SATURDAY: A pair of defectives had some good fun...

SATURDAY, AUGUST 23, 2025

...on our most watched "cable news" program: Early this morning, the thought came to mind:

Had we ever attempted to research the concept of "compulsive lying?"

We say had we ever attempted to research that topic for the obvious reason—we aren't medical specialists here. But our journalists refuse to speak to such specialists, and so we did a bit of clicking, quickly landing on this:

Pathological lying

Pathological lying, also known as pseudologia fantastica, is a chronic behavior characterized by the habitual or compulsive tendency to lie. It involves a pervasive pattern of intentionally making false statements with the aim to deceive others, sometimes for no clear or apparent reason, and even if the truth would be beneficial to the liar. People who engage in pathological lying often report being unaware of the motivations for their lies.

In psychology and psychiatry, there is an ongoing debate about whether pathological lying should be classified as a distinct disorder or viewed as a symptom of other underlying conditions. The lack of a widely agreed-upon description or diagnostic criteria for pathological lying has contributed to the controversy surrounding its definition. But efforts have been made to establish diagnostic criteria based on research and assessment data, aligning with the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). Various theories have been proposed to explain the causes of pathological lying, including stress, an attempt to shift locus of control to an internal one, and issues related to low self-esteem. Some researchers have suggested a biopsychosocial-developmental model to explain this concept...

[...]

Pathological lying is listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), although only as a symptom of other disorders such as antisocial, narcissistic, and histrionic personality disorders, not as a stand-alone diagnosis. The former ICD-10 disorder Haltlose personality disorder is strongly tied to pathological lying. Pathological lying is represented in both the DSM-5 and ICD-11 alternative models of personality disorder which emphasize dimensions of personality dysfunction, rather than specific categorical disorders. "Deceitfulness," an aspect of the Antagonism domain, is a trait encompassing pathological lying in the DSM-5's model, while the current ICD-11 trait domain of Dissociality (analogous to DSM-5 Antagonism) holds pathological lying to be a behavioral expression of the Lack of Empathy facet...

The complex discussion goes on from there. But "pathological lying" is, in fact, a clinical term in the DSM, though only as a symptom of other disorders. 

Just yesterday, we had occasion to note the way one clinical psychologist linked antisocial and narcissistic personality disorders to one of her famous relatives in a recent best-selling book.

We did this clicking today for the obvious reason. Yesterday, we saw the commander in chief making this presentation again, as a group of malfunctioning upper-end journalists politely averted their gaze and kept their frightened traps shut:

PRESIDENT TRUMP (8/22/25):  I have said to Pam and everybody else, give them everything you can give them, because it’s a Democrat hoax. It’s just a hoax, the whole Epstein thing is a Democrat hoax.

So we had the greatest six months, seven months in the history of the presidency, and the Democrats don’t know what to do, so they keep bringing up that stuff.

But it affected them. Bill Clinton was on his plane and went to the island, supposedly 28 times. I don’t want to bring that up, frankly. You have Larry, whatever his name is, Summers, the head of Harvard, who was Jeffrey Epstein’s best friend. Nobody ever talks about that. I mean, but I don’t want to hurt Larry Summers, but he was best friends with Jeffrey Epstein.

No, this is a Democratic hoax to try and get the significance of what we’ve done over the past seven months. Nobody’s ever seen anything like it. They say it’s number one in history. What we’ve done, including stopping seven wars. I mean, just including that. And now you look at the stock market today, it’s way up to start off with, from where I took it.

There the gentleman went again, as the band failed to play on. 

The president didn't want to say what he said, but he persistently says it, with the word "supposedly" thrown in to give him a way to hide. As he keeps doing this, the journalists in the room keeping fail to challenge or question his statement, and the children at Mediaite just keep publishing what he said without a word of comment.

Yesterday, the transcripts of the two days of interviews with Ghislaine Maxwell were released. There's no obvious reason to believe anything she said, but this very morning, on Fox & Friends Weekend, we saw legal correspondent Gregg Jarrett fleetingly refer to this:

TODD BLANCHE: I think you said you don't—you're not aware of President Clinton ever going to the island?

MAXWELL: He never. Absolutely never went.

Her elaboration goes on from there. 

The fact that she made this emphatic statement doesn't mean that it's true. But there has never been any credible evidence saying that Clinton ever went to the island, despite the garbage the sitting president keeps serving to the individuals who are cast in the role of what's left of "the American press corps."

(For the record, we also know of no reason to think that Summers was Epstein's best friend. That was just crazy talk too, part of a string of crazy clams by the sitting commander.)

It was said this morning on Fox & Friends Weekend—said fleetingly, but yes it was said! It was said by Jarrett at 6:29 a.m.—and the three friends all ignored it:

Fox & Friends Weekend: August 23, 2025
Charlie Hurt: co-host, Fox & Friends Weekend
Rachel Campos-Duffy: co-host, Fox & Friends Weekend
Griff Jenkins: co-anchor, Fox News Live

They had opened the show with one of the stupidest presentations in the history of human stupidity—with a three-pronged attempt to say that Republicans are currently gerrymandering Texas because gerrymandered states like Massachusetts have forced them to do it.

The three stoopnagles took turns advancing this brainless claim, with Massachusetts offered as the featured demon. As we noted on Thursday, the New York Times has even gotten around to explaining the situation in Massachusetts. But as this nation sinks into the sea, the sheer stupidity of the Fox News Channel is one of the jagged icebergs which is bringing the ship of state down.

The exchange about the allegedly gerrymandered Bay State occurred at 6:03 a.m. In fairness, we'll guess that none of the trio of friends actually knew that what they were saying made no sense at all.

At 6:09, Campos-Duffy really began to earn her pay, saying that Kilmar Abrego Garcia and Senator Van Hollen were shown "having a margarita" together in that famous photo from El Salvador.

Actually, she actually said they were "having a margarita or whatever." With that, the genial Fox News Channel religionist seemed to be playing the president's "supposedly" game. We do feel sure that she understood the game she was playing this time.

These are the people who are working, around the clock, to sink the American ship of state, such as it is at this time. They're sinking the ship through their far-reaching dumbness, but also through their true belief in Red American tribal greatness.

Our human brains are wired this way. As we started telling you long ago, there's no obvious reason to believe that we'll be able to extricate ourselves from this ongoing tribal mess.

For what it's worth, the haplessness has also been general over Blue America. Down below, we'll link you to something Joy Reid has now said, thereby creating a bit of tape the Fox News Channel has been playing all week.

