SATURDAY: What it means to have a good heart!

SATURDAY, AUGUST 29, 2026

Lake Ontario Days: Inevitably, the week's events occasioned memories of our own Lake Ontario Days. 

We refer to our days, basically in the 1990s, in the comedy room at the Lake Ontario Playhouse, way up there in unobtrusive Sackets Harbor, New York.

Sackets Harbor (1990 population: 1,313) may be the smallest locale ever to have had a weekend comedy room. Its spirit seemed to come from its cheerful young founder, NAME WITHHELD. 

The room has closed, but a commenter at TripAdvisor once started her comment like this:

I love this place
Not only is it a comedy club but it has an amazing little bar...

"I love this place," the lady said. "It has an amazing bar."

Inexplicably, it surely did! In that inexplicably unusual waiting room / bar, we heard a story once, from a young patron, which remains in our head as the definition of what it means to have an extremely kind heart. 

Also, we first listened to the lyrics of "In My Life" on the jukebox there. We can't remember why, but we'd play it after every show, even after the bad ones.

It's a remarkably simple song. Two (2) verses only, producing this pair of conclusions:  

In my life I've loved them all.
In my life I love you more...   

The lyrics were by John Lennon. Based on reported chronology, the song couldn't have been about Yoko Ono.   

Was the song about any actual person? We have no way of knowing, but an unusual spirit did seem to obtain inside that "amazing little bar."

The lake was right down the street. Inside the room, we heard someone describe an ambition which has stuck in our head, decades later, as the essence of a very good, decent kind heart.   

Then again, also this: This report in today's New York Times has several direct references to "mental illness" and to the unfortunate state of being "mentally ill," if only in one particular way. 

It seems to us that, as a nation, we'd gain from learning more about the nature of mental illness. For today, we'll stick to the eternal need for us the people to emulate those who arrived on the planet in possession of decent kind hearts.

REFUSALS: President obliterates the name of a lake!

FRIDAY, AUGUST 28, 2026

"Clinically insane," anchor says: Is it possible that the sitting president is "clinically insane?" 

The question arose last evening on MS NOW's The Last Word. After his opening monologue, Lawrence O'Donnell began to introduce his first guest. 

For the record, we admire the fact that O'Donnell cares—that he seems take these things personally. 

O'Donnell's 17-minute monologue had concerned the all new-and-improved "Lake America." As he introduced his initial guest, here's part of what he said: 

O'DONNELL (8/27/26): Leading off our discussion tonight is Congressman Jamie Raskin of Maryland. He's the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee.   

Congressman Rankin, thank you very much for joining us tonight. 

We were going to run a little clip of video...of Donald Trump saying he might rename the Atlantic Ocean and the Pacific Ocean, thereby giving historians all the more they might need to declare him clinically insane, as I'm sure history will. 

Let's go [instead] to the real breaking news of the night, which is the federal judge in Boston—

At this point, Raskin interrupted with a joke. Let's consider what O'Donnell had said.  

O'Donnell's monologue had concerned the latest foolishness from the president—his obliteration of The Lake Formerly Known as Ontario, with a (joking?) threat to rename two oceans thrown in.   

O'Donnell had referred to the president's "madness" throughout his monologue. Now he said he felt sure that that historians will say that the president was "clinically insane" during his time in the White House.  

We respect O'Donnell for the disgust he routinely directs at the president. He isn't going through the motions. It's plain that he actually cares about the danger we seem to be in.

That said, in what sense can a person say that the president is "clinically insane?"  Ironically, because "insanity" and "insane" aren't clinical / medical terms, the dramatic assessment, "clinically insane," isn't a clinical term either!  

"Clinically insane" isn't a clinical term! Instead, it serves as a lusty insult, but the term doesn't tell us much. Had he been a bit less angry, O'Donnell might have settled for some such assessment as this:  

 In the future, historians will likely agree that the sitting president was [some version of] "mentally ill" during his term in office. 

Or was O'Donnell thinking of some form of cognitive decline, resulting in a serious cognitive shortfall?  Could that really be what he meant?

He could be thinking of either or both! With apologies for the constant repetition, here's how one medically trained observer put it earlier this year:   

UNNAMED CNN ANCHOR (2/26/26): You've known him your whole life. Do you actually see a decline?

MEDICALLY TRAINED OBSERVER: I do, but I think it's important to remember that Donald has never been fit in any capacity. Obviously, what we're dealing with now are age-related cognitive declines. We're dealing with physical issues that the White House tries to cover over.

But this is somebody who for decades now has had serious, undiagnosed and untreated psychiatric disorders, which are only going to worsen, especially given the pressure he's under and given the cognitive and physical declines.     

The unnamed observer alleged "obvious cognitive declines," but she also referred to "serious psychiatric disorders." Which was O'Donnell thinking about when he posited a future assessment of "clinical insanity?"   

Viewers of The Last Word weren't given the slightest idea. In his anger, we doubt that O'Donnell had given this matter much thought.  

Full disclosure:

Our American journalism is very primitive, even when performed by our Harvard grads. Within our current culture, it's hard for us modern Americans to understand that fact.  

O'Donnell was angry about Trump's latest nonsense, as he frequently is. But in his anger, he behaved in the way Professor Brabender once insightfully described:   

Where I come from, we only talk so long. After that, we start to hit.  

