that athlete Roger Clemens is not in the National Baseball Hall of Fame...
He even had time for that!
More strikingly, the sitting president informed the world that it's MISSION ACCOMPLISHED in Iran, a puzzling claim he didn't try to justify or explain. To see that particular Truth Social post, you can just click here.
Inevitably, the post includes a putdown of a former president, in this case George W. Bush. In other posts, he creates unflattering visual portraits of former president Obama, and he presents a photo of his mother and father above this nutty caption:
The parents who save [sic] the world.
Yes, that's what the caption says. And yes, it was actually posted.
(The Daily Beast presents a paywall. For an unrestricted review of these 46 posts, you can click here for The Mirror.)
Is something wrong with the sitting president? Starting with Monday's report about The Motorcade Which Conquered the Reflecting Pool, we drifted back onto that tired old theme this week.
We also returned to a tired old fact:
No matter how strange the president's conduct becomes, the major news orgs and journalists of our own Blue America will never examine that question.
In fairness, yesterday's 46 posts were fairly tame, as compared to the astoundingly toxic posting the president has done in the past. But of one thing we can all feel certain:
No matter how strange the conduct gets, the strangeness will be ignored. The oddness will be disappeared and thus normalized. Nothing to look at, we'll (inferentially) be told.
The press is obeying a very old rule. In fairness, it was a very good journalistic rule, until the time came when it wasn't.
Also, we'll guess that various orgs don't want to get sued or prosecuted. For reasons like those, our favorite stars on MS NOW will never speak to medical specialists about the president's fury or about the wide range of his very strange conduct.
(That conduct "will only worsen," various medical specialists have said.)
In some ways, it's just as well that the interviews won't be conducted. Truth be told, our upper-end American press corps isn't amazingly sharp. They would have little sense of the appropriate way to explore the possibility that the most powerful person on the face of the earth might be (dangerously) "mentally ill."
(Ethical reminders: In our view, a serious "mental illness" is a serious illness. Also, people who are seriously mentally ill didn't choose to be mentally ill.
(In our view, mental illness shouldn't be treated as an occasion for insult. I will not abandon one person, Dolly Parton is said to have said.)
At any rate, is something wrong with the sitting president? They wouldn't know how to examine that question, and they've taken a vow not to ask!
We offer one more point:
The president's aide isn't the issue. The issue is the (far more dangerous) sitting president himself.
Dating back to the dawn of time, it's always been fun to beat on "the girl." In the current situation, it's also a dereliction of duty—the latest refusal to serve.
Over the past quite a few years, "a florid, aggressive contempt has been a constant in our politics." In the current circumstance, a great deal of that fury has come from one man.
There's no telling what he might decide to do—how many East Wings he might tear down—after November 3.
Is a medical problem involved? To a man, to a woman, your "journalists" have agreed not to ask!
They would haul my ass to HR if I kept referring to a 35 year old woman as a girl. WTF?
ReplyDelete"In our view, a serious "mental illness" is a serious illness. Also, people who are seriously mentally ill didn't choose to be mentally ill."
ReplyDeleteYes. And sometimes cruety is a deliberate choice, for those who perform cruel acts as well as those who cheer it from the safety of the sideline.
It's entirely possible that our president suffers from an illness. It's also possible he's just a dick.
It's also possible he's just a dick.
Deletesome American dickheads are so deplorable that they will crawl naked thru a Paris sewer to vote for Trump precisely because he is a dick.
Somerby wants you to believe that “being a dick” is a medical condition and merits pity.
DeleteBeing a dick is the Republican Party platform.
DeleteThere are plenty of seriously mentally ill people who are perfectly harmless. Trump isn't one of them. He's a dick AND mentally ill, and both the trait and the condition are getting worse, reinforcing each other.
DeleteSomerby frequently posits that Trump is a sociopath. Being a dick is a characteristic of sociopathy. He wants us to pity Trump because his sociopathy is not his choice. It is his “mental illness.”
DeleteExtending that, Ted Bundy should not have gone to jail for killing all those women. It was just his sociopathy.
Delete
ReplyDelete"Trump Fires Off 46 Posts in Manic Two-Hour Spree"
It may seem like a lot, and yet the retarded Corby here will sniff her finger and easily do twice that!
Which one is the president of the United States?