First, though, we turn to what we saw this Thursday on The Five. This array of children had been gathered together on the Fox News Channel set:

The Five: Thursday, August 21, 2025
Kennedy: former MTV VJ
Jessica Tarlov: designated Democratic pincushion
Jesse Watters: co-host, The Five
Dana Perino: co-host, The Five
Greg Gutfeld: co-host, The Five 

Kennedy sat in "the Judge Jeannine chair" as the nation's most-watched "cable news" program went on the air. Six minutes into the clownish program, a pathetic but increasingly typical exchange occurred.

It started with the practiced idiot Watters ruminating about an inaccurate report—the report that President Trump was going to go on patrol that night with the federal troops in D.C. That notion never really made sense, but it was being widely reported.

It started as Watters clowned about that. It ended as two defectives joined forces to undermine the very possibility of maintaining an American nation:

WATTERS (8/21/25): I love that Trump's going out there like a general to inspect the troops...I'm with Greg. This is the best episode of Cops we're ever going to see. 

[Laughter] 

I hope he does a field sobriety test on some sloppy drunk kid from Georgetown. I hope someone, they arrest and pull drugs out of their pocket, and Trump's like, "That's a lot of crack!"

GUTFELD: Ha ha ha ha ha.

WATTERS: I hope he goes out with the vice squad and finds Adam Schiff trying to score some dope and women at some seedy hotel on the wrong side of the tracks.

KENNEDY (off camera): "Women?"

WATTERS (chuckles): Didn't say that! Not that there's anything wrong with that!

We wondered if we'd heard that right. When we played it back, we had.

An exchange like that would be par for the course on the Gutfeld! program. As we've noted in the past, the defective culture of that grisly program has been migrating down to The Five.

At any rate, six minutes into the nation's most watched "cable news" program, a pair of employees were now playing one of their channel's favorite games. It's the game where they say that various Democrats are secretly gay, or that Michelle Obama is secretly a man.

These are defective, ill-functioning boys and girls; they're hired because they're defective. Also defective is the Blue American world, which has agreed to avert its gaze as this relentless attack on the possibility of maintaining a nation goes on and on and on.

Something is wrong with the sitting president? In fairness, over here in Blue America, something is also wrong with us!

On Fox, the following bromide obtains:

It's the stupidity, Stupid!

They keep it up all day long, and then on into the night. At 6 o'clock on weekend morning, Campos-Duffy comes on, serving those margaritas to her viewers. 

"Or whatever," of course.

Starting on Monday, we expect to sample more mental health / "mental disorder" content. We'll also try to keep you posted about what the stoopnagles have done. Last week, they were delightedly playing tape of these recent statements by Joy Reid:

Joy Reid claims 'mediocre White men' like Trump, Elvis can't 'invent anything,' steal culture from other races

You can assess the merits of her statements for yourself. Almost surely, the politics of that tape is the politics of ongoing defeat.

Regarding Senator Schiff:

Stating the obvious, it wouldn't matter if he was gay. We know of no reason to believe that he is, but many people are.

On the other hand, we give you Kennedy and Watters, bringing the demented culture of the Gutfeld! program all the way down to The Five. Please note:

As they played their soul-draining game, no one else said a word:

Dana Perino kept her trap shut. In accord with whatever theory, so did Jessica Tarlov.

Something is wrong with that channel's terrible children. Also, something is wrong with us.

FRIDAY: Concerning My Darling Clementine...

FRIDAY, AUGUST 22, 2025

...we learned from the late Roger Ebert: Our president seems to have his darling Vladimir Putin. We advise you to pity the child—to find a way to pity the child for the way the adult apparently got here.

Thanks to director John Ford, we all have My Darling Clementine. The leading authority's overview starts exactly like this:

My Darling Clementine 

My Darling Clementine is a 1946 American Western film directed by John Ford and starring Henry Fonda as Wyatt Earp during the period leading up to the gunfight at the O.K. Corral. The ensemble cast also features Victor Mature (as Doc Holliday)...

The title of the movie is borrowed from the theme song "Oh My Darling, Clementine," sung in parts over the opening and closing credits. The screenplay is based on the biography Wyatt Earp: Frontier Marshal by Stuart Lake, as were two earlier movies, both named Frontier Marshal (released in 1934 and 1939, respectively).

My Darling Clementine is regarded by many film critics as one of the best Westerns ever made. In 1991, the film was deemed "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" by the Library of Congress and selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry. It was among the third annual group of 25 films named to the registry.

[...]

Fifty years after its release, Roger Ebert reviewed the film and included it in his list of The Great Movies. He wrote it was "one of the sweetest and most good-hearted of all Westerns, unusual in making the romance between Earp and Clementine the heart of the film rather than the gunfight."

We came to appreciate the film thanks to Ebert's decency. His lengthy 1997 review can be read by clicking here. We gained a great deal from this passage:

My Darling Clementine

[...]

The gentlest moments in the movie involve Earp’s feelings for Clementine (Cathy Downs), who arrives on the stage from the East, looking for “Dr. John Holliday.” She is the girl Doc left behind. Earp, sitting outside the hotel, rises quickly to his feet as she gets out of the stage, and his movements show that he’s in awe of this graceful vision. Clementine has been seeking Doc all over the West, we learn, and wants to bring him home. Doc tells her to get out of town...

Clementine is packed to go the next morning when the marshal, awkward and shy, asks her to join him at the church service and dance. They walk in stately procession down the covered boardwalk, while Ford’s favorite hymn plays: “Shall We Gather at the River?” When the fiddler strikes up, Wyatt and Clementine dance—he clumsy but enthusiastic, and with great joy. This dance is the turning point of the movie, and marks the end of the Old West. There are still shots to be fired, but civilization has arrived.

[...]

“My Darling Clementine” must be one of the sweetest and most good-hearted of all Westerns. The giveaway is the title, which is not about Wyatt or Doc or the gunfight, but about Clementine, certainly the most important thing to happen to Marshal Earp during the story. There is a moment, soon after she arrives, when Earp gets a haircut and a quick spray of perfume at the Bon Ton Tonsorial Parlor. Clem stands close to him and says she loves “the scent of the desert flowers.” 

“That’s me,” says Earp. “Barber.”

Ford loved American music; he also loved cornball humor. His female characters were very important. In Stagecoach, the duke (John Wayne) stands up for an equally compelling lady, even in 1939. In The Searchers, we're always struck by the portrayal of the Vera Miles character, an extremely spirited young woman who's living, with her immigrant parents, next door to the end of nowhere, way out in the desert west.

(Then too, Ford made the deeply human Grapes of Wrath. He chose this lyric from the American songbook: "Do not hasten to bid me adieu.")

In My Darling Clementine, the painfully shy Fonda character finally has the courage to act on his admiration for the young woman who has arrived from the east but is about to go away on the morning stage. You can see the scene in question here. It culminates in their dance under an open sky.

Their dance is beautifully rendered. With that dance, Ebert says, civilization has come to the west.