Would it make any difference if O'Donnell had interviewed a medical specialist instead of the ubiquitous Raskin? If he had managed to formulate searching questions for that medical specialist, who would of course have to be careful to ignore his or her political inclinations?  

Would it be helpful to take that route in future interviews? For example, to interview the unnamed observer who appeared on CNN, asking her to detail the problems as she perceives them?  

In a best-seller she published in 2020, that observer said the sitting president had suffered the misfortune of being born to a father who was a "sociopath." In passing, she said that children of "sociopaths" are more likely to be "sociopaths" themselves.   

Would it be instructive for the public to see Lawrence O'Donnell, or someone else, interview that unnamed author about such claims or such facts? Of one thing you can be fully certain—no one is going to do that! That observer made the claims we've reposted on CNN and was never seen there again.

"After that, we start to hit?" We'll close today with thoughts about a pair of famous, highly regarded persons. We'll let Dolly Parton go first:   

I will not abandon one person, Dolly Parton is said to have said. Had she been forced to discuss the recent conduct of President Trump, what might she have said?   

The second famous person is a famous fictional person. As we noted the other day, when the Brando character begins to inquire about her values—when he possibly begins to challenge her sincerity—this is what she says:   

TERRY MALLOY: The way those sisters used to whack me, I don't know what. They thought they were gonna beat an education into me, but I foxed 'em.   

EDIE DOYLE: Maybe they just didn't know how to handle you.   

TERRY: How would you have done it?   

EDIE: With a little more patience? And kindness? 

The Brando character laughs it off. But the moral greatness of On the Waterfront involves the extremely rare undercard, in which the male character sees that "the girl" is a better person than he is and decides that he wants to learn to be more like her.   

We're not suggesting that treating the president with patience or kindness would change whatever is destined to come. But could it help in any possible way if we were willing to pity the child who had the misfortune to be born to the "sociopath" father? The child whose behavior was already so bad by seventh grade that he could no longer continue in his local private school, where his father sat on the board?   

Had his own "sociopathy" already begun to present at that point? Would it be instructive or helpful in any way to ask that author about that point?

It's too late to avoid the danger lodged in our flailing nation's current situation. That said, would it help if, just this once, we refused to use the language of mental illness as a way to issue a stinging insult—as a way to "hit?"   

By the way, is a mental illness really an illness? Have you ever seen a journalist ask?

TOXIC: As a monster attacks the "ugly chicks"...

THURSDAY, AUGUST 27, 2026

...our Blue stars refuse to respond: This morning, we posted a key part of Michelle Goldberg's column from Sunday's New York Times. 

We're big fans of Goldberg's work. In this passage, she's portraying what we would regard as a dangerous state of affairs:

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.

According to that presentation, "an aggressive contempt has been [and remains] a constant in our politics." We agree with her assessment that, at the present time, Red America is more the abuser. 

The toxicity is peddled for sport on such Fox News Channel programs as Jesse Watters Primetime and Gutfeld!. They're the second and third most watched programs in American "cable news." 

Last night, on the inane yet noxious Gutfeld! show, the toxicity and the ugly expressions of contempt got started with the opening "joke" by host Greg Gutfeld.

(The program opens with a handful of jokes, then proceeds to four or five pseudo-discussions.)

Onscreen, the "joke" was sourced to Earth.com. It was delivered at 10 o'clock sharp:   

GUTFELD (8/26/26): Good evening, everyone. Scientists recorded 420 human screams and discovered they can have many different meanings.   

The main ones are pain, fear and waking up next to this: 

PHOTO: Kathy Griffin   

AUDIENCE: Laughter   

It's an extremely unflattering photo of Griffin. Gutfeld uses it on a regular basis to subject Griffin to ugly braindead ridicule.   

New York Times "feminist" Kat Timpf gazes on at moments like this; the blowhard "Tyrus" sits by her side. Last night, their benefactor's third joke went like this:

GUTFELD: Yesterday, Dick's Sporting Goods stock dropped 28 percent. 

The last time dicks went down that fast was when these five hit the nude beach.  

PHOTO: The women of The View  

AUDIENCE: Laughter, cheers, applause

The star of the show was rolling along—and yes, he would have another:  

GUTFELD (continuing directly): As the trade war escalates, Canada is responding with stiff new tariffs on lipstick, mascara and pedicure kits—

in a move vigorously opposed by ugly chicks.    

And no, it didn't stop there.

This garbage is spilled on the stage each night as the feminist Timpf laughs along. The silence is deafening from Goldberg and from everyone else in the Blue American guild—from everyone at the New York Times; from everyone at The Atlantic; from all the deeply principled millionaires working for MS NOW.  

Aggressive toxicity pours from this source. Blue America's guardians refuse to speak, notice or care.

It's time for Goldberg to explain why this situation exists. It's silly to think that a modern nation can survive such relentless dumps of toxicity, whether from a sitting president or from a person like Gutfeld, met by such measures of cowardice.   

We're big fans of Goldberg's work; it's time for her to speak. It's clear that no one else ever will. As it says in a very old book, this is the gruesome societal breakdown our self-admiration has chosen.

REFUSALS: The president's parents saved the world!

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!