DeletePretty hard to get more cold-hearted than this on an industrial scale:
ReplyDeletehttps://www.cbsnews.com/miami/news/grand-jury-report-hope-florida/
That's small fry republican corruption compared to the Trump crime family
DeleteIt's all of a kind. Corruption is what fascist's do.
DeleteI credit Goldberg for recalling Hillary calling conservatives "deplorable." Hillary's full set of adjectives was "racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic -- a basket of deplorables." That's a level of insult that sticks in one's mind.
ReplyDeleteLiberals have been expressing these thoughts for a very long time -- back before the 1950's. In 1948. Trump called Dewey a fascist.
The liberals' trick for justifying the insult is to redefine "bigotry". The traditional definition of bigotry is treating some class of minorities worse than the rest of us. The new definition of bigotry is "opposing special benefits for some class of people." E.g., opposing so-called "reparations for slavery". Today's liberals consider MLK's praise of a color-blind society to be racist.
"racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic -- a basket of deplorables."
DeleteThat is you, dickhead. Hillary was wrong that is is only half maggots.
“Trump called Dewey a fascist.”
DeleteFreudian slip.
Mirror David, look into your diseased soul and pray for forgiveness 💖🙏 Just think, what would Dolly do, you depraved sick fuck.
DeleteOf course, Hillary didn’t say all conservatives were deplorable. She was only talking about the ones who were truly, verifiably racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic. And there are such conservatives, DiC. The fact that you put yourself in that subset “basket” is illuminating.
DeleteIt also sticks in one’s mind when Trump calls his opponents “vermin”.
DeleteDavid is redefining bigotry, not Hillary.
Delete"I credit Goldberg for recalling Hillary calling conservatives 'deplorable.'"
DeleteIt was Trump supporters, not conservatives, and it was half of them.
Hillary didn’t understand that Zionism is deplorable, too.
Delete"Today's liberals consider MLK's praise of a color-blind society to be racist."
DeleteNo.
Because the Dumbocrats ain't liberals?
DeleteToday, August 27, there is going to be an "emergency" hearing concerning King Donald J Chickenshit's completely lawless attempt to appropriate the Kennedy Center Memorial for himself. This has been going on for months. For no fucking reason whatsoever.
DeleteWhat the fuck do you call a maggot trump hump dickhead in cal who voted for this shit? I say you are fucking deplorable, you motherfucking fascist bastard.
@1:11 - No, not verifiably. It is not possible to verify that some anonymous person is a bigot without even knowing who that person is or knowing anything about her or him.
DeleteYou show us who you are every fucking day, dickface, you motherfucking racist fascist freak
DeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
DeleteThere are pencil-and-paper tests of various forms of bigotry that measure racial attitudes, sexism, and so on. The fields that measure this stuff are called social psychology and sociology. If you pay attention, people will show you and tell you who they are.
DeleteThis may be one reason why a right wing goal has been to remove the influence of psychology from schools. Psychology is more formally called "psychological science" because after the 20th century, it has used the scientific method and quantitative measures to collect data, observe subjects and to answer questions.
Here is a test that David would show bigotry on. You take resumes that an applicant might submit when applying for a job. You keep the data and experience the same, but change the name of the person from John to Jamelle and change the photo from white to black. Then you have subjects evaluate and rate the applicants based on competence, qualifications, likelihood of success in the position, etc. Bigotry occurs when people give the white candidates higher marks than the black ones, even though all the other info is exactly the same, switching only the names for a comparison group.
DeleteThere are numerous studies like this that demonstrate racism in both groups of people and in individuals (based on their own choices in a task).
David has many times said he would not hire black candidates because they would be unable to succeed. It is an entrenched view he holds that would show up strongly in a judgment task. But David doesn't wait for anyone to measure his racism. The things he says about people here shout it louds and clear.
Just like when Somerby claimed that Ketanji Brown Jackson could not be the most qualified person for the Supreme Court because he was sure there were white males with better qualifications -- despite her stellar ABA ratings, her high level experience, her training and performance. And when someone says something like that, it becomes clear that only skin color makes someone more highly qualified, and she could never be white, so she was obviously under-qualified. That is bigotry, racism, and sexism. As is the assumption that only the topmost white male candidate is worthy of consideration, because coming from a diverse background is not value-added (that a white male would not have) but a detriment.
On the other hand, David is very quick to accuse others of anti-semitism.
DeleteHere is an objective test of xenophobia: (mark each answer T or F:
Delete1. Too many foreigners in a community change the cohesion among neighbors.