In large part, civilization depends on the ability of the people thought of as men to respect, and to admire, the people thought of as women. More broadly, it depends on the ability of us the humans to come to terms with the challenges of sexuality, attraction and romance, which have always been very hard.

The Fonda character has his darling Clementine. Tragically, President Trump almost seems to be pursuing a darling of a different stripe. (We suggest that you pity the child.)

On programs on the Fox News Channel, many top stars are having a very hard time respecting the challenges of modern sexuality. Tomorrow, we'll show you an especially grisly example of what we're talking about. 

Despite the stories we tell ourselves, Blue America has never had much of a sexual politics either, not even during the recent period when we were briefly pretending. That said, the current backsliding on the Fox programs we have in mind is astounding and hard to believe, as is the liberal world's silence about this behavior.

Our nation is in a world of hurt. We'll need good luck to survive.

REVOLUTION: We thought we heard something at the summit!

FRIDAY, AUGUST 22, 2025

As it turned out, we were right: It has now been a full week since the Subarctic Summit. On that occasion, the leader of a revolutionary movement flew north to Alaska, in Fabian's wake, to meet with Vladimir Putin.

Since that time, his focus has shifted. He has moved on from peace in Ukraine to the pledge he made yesterday—his pledge to install new grass in all of Washington's parks.

The parks will have "all new grass," Pam Bondi has pitifully said. This is the transparently silly and childish world into which this former nation has fallen.

The trip to Alaska occurred last Friday. The revolutionary leader flew north speaking of a ceasefire, returned with a whole different outlook. 

Also, the leader has said that President Putin told him that mail-in voting can never work. On that basis, the president has vowed that mail-in voting must be made to perish from the earth—a campaign he's advancing with his standard factual claims which are clownishly inaccurate.

For ourselves, we're so old that we can still remember the Stumblebum Summit! That said, dreams of Ukraine have given ways to dreams of parks with all new grass, and a front-page analysis piece in the New York Times now carries this gloomy headline:

Trump’s Bold Talk Aside, Russia and Ukraine Remain Miles Apart on Peace

How did it ever get this far? That's what Don Corleone once asked.

In print editions, the front-page headline on that piece is a bit less frank. All in all, though, it may turn out that "all new grass" is amazingly easy, while dealing with Putin is hard.

The revolutionary leader had flown north with visions of a ceasefire dancing in his head. He had been divinely appointed to his office, Pete Hegseth's pastor had said.

By the time the summit was over—after the scheduled luncheon was cancelled—the Fox News Channel's Jacqui Heinrich seemed to be saying that things didn't seem to have gone real well. 

We give Heinrich high marks for making Fox News viewers hear the statements shown below. As she ended a gloomy synopsis, she was taking about the way things had seemed during the day's extremely brief press event, right at the end of the summit:

HEINRICH (8/15/25): ...It was just very unusual, atypical, and I think we're all awaiting the read-out, because the way it felt in the room was not good. It did not seem like things went well, and it seemed like Putin came in and steamrolled—got right into what he wanted to say and got his photo next to the president and then left. 

Of course, that is only the piece of the picture that we have right now, and certainly President Trump, who is the host and who is the president, would not want to, I think, enable something that would make him look weak. But we are eagerly awaiting to hear the background on that.

That was the end of a much longer statement; to peruse the full text, click here. That sad:

To Heinrich, the whole thing didn't seem to have gone well. At the press event, Putin had steamrolled, and then he had left. She almost made it sound like a certain revolutionary leader had been made to seem weak. For videotape pf her full remarks, you can just click this.

What had happened at that brief press event? What had the two titans said?

As we noted in Monday's report, President Putin had "steamrolled" ahead for almost nine minutes. President Trump then spoke for three.

In that same report, we reported what we thought we had heard as President Trump spoke. We referred to the "desperation friendship" he seemed to be trying to maintain with his new darling, President Putin. 

For us, we thought we heard the sound of that delusional behavior after Putin conducted his steamroll. It started when Trump said this:

PRESIDENT TRUMP (8/15/25): Well, thank you very much, Mr. President. That was very profound. And I will say that I believe we had a very productive meeting. There were many, many points that we agreed on. Most of them, I would say. A couple of big ones that we haven't quite gotten there, but we've made some headway.

So, there's no deal until there's a deal. I will call up NATO in a little while. I will call up the various people that I think are appropriate. And I'll, of course, call up President Zelenskyy and tell him about today's meeting. It's ultimately up to them. They're going to have to agree with what Marco and Steve and some of the great people from the Trump administration who've come here, Scott and John Ratcliffe, thank you very much.

But we have some of our really great leaders. They've been doing a phenomenal job. We also have some tremendous Russian business representatives here. And I think, you know, everybody wants to deal with us. We've become the hottest country anywhere in the world in a very short period of time. And, we look forward to that. We look forward to dealing—we're going to try and get this over with. We really made some great progress today.

I've always had a fantastic relationship with President Putin—with Vladimir. 

To our ear, it started with that first reference to "Vladimir"—with that first desperation use of his dear friend's first name. It sounded like desperation to us—and it sounded like a delusion.

To see the steamroll and President Trump's rejoinder, you can just click here. You can see how that first name-call sounds to you.

For ourselves, as the revolutionary leader continued, we thought we heard his "desperation fawning" grow:

PRESIDENT TRUMP (continuing from above): I've always had a fantastic relationship with President Putin—with Vladimir. We had many, many, tough meetings, good meetings. We were, interfered with by the "Russia, Russia, Russia" hoax. That made it a little bit tougher to deal with.

But he understood it. I think he's probably seen things like that during the course of his career. He's seen—he's seen it all. But we had to put up with the "Russia, Russia, Russia" hoax. He knew it was a hoax, and I knew it was a hoax.

But what was done was very criminal. But it made it harder for us to deal as a country in terms of the business and all of the things that we'd like to have dealt with. But we'll have a good chance when this is over. So just to put it very quickly, I'm going to start making a few phone calls and tell them what happened.

But we had an extremely productive meeting, and many points were agreed to. And there are just a very few that are left.

Some are not that significant. One is probably the most significant, but we have a very good chance of getting there. We didn't get there, but we have a very good chance of getting there.

I would like to thank President Putin and his entire team, whose faces who I know in many cases otherwise. Other than that, who's whose faces I get to see all the time in the newspapers. You're very—you're almost as famous as the boss. But especially this one right over here. But we had some good meetings over the years, right?

Good productive meetings over the years. And we hope to have that in the future. But let's do the most productive one right now. We're going to stop really 5,000, 6,000, 7,000—thousands of people a week from being killed. And President Putin wants to see that as much as I do.

So again, Mr. President, I'd like to thank you very much, and we'll speak to you very soon and probably see you again very soon.

Thank you very much, Vladimir.

PUTIN: Next time in Moscow.

TRUMP: Oh, that's an interesting one. I don't know, I'll get a little heat on that one, but I could see it possibly happening.

Thank you very much, Vladimir.

He first-named "Vladimir" two more times as his three minutes mercifully ended. We thought we heard him protesting too much—insisting that the friendship really does exist as he reminisced about all the great meetings he had enjoyed with all those great Russian leaders.

Is something wrong with President Trump? Peter Baker isn't allowed to ask. We've asked that blindingly obvious question again and again and again.

For the record, we'll guess that our hearing is good! Last Friday, we thought we heard the markers of a "desperation friendship"—of an imagined friendship, a friendship that doesn't exist. And sure enough:

In the days which followed, darling Vladimir has continued to bomb kindergartens, hospitals, apartments and schools, even as his delusional counterpart has gushed about the peaceful happy feeling that obtained when his darling Vlad got off his plane in Alaska.

It can't be faked, he seemed to say, to the trio of friends at Fox. We're willing to guess that it can!

He has also talked about the way his darling Vlad 'very happily" picked up the phone when he called him on Monday. And dear God and all the angels and saints! This apparently delusional man actually said these words to someone we all should pity—to French president Emmanuel Macron:

PRESIDENT TRUMP (8/18/25): I think he wants to make a deal. I think he wants to make a deal for me. 

Do you understand that? As crazy as it sounds.

[Addressing the entire room]

Sit down. Sit down, everybody. I think we’ll let the press come in for a minute.

By Monday, he was even saying that! So go ahead, you mental giants! Go ahead and tell us that what we thought we heard last Friday was, as usual, wrong!

Is something wrong with President Trump? In the toughest parts of her best-selling book, Too Much and Never Enough, his niece the clinical psychologist said such things as these about her famous uncle:

MARY L. TRUMP (pages 12-13): 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.

[...]

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 fact is, Donald’s pathologies are so complex and his behaviors so often inexplicable that coming up with an accurate and comprehensive diagnosis would require a full battery of psychological and neuropsychological tests that he’ll never sit for. 

At present, "sociopath" isn't a clinical term. That said, at various points in her book, Mary Trump directly applied the term to the president's father. She also said that the diagnostic equivalent of that term might well apply to President Trump himself.

She seemed to say that her uncle's "psychopathologies" are numerous. All across the American press corps, it has been agreed that this part of her book, and this fairly obvious possibility, must never be discussed.

In other parts of her (very thoughtful) book, Mary Ttump explains the way the sitting president came to be the way he is. She displays great sympathy for the child whose mother took sick when he was just two,, even as she voices great concern about the highly "dangerous" adult.

With that, we offer a full disclosure. Try not to be embarrassed:

In her book, Mary Trump discusses, at some length, the difficulty her uncle came to have with respect to the ability to experience love. She explains this in terms of certain aspects of his profoundly unfortunate upbringing—in terms of his mother's absence due to serious medical problems and his father's overt sociopathy.

Pity the child, she seems to be saying, even as she says that we should we fear the dangerous adult. In the past week, the adult man has persistently described the delusional friendship he thinks he shares with his great friend and his darling, Vladimir Putin, whose feelings just can't be faked.

Is something wrong with President Trump? If so, that's a great human tragedy. If so, what might the "psychopathologies" be to which his niece referred?

For better or worse, people like Peter Baker will never approach a medical specialist to ask some such question. It seems to us that the president's behaviors constantly suggest the presence of delusional thinking especially about himself, along with the presence of powerful fixed ideas.

During his first term, he maintained a "bromance" with Kim Jong Un, weirdly discussing the way the two had "fallen in love." That was dismissed as a joke at the time, but we thought we heard a desperation friendship this Tuesday when he talked about the peaceful easy feeling as Vladimir got off his plane.

The day before, he even said that his darling Vladimir was going to fashion a peace deal—that he was going to do that for him!

We heard the voice of Gretta Conroy when we heard him say that. One difference:

In Joyce's famous novella, The Dead, she was describing a real event. The president seems to be locked in a type of a fantasy

Our journalists refuse to discuss these manifestations. In effect, it's one major group of Palookas refusing to discuss another.

They refuse to discuss the apparent delusions. They refuse to center their work on the astonishing way he traffics in ludicrous misstatements of fact.

They refuse to discuss his possible paranoia, or the vast extent of his anger. When they would interview Mary Trump, they would stay away from such topics. Meanwhile, Dr. Bandy X. Lee is long gone from her position at Yale.

Our final thought?

We'll guess that the president's ultimate delusion may concern a delusional belief in his own cosmic greatness. According to his niece the clinical psychologist, he was being mocked as "The Great I-Am" by the time he was 11 or 12. She also describes the way his sociopathic father raised him to think that way.

The president has called himself "a very stable genius." Ludicrously, he boasts about the way he keeps acing cognitive tests which no one else could pass. Delusionally, he doesn't seem to have any idea of how transparently stupid this self-idolatry is.

He was raised this way, his niece says—he was raised to be drenched in such delusions. Our guess would be that he is somehow compelled to see himself as a colossus astride the world—as the equivalent of global strongmen like Putin and Xi, far superior to mere Euro leaders.

That would be an amateur's guess. People like Peter Baker won't speak to experienced specialists.

By Tuesday, he was describing the peaceful happy feeling when Vladimir stepped off his plane. For his part, Vladimir was still bombing hospitals every night. The president would soon move ahead to a promise of "all new grass."

A bunch of Palookas enable this gong-show. This is the way the world ends!

THURSDAY: Massachusetts miasma un-muddled again!

THURSDAY, AUGUST 21, 2025

New York Times echoes Daily Howler: The Massachusetts "gerrymander" muddle has been unpacked again!

This muddle has been vexing the various savants employed by the Fox News Channel. For now, we'll take you back to the August 12 edition of The Will Cain Show (4 p.m., Monday through Friday).

Cain was sure that the Massachusetts congressional map just had to have been gerrymandered. His evidence, such as his evidence was, went exactly like this:

CAIN (8/12/25): It just kind of flies in the face of reality when I look at the state of Massachusetts, where Donald Trump gets 35% of the votes and there are zero Republican representatives from the state.

Words say one thing, and actions do something else in a place like Massachusetts. So, you can’t–so you can’t bring up random words and actions to me when I see the evidence in these states.

We'll link you to the full discussion below. Simply put, Cain was saying that Democrats do engage in gerrymandering, just like Texas is now doing. Just look at Massachusetts, where Candidate Trump got 35% of the vote—but all nine members of the state's delegation to the House of Representatives are Democrats! 

Please don't say that isn't a gerrymander! Any such statement flies in the face of reality!