2. It is too hard for people to get along when there is too much babel (foreign languages, different attitudes).
3. On average, immigrants have contributed less to our country's progress than native born people.
4. People from some countries are not equipped to behave properly in a democracy like ours.
5. Immigrants have too many children.
6. Immigrants take jobs from hard-working native Americans.
7. Having to teach bilingual students drains the resources of local schools.
8. Crime is high for immigrants because they do not raise their children to be law-abiding.
9. It is better to deport immigrants before they commit crimes than to wait until they are fugitives.
10. People should not come to the USA until they have learned to speak English.
You get the idea. A xenophobe is going to mark a lot of those questions T, earning a score that can be compared across groups or over time as a measure of negative attitudes toward immigrants (xenophobia). I just made these up, but an actual study would test the question first and also collect demographic info to see what correlates with higher xenophobia scores. I would bet that having visited another country is negatively correlated with xenophobia. But you test and find that out empirically.
“Trump called Dewey a fascist.”
ReplyDeleteYou mean off course that Trump called Harris a fascist.
In 1948?
DeleteThat was Truman. The Dumbocrat who ordered a murder of half a million civilians just to brag about his shiny new weapon.
DeleteTruman dropped the bomb to get the Japanese to surrender. I do not know whether the firestorms in Hiroshima were anticipated. There are estimates of how many lives were saved by that major show of force against Japan. Nothing is gained by trying to portray Truman, who took his responsibilities seriously, as a Trumpian war monger.
DeleteThe entry of the Soviet Union into the war against Japan was just as important as the bomb.
Deletehorseshit
Delete"Soviet and Mongolian forces quickly crushed Japan's Kwantung Army and took control of Manchuria, Inner Mongolia, northern Korea, southern Sakhalin, and the Kuril Islands. The swift collapse of the Kwantung Army removed Japan's final hope of using the Soviet Union as a neutral mediator to negotiate a conditional surrender. The invasion happened concurrently with the U.S. atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, forcing Japan's unconditional surrender and ending World War II in August 1945."
DeleteThe US was begging Stalin to do it sooner
Delete
Delete"The invasion happened concurrently with the U.S. atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, forcing Japan's unconditional surrender"
I wouldn't call it "invasion", and they didn't happen "concurrently". The Soviet military op stared the day the Dumbocrat president mass-murdered the population of Nagasaki - August 9th. And Japan only surrendered on September the 2nd, when the Soviets finished off the Kwantung Army.
Like any typical country club republican, AnonyMao loves endless wars so they can sip Old Fashions at the nineteenth hole and collected their defense contractor dividends.
DeleteHere is one of Somerby's right wing talking points for today:
ReplyDelete"For example, depending on where your chronology starts, we don't think it's obvious that Blue America "is more abused than abuser."
Somerby makes no effort to support this remark with evidence or argument. It has never been the goal of the left to abuse anyone. The same cannot be said of the right. The further back you go in time, the more abusive the right has been, not just to the left but also to their own voters.
The problem with Somerby's approach is that he thinks the left does nothing but call names when it addresses bigotry. The programs enacted by the left to combat racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia have made progress that can and has been measured. That progress has been rolled back by Trump with the concurrence of the right. Reducing these efforts to name-calling is wrong. For example, the right has systematically removed books with main characters who are minorities from school and library shelves. Those are a means of generating empathy for people with different lives than white Republicans. The right has systematically fired and removed from classrooms and other visible positions, members of minority groups, without cause (they did nothing wrong and were performing well in their jobs). This encourages racism by preventing minorities from showing that they can do jobs as well as anyone else. The right has eliminated scholarships and grants from minority students and the institutions serving large numbers of minorities, such as the HSI's and HBCUs, making it harder for such students to compete on the job market, shutting them out of higher paying jobs.
Every time you turn around, the right has removed a program intended to combat disparities in our culture. David defines this as reverse-racism because whites are not being privileged as they usually are, but there are set-asides for people who can succeed with that help.
Somerby's attitude that calling out racism is hurting anyone is stupid. Right wingers are proud of their racism and sexism and other phobias. It shows they are "right thinking" in their own minds. They do not want to share this culture or this country without anyone else they disapprove of, so they actively harm other people. Calling out racism and sexism by prosecuting and counting hate crimes, makes it possible for others to live side-by-side with assholes who never learned how to share. Such crimes were declining before Trump was elected. Just as salaries for blacks and other minorities were improving and degrees completed were increasing, and so on.