Full disclosure: Sometimes, Democrats do gerrymander their congressional districts. The state of Illinois is a current prime example.

Also this: 

Will Cain is perfectly bright, in the basic IQ sense. Because of that observable fact, we sometimes find it hard to believe that he's being fully sincere in some of the mandated talking points he agrees to agree with.

This isn't necessarily one of those cases! As we've noted several times in recent weeks, the logic of redistricting and gerrymandering is routinely misconstrued. We're going to guess that Brother Cain didn't know why his presentation about the Bay State didn't make a whole lot of sense.

Today, this vexing piece of logic has been clarified for all time. In the New York Times, Nate Cohn has slain the dragon in an analysis piece which starts exactly like this:

Trump Says Massachusetts’ All-Blue Map Is Unfair. Is He Right?

It’s easy to understand why President Trump and Republicans point to the Massachusetts congressional map in their push to justify redistricting in Texas and other red states.

Last year, Mr. Trump won 36 percent of the state’s vote, but neither he nor Republican House candidates managed to win even one of nine congressional districts. The state’s map plan has been ranked as “more skewed” than 95 percent of plans nationwide by PlanScore, a nonprofit group that is advised by legal scholars, political scientists and mapping experts.

It certainly sounds unfair, but is it a gerrymander? That’s not so simple.

While it might seem reasonable to expect that Republicans would win three or four seats with more than a third of the presidential vote, it’s really not obvious that Republicans should win a single district in Massachusetts, let alone three. 

As always, we'd say that Coen is being too kind when he excuses the endless MAGA muddle about this basic point. Someone should have explained the logic of this matter to President Trump long ago—not that it would have made any difference.

That said, the incomprehension is general over the discourse with respect to this general topic. As he continues, Cohen explains what we've explained several times in the past few weeks. using similar numbers:

COEN (continuing directly): The problem is geography—or more specifically, the geographic distribution of a party’s voters across the state. For better or worse, congressional districts represent the voters of the different geographic areas of a state; they don’t directly represent a state’s voters. There is no guarantee that the state’s population as a whole will be well represented by the winners of each of a state’s geographic areas. This is at the heart of why it can be hard to detect—let alone prohibit—partisan gerrymandering.

Imagine, for instance, a state that votes 60-40 for one party, with every neighborhood voting 60-40. If so, it is impossible to draw a district for the minority party: While there are plenty of minority party voters, there’s no area that can be drawn to represent that party’s voters.

That's what we've been saying! If the population of a 60-40 state is evenly distributed across the state, it may be impossible to create a district which doesn't tilt strongly in favor of the statewide majority party.

Massachusetts is one such state. As Coen explains, there is no significant region of the state which doesn't tilt Democratic.

The heavily Democratic state of Maryland is different. Here in Maryland, we have one part of the state—the so-called "Eastern Shore" on the eastern side of the Chesapeake Bay—which tilts fairly strongly Republican.

Massachusetts has no such outlier region. For that reason, Maryland has one (1) Republican congressman. Massachusetts has none.

Coen goes into substantial detail about this elementary piece of logic. Not being the more typical Fox News Channel tribune, it seems to us that Cain should already have figured this out on his own.

To see him trying to puzzle this out, you can simply click this link for videotape of the August 12 show, as supplied by Mediaite. On that occasion, he was debating Texas state Rep. James Talarico, a Democrat, about this general matter.

For the record, Rep. Talarico didn't we explain the logic of this matter himself! He just kept noting that a Republican governor in Massachusetts had approved the existing congressional map.

With his new report, Coen has explained this matter in detail, convincingly slaying a dragon. In closing, though, we offer this basic point:

It won't make a lick of difference! Our discourse runs on the rocket fuel of endlessly bungled logic. 

The bungling is part of a widespread consensus. Nothing can, and nothing will, ever change that fact!

REVOLUTION: There was a peaceful happy feeling...

THURSDAY, AUGUST 21, 2025

...when Vladimir stepped off his plane: Is it possible that something good will emerge from the Trump-Witkoff diplomacy?

In theory, everything's possible! That said, it's as we noted in yesterday afternoon's report:

In his new column for the New York Times, Thomas Friedman quotes lengthy statements by Witkoff—lengthy statements about Vladimir Putin—which seem to have come from the twilight zone. Then too, there's what the sitting American president said when he spoke about this matter for twenty-five minutes this past Tuesday morning.

The venue may have been a bit of a problem. The president spoke for twenty-five minutes on the D-minus morning program, Fox & Friends.

He spoke to a trio of C-minus students. Later that same day, Tom Nichols tried to describe what had happened, writing for The Atlantic:

Trump Keeps Defending Russia

This morning, the commander in chief made clear that he does not understand the largest war in Europe, what started it, or why it continues. Worse, insofar as he does understand anything about Russia’s attempted conquest of Ukraine, he seems to have internalized old pro-Moscow talking points that even the Kremlin doesn’t bother with anymore.

The setting, as it so often is when Trump piles into a car with his thoughts and then goes full Thelma & Louise off a rhetorical cliff, was Fox & Friends. The Fox hosts, although predictably fawning, did their best to keep the president from the ledge, but when Trump pushes the accelerator, everyone goes along for the ride.

The subject, ostensibly, was Trump’s supposed diplomatic triumph at [Monday's] White House meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and seven European leaders...Trump ran through the usual items: The war was Joe Biden’s fault; the “Russia, Russia, Russia hoax”; the war never would have happened if Trump had been president. Unto ages of ages, amen.

But when the hosts asked specifically about making peace, the president of America sounded a lot like the president of Russia.

That's the way Nichols started. He didn't make it sound good. 

On this campus, we had happened to see the last few minutes of the Fox & Friends interview in real time. We read the Nichols piece before we reviewed the full session.

Regarding that 25-minute session, let us say this about that:

You can watch the whole darn thing simply by clicking this. We're forced to say that, when we did, the president's adoption of the Russkie viewpoint sounded even more extreme than what Nichols had said.

Also, the president spoke, once again, of his recent encounters with his current best friend.

In fairness, we aren't Russia policy experts here—but we may know how to step outside the narrowest lanes of understanding when we listen to President Trump. Along the way in his Fox & Friends session, he spoke of his personal interaction with his darling Vladimir in Alaska on Friday last.

He thought back on that personal meeting way up north. When he did, here's what he said:

PRESIDENT TRUMP (8/19/25): [The Russians] had no communication with the White House for years as people died—years, with Biden and his people. No communication! Putin told me—years! It was years when he didn't speak to anyone from the White House. And it was a long time that he didn't speak to anybody from Europe.

No, it's a fractured relationship. And when I came in, I always had, despite the Russia, Russia, Russia hoax, which truly was a very dangerous thing for our country, but despite that I maintained a very good relationship. 