The problem is not the name-calling. It is that these right wingers do not want minorities to live in our country. They have been using extra-legal means to rid our country of their targets, with Trump's encouragement. This is not who we are as a country, but does Somerby ever call the right out on this stuff? No, he encourages it, just as the right does.
" Donald Trump apparently found a two-hour break in his presidential schedule Wednesday to fire off 46 posts in rapid succession on Truth Social. "
ReplyDeleteIsn't it clear that these posts are being made by Natalie Harp, not Trump? That doesn't mean he is hard at work being the president, but it seems unlikely he has the focus or patience to make those posts himself. That is what it means to have dementia. People take over your chores of daily living for you.
The American Press Corps is obviously unqualified to diagnose a serious mental illness in a sitting president. Why does Somerby keep demanding this? The people who need to do that are medical professionals. There are measures in Congress calling for the formation of a bipartisan committee to evaluate the president's health and fitness for office. It has gone nowhere because of Republicans, who control both houses of Congress. This will change after the midterms and then Somerby can reasonably call for CONGRESS to evaluate the president's health.
ReplyDeleteUntil then, Somerby is playing the buffoon, as he does here daily. Gosh, why doesn't Natalie Harp evaluate the president's mental health? She has the most access to him! But could we trust the results given her lack of objectivity?
"Dating back to the dawn of time, it's always been fun to beat on "the girl."
ReplyDeleteIt is time for Somerby to stop referring to Natalie Harp as "the girl." It is inappropriate given that she holds a $150K govt job working for the president, is 35 years old, and can in no way be considered a girl, except as a female human being. Female humans are only called girls between 0-18 years old. Calling a woman a girl is a sexist insult.
It does not matter that Somerby is incorrectly pretending that we on the left have been calling Harp that -- we have not. Somerby has quoted no one calling her that, except himself. By doing this, he is implying that we on the left will break our own norms about showing respect for adult women if the women involved is a right winger, such as Harp. But that isn't happening.
Harp is being attacked for having no security clearance (refusing to fill out the form for several years), posting crap like the ape pictures of the Obamas, crawling into the trunk of a car and throwing a hissy fit when told she cannot go with the president on an occasion, engaging in stalker behavior by following Trump everywhere and writing him love letters, and being unprofessional in her conduct with the president. None of that amounts to "the girl". Perhaps Somerby thinks that if he calls someone disliked by we Blues (Natalie Harp) a girl, then we will consider that OK, but the left doesn't make its respect for women conditional on being in our own party.
So Somerby needs to cut this out. It is ugly, unfair to Harp, and unfair to Blue America.
"Beating on" the girl does not go back to the dawn of time. It has always been considered abusive. In more primitive societies, someone who mistreat women or girls would be restrained by the entire family group or village. Too much beating on women would result in the species dying out.
DeleteSomerby leaks his backward view that mistreating women is bred in the bone. This is very convenient for men who dislike women, because it generalizes their own hate to other men, and because it justifies their own impulses to hurt women. And no, unlike the pseudo-anthropology of incels, rape was not common in those caveman days.
Yesterday when somerby engaged in a bit of faux-clever armchair psychoanalysis and bizarrely accused Lawrence O’Donnell of mentioning Natalie because Lawrence might secretly be dreaming of traveling himself “with Natalie”, he neglects the reality, which is that Trump’s dependence on such a sycophantic adherent shows Trump’s pathology. Would Somerby also claim that Ossoff’s “insinuation”, which he called “angry”, was also made because Osoff secretly dreams of traveling with Natalie? It’s patently ridiculous.
DeleteSomerby is bizarre on the subject of liberals and sexism/misogyny. He uses the phrase “sexual politics” without ever defining what he actually means by that, and then he claims that liberals have no sexual politics, whatever that is supposed to mean. He is at pains to show that liberals don’t really care about sexism or misogyny, in other words that it is all performative concern. That was his reaction to “me too”, and it’s also why he keeps on saying that blue America, i.e. blue media, i.e. corporate media won’t discuss and/or critique Gutfeld’s apparent misogyny/sexism. He himself referred to the treatment of Hillary as misogynistic, but then he claimed that liberal feminists wouldn’t defend her against it. And ironically, when people like Galloway, recently quoted as saying that this country is sexist and that’s why Hillary wasn’t elected, Somerby gets angry and says she got more votes than Trump, which shows there was no sexism.
ReplyDelete