I mean, you saw that when he got off his plane, I got off my plane, there’s a warmth there that you can’t—you know, there’s a decent feeling, and it’s a good thing, not a bad thing. 

People will say, "Oh, it's such a terrible thing." It's not a terrible thing.

Borrowing from the Eagles, it was a peaceful happy feeling as the two friends stepped off their planes. Indeed, "There's a warmth there that you can't"—at that point, what did the president leave unsaid?

There's a warmth there that you can't fake or misconstrue? Is that what the president meant?

So said the American president. He said it's not a terrible thing that he and Putin share this peaceful easy feeling—this warmth. Regarding that, we must quickly add this:

The president said it's not a terrible thing. For better or worse, correctly or otherwise, many Russia experts don't believe that it's a "thing" at all!

Rightly or wrongly, many observers believe that Trump is getting played by this former KGB man. There's no way to prove some such assessment—but as he spoke with the trio of friends, Trump also described his phone call with his friend on Monday afternoon Eastern time—the call he made in the course of his meeting with President Zelensky and a phalanx of Euro officials.

At one point, President Trump rang Moscow up. Here's how the phone call went, he now told the three friends at Fox:

PRESIDENT TRUMP: I think [the European leaders] sort of knew at the end of the meeting I was going to call President Putin. And President Putin expected it and he was there.

Now by the time I called him, it was one o'clock in the morning in Russia. Russia is a big place. You know, they have eleven time zones, I believe. Nine or eleven, but I think it's eleven. 

Think of it—eleven time zones! That's a lot of time zones. So it was late—it was like one o'clock in the morning, but he picked it up very happily. Sure, he works very hard, like we all do. 

And we had a very good call. And I told him that, "We’re going to set up a meeting with President Zelensky, and you and he will meet. And then after that meeting, if everything works out OK, I’ll meet and we’ll wrap it up."

Despite the profusion of time zones (eleven!), Vladimir took the prearranged call. He picked UP the phone very happily, and the two men had a good call.

Speaking with the trio of friends, the president left the impression that he had then told Vladimir what would come next, and that Valdimir had happily acceded to the president's plan. 

Sadly, this is the rest of the story:

Despite the very happy call, the Russkies have now splashed cold water on the plan that President Trump described. They've said that any such meeting with President Zelensky is, at best, a long way off. There is, of course, no way to know if the president's account of the good, happy call was accurate to begin with.

There had been a peaceful happy feeling as Putin stepped off his plane. There was a warmth between these two titans—a warmth you simply can't [fake]. And it was, of course, at Monday's meeting where President Trump took poor Macron aside.

He took him aside and made him listen to this remarkable suggestion:

PRESIDENT TRUMP (8/18/25): I think he wants to make a deal. I think he wants to make a deal for me. 

Do you understand that? As crazy as it sounds.

[Addressing the entire room]

Sit down. Sit down, everybody. I think we’ll let the press come in for a minute.

"As crazy as it sounds," the president said, he has the impression that Vladimir Putin wants to make a deal for peace. More specifically, he thinks Putin wants to make a peace deal for him—for President Donald J. Trump!

We can't help thinking that we're hearing a type of delusion floating around inside these strange remarks. We know that we thought we heard the voice of Gretta Conroy when Trump made that last strange comment—when he said he thinks that President Putin wants to make a deal for him.

We thought we heard her speaking about the gentle boy who, she said, had "died for me"—the gentle boy who had died for her when he was just seventeen.

("I can see him so plainly," she said. "Such eyes as he had: big, dark eyes! And such an expression in them.")

At any rate, Putin wants to make a peace deal—and he wants to do it for President Trump! The president was willing to say that it sounds crazy—but we'll guess he really believed what he said when he said those words to Macron.

We've yet to show you what the president said last Friday in the very brief press event at the end of the Anchorage summit. We've yet to revisit what Mary Trump said about her famous uncle's profusion of "psychopathologies" in her best-selling book, Too Much and Never Enough. 

We've yet to revisit what she said about the way her famous uncle came to be the way he is. Even as late as 2020, she was still able to pity the child, even as she voiced her great fears about the adult.

We have only one day left this week. (Saturday has already been slotted to belong to Joy Reid.)

That said, were we right in what we thought we heard when President Trump spoke to Macron? Were we hearing some sort of delusion being given voice by the world's most powerful man? 

Also this:

In these deeply challenging times, will the withered voices of Blue America ever agree to consider such points? A withered discourse helped bring us here. Will we ever improve our game?

Tomorrow: As spoken way up north

WEDNESDAY: Please listen "inside" what the president said!

WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 20, 2025

Also, Friedman quotes Steve Witkoff: In this morning's report, we compared something President Trump recently said to a famous statement by Gretta Conroy in Joyce's acclaimed novella, The Dead.

Trump was speaking to President Macron; the Joyce character was speaking to her husband, Gabriel. Here on this sprawling campus, when we heard the audiotape of the more recent statement, we immediately thought of the other.

The statements in questions are these:

From the pages of this week's news:

PRESIDENT TRUMP (8/18/25): I think he wants to make a deal. I think he wants to make a deal for me. 

Do you understand that? As crazy as it sounds.

[Addressing the entire room]

Sit down. Sit down, everybody. I think we’ll let the press come in for a minute.

From Joyce's novella, 1914:

“I suppose you were in love with this Michael Furey, Gretta,” he said.

“I was great with him at that time,” she said.

Her voice was veiled and sad. Gabriel, feeling now how vain it would be to try to lead her whither he had purposed, caressed one of her hands and said, also sadly:

“And what did he die of so young, Gretta? Consumption, was it?”

“I think he died for me,” she answered.

Here on this campus, when we heard the more recent statement, it sounded a bit like the other. In suggesting that you consider the pair of statements, we're suggesting that you start to listen with your feelings—quite possibly, with the insights the poets alone can provide.

As Gretta Conroy's revelation continues, we learn that her assessment—“I think he died for me,” she said—was based on a firm foundation. President Trump's statement to Macron sounds quite different to us.

What can we learn from the sound of that statement? We 'll pick up there tomorrow, eventually returning to Mary Trump's best-selling book, Too Much and Neve Enough. For today, we'll suggest that you consider Thomas Friedman's new column for the New York Times.

We're not crazy about the headline. But here's how the column begins:

Ukraine Diplomacy Reveals How Un-American Trump Is

I am really trying to be fair in analyzing the Trump-Putin-Zelensky-Europe drama that has been playing out the past few weeks. I am trying to balance President Trump’s commendable desire to end the murderous war in Ukraine with the utterly personalized, seat-of-the-pants, often farcical way he is going about it—including the energy that everyone involved has to expend feeding his ego and avoiding his wrath, before they even get to the hellish compromises needed to make peace.

For now, the whole thing leaves me deeply uncomfortable.

I have covered a lot of diplomatic negotiations since becoming a journalist in 1978, but I have never seen one when where one of the leaders—in this case Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky—felt the need to thank our president about 15 times in the roughly four and a half minutes he addressed him with the press in the room. Not to mention the flattery that our other European allies felt they needed to heap on him as well.

When our allies have to devote this much energy just to keep the peace with our president, before they even begin to figure out how to make peace with Vladimir Putin; when they have to constantly look over their shoulder to make sure that Trump is not shooting them in the back with a social media post, before Putin shoots them in the front with a missile; and when our president doesn’t understand that when Putin says to Ukraine, in effect “Marry me or I’ll kill you,” that Zelensky needs more than just an American marriage counselor, it all leads me to ask: How is this ever going to work?

For our money, Friedman is being overly "fair" when he accepts the characterization according to which President Trump is exhibiting a "commendable desire to end the murderous war in Ukraine." 

We know of no reason to believe it's as simple as that—or even that it's anything like that at all.

Beyond that, Friedman describes the hoops our "allies" must jump through as they try to work with the sitting president. Friedman says this raises a troubling question:

How is this ever going to work?

In our view, it also raises the pair of questions we've now been asking for years:

Is something wrong with President Trump? Also, why isn't anyone willing to ask?

The press corps has agreed that those last two questions must never be asked. It seems to us that, if we listen to what the president said to Macron, we may be hearing a part of the answer to the first of those two questions.

In his column, Friedman proceeds to quote Steve Witkoff at substantial length. More specifically, he quotes statements in which Witkoff offers his assessment of Vladimir Putin, with whom he has been negotiating on President Trump's behalf.

Witkoff's lengthy statements sound almost completely delusional. At one point, Friedman says this:

FRIEDMAN: It gets worse. Trump is so deluded as to Putin’s nature that during his summit with European leaders on Monday he was overheard on an open microphone telling President Emmanuel Macron of France about Putin: “I think he wants to make a deal for me. Do you understand that? As crazy as it sounds.”

Interesting! That said, delusion can be a colloquial term, or it can also go clinical.

In fairness to Witkoff, he may simply be saying what he feels he has to say, given the outlook of the man who has made him our leading ambassador.

When we listened to Trump this week, we also thought we heard the voice of Gretta Conroy. In the next few days, we'll tell you what we thought we heard. 

Mary Trump's book still seems highly instructive to us. Is there any chance—any chance at all—that we Blues can improve our game?

Hitting the links: The Dead became a feature film in 1987, starring Anjelica Huston. Don't cheat yourself out of the chance to see her perform the scene in which, weeping, Gretta Conroy explains her statement:

I think he died for me.

 To watch that scene, click here.

To read that scene as Joyce wrote it, you can simply click this link, then scroll to the end of the story.

 

REVOLUTION: "I think he died for me," she said!

WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 20, 2025

On Monday, Trump said something quite similar: On Monday, the president spoke to Emmanuel Macron, president of a vexatious nation called France.

His words were captured by an active mike. He'd just spoken to Putin on the phone. Strangely enough, the president now said this:

PRESIDENT TRUMP (8/18/25): I think he wants to make a deal. I think he wants to make a deal for me. 

Do you understand that? As crazy as it sounds.

[Addressing the entire room]

Sit down. Sit down, everybody. I think we’ll let the press come in for a minute.

He seemed to be saying that Vladimir Putin wanted to fashion a peace deal. More remarkably, he seemed to be saying that Putin wanted to fashion a peace deal for him, apparently as some sort of favor for the sitting American president

The president said that sounded crazy. We're strongly inclined to agree.

We also agree with the various analysts who have said it was a very strange moment when Trump said that to Macron.  Also this:

When we heard the tap of what Trump said, we thought of the great novella by Joyce. Inevitably, we thought of the climactic scene of the acclaimed story, The Dead.

 The leading authority guides us:

The Dead (Joyce short story)

"The Dead" is the final short story in the 1914 collection Dubliners by James Joyce. It is by far the longest story in the collection and, at 15,952 words, is almost long enough to be described as a novella. The story deals with themes of love and loss, as well as raising questions about the nature of the Irish identity.

The story was well-received by critics and academics and described by T. S. Eliot as one of the greatest English-language short stories ever written. It was later adapted into...the 1987 film The Dead written by Tony Huston and directed by John Huston.

[...]

Joyce biographer and critic Richard Ellmann wrote: "In its lyrical, melancholy acceptance of all that life and death offer, 'The Dead' is a linchpin in Joyce's work."...On the centennial of the release of Dubliners, Dan Barry of The New York Times called "The Dead" "just about the finest short story in the English language."

This story offers a critique of a society that has been gripped by a deadening paralysis of the spirit...

Ah yes, the "deadening paralysis of the spirit"—the paralysis that had somehow managed to grip the Irish society Joyce believed he saw around him. But let's focus on the direct connection between that widely acclaimed short story and the peculiar thing the president recently said.

We turn now to the end of Joyce's story—to the end of a long and convivial night: 

The elderly sisters Kate and Julia Morkan have staged their annual party in celebration of Twelfth Night. Now, as the party is winding down, a revelation is drawing near. It will involve Gabriel Conroy, nephew to the Misses Morkan, and his wife, Gretta Conroy:

As the party winds down, the guests filter out, and Gabriel prepares to leave. He finds his wife standing, apparently lost in thought, at the top of the stairs. In another room Bartell D'Arcy sings "The Lass of Aughrim." 

The Conroys leave; and Gabriel is excited, for it has been a long time since he and Gretta have had a night in a hotel to themselves. When they arrive at the hotel, Gabriel's aspirations of passionate lovemaking are conclusively dashed by Gretta's lack of interest. 

He presses her about what is bothering her, and she admits that she is "thinking about that song, The Lass of Aughrim." She admits that it reminds her of someone, a young man named Michael Furey, who had courted her in her youth in Galway. He used to sing "The Lass of Aughrim" for her. 

Michael Furey used to sign that song for her, she says. She has thereby started to echo the president's peculiar statement. 

Her revelation continues from there. You can see Anjelica Huston performing this scene simply by clicking this. Our advice to you would be this:

Don't cheat yourself out of watching.

For our money, the actor Donal McCann, playing her husband, may not have captured the scene in quit the way she did. We'll attribute that to imperfect direction. But as you can see by clicking this, these are the lines from Joyce's original text in which the revelation about Michael Furey is being completed:

“He is dead,” she said at length. “He died when he was only seventeen. Isn’t it a terrible thing to die so young as that?”

“What was he?” asked Gabriel, still ironically.

“He was in the gasworks,” she said.

Gabriel felt humiliated by the failure of his irony and by the evocation of this figure from the dead, a boy in the gasworks. While he had been full of memories of their secret life together, full of tenderness and joy and desire, she had been comparing him in her mind with another.

[...]

“I suppose you were in love with this Michael Furey, Gretta,” he said.

“I was great with him at that time,” she said.

Her voice was veiled and sad. Gabriel, feeling now how vain it would be to try to lead her whither he had purposed, caressed one of her hands and said, also sadly:

“And what did he die of so young, Gretta? Consumption, was it?”

“I think he died for me,” she answered.

(“Poor fellow,” Gretta soon says. “He was very fond of me and he was such a gentle boy.")

I think he died for me, she said. For our money, Anjelica Huston's performance of this story cuts extremely deep.

More than a century later, the strange man who is this nation's sitting president made a somewhat similar declaration, in this case regarding the deep friendship he seems to believe he maintains with Russia's Vladimir Putin.

Gretta's story continues from there. We thought of that famous scene from The Dead when we heard the tape of what the president recently said. 

At this juncture, we'll recommend this part of the synopsis we've posted above:

The Dead offers a critique of a society that has been gripped by a deadening paralysis of the spirit...

Our own society lies in the grip of a similar paralysis. That deadening paralysis is reflected, on a minute to minute basis, by the shriveled way our own Blue American tribunes are willing or able to discuss the remarkable oddness of the sitting president, the revolutionary leader in question.

Is something wrong with President Trump? If so, that would of course be a human tragedy—but under the circumstances, it would also represent a dangerous state of affairs.

Is something wrong with President Trump? The tribunes of our deadened world have agreed to avoid that obvious question. This Monday, the question loomed up again, as the president made a very strange declaration in a whispered aside to the president of France.

He seems to think that the man he calls "Vladimir" wants to fashion a peace deal—wants to fashion a peace deal for him! Presumably, this's an example of delusional thinking of the highest possible order.

What might that mean about President Trump? Tomorrow and Friday, we'll return to that question—but we leave you today with this broader point:

Those of us in Blue America need to step beyond our own tribe's deadened spirit. We need to see ourselves for who we are—and for who we plainly aren't at this point.

We need to find a richer way of understanding our current predicament. We may need to find the way that our deadened civilization can be "renewed by...the undemocratic but sovereign power of the imagination, by the undemocratic power which makes poets the unacknowledged legislators of all mankind, the power which makes all things new."

We may be able to do some such by stepping outside the intellectual and spiritual poverty of the moment—the poverty of the shriveled discourse which emerges from our current round-the-clock pseudo-news environment.

We may need to let our feelings bloom, perhaps by consulting the poets, with Joyce as one example.

"I think he died for me," she said. As her story continues, we see that the weeping Gretta wasn't caught in the grip of a delusion in her thought about the gentle boy who died when he was just 17. 

Almost surely, our sitting president is. We very badly need to discuss the actual situation our deadened society is in.

We need to get wiser and deeper and better. What is actually going on within that peculiar man—within the revolutionary leader who, we're told, was divinely appointed to his current post?

Tomorrow: Delusions and fixed ideas

TUESDAY: Matt Bai says he has found the villains!

TUESDAY, AUGUST 19, 2025 

Could the villain really be him? The fury had to go somewhere today. When the sitting president awoke, the fury and rage went here:

Trump Wakes Up to Trash ‘STUPID AND UGLY WINDMILLS’ for ‘KILLING’ New Jersey

That's the headline on the Mediaite report. To read the actual Truth Social post, you can just click here.

That's where the fury went first. Last night, on the Gutfeld! show, Greg Gutfeld started with one of his typical jokes about the way Taylor Swift is really just a 6. Soon, he was offering a sally about the alleged effect on crime of the president's takeover of the D.C. police. 

In our view, the comment came from within a peculiar, unexplained soul:

GUTFELD (8/18/25): It's gotten so quiet on the streets that you can hear Rashida Tlaib's mustache growing.

[LAUGHTER, APPLAUSE]

Pathetically, LAUGHTER, APPLAUSE! At any rate, President Trump is full of fury and anger, and so is this "cable news" star.

For the record, "Tayler Swift is just a 6" is a standard theme for this aging moral pervert. So too with the physical insults—fat as a cow; not sexually attractive; too many facelifts—he aims at every (liberal, progressive, Democratic) woman who swims into his ken.

Night after night after night after night, we remain amazed by his unrecognizable conduct. We're even more amazed by the fact that his nightly behavior has been thoroughly normalized—has been completely accepted—by our tribunes here in Blue America, by the people we now call "The Best."

It's a very depressing time to glance about the society. That disordered fellow's moral squalor has been thoroughly normalized. So is President Trump's constant massacre of anything known to be an actual fact.

Unfortunately, the normalization performed by us Blues is as bad as the peculiar conduct displayed by (so many of) them Reds. We offer that as a prelude to a recent column by Matt Bai.

The column appeared in the Washington Post. Headline included, it started off like this:

Our institutions aren’t failing. We are.

There’s a lot of talk now about failing institutions. Every time President Donald Trump pushes the boundaries of his power—this month alone, he commanded Texas to create more Republican congressional seats and staged a hostile takeover of D.C.—his critics ask: Will no one stand in his way? Where are the pillars of democracy when we need them?

I’ve raised these questions myself, yet lately I’m coming around to another way of thinking. Maybe the most culpable institution in our national breakdown isn’t any branch of government or industry—but rather the American people.

We’re the ones expressly charged with holding a rogue president accountable, and we’re failing spectacularly.

We the people are "failing spectacularly," Bai has decided to tell us. From there, he proceeds to slice the lunch meat remarkably thin, eventually serving this:

I’m not talking about the large segment of voters who disdain Trump, or the celebrity-loving Trumpists who would make him Pharaoh if they could. I’m talking mainly about the centrist and conservative voters who wince at what Trump does and wish he were a better person—but for whom tax cuts and anti-woke policies seem worth the trade-off. These are the voters who got Trump elected, and these are the voters who enable him still, more than any judge or congressman.

It isn't all Trump voters, just some—and it certainly isn't Us! So says the incoherent diagnostician of modern-day moral greatness.

There's no great gain likely to come from an attempt to say who is really at fault. To Bai, we'd be inclined to offer this:

Mother-frumper, heal thyself! 

Mofo, heal thyself—it's an ancient bromide! In this instance, we're aiming it at "the knights of the keyboard" (Ted Williams) who simply aren't willing to come to terms with the president's apparent mental disorder, or with the moral and intellectual squalor of astonishing people like Gutfeld and his pals at the Fox News Channel.

The homunculus keeps telling us that Swift is really a 6! The desire of men of his type to subjugate women goes all the way back to the dawn of the West—all the way back to the opening verses of the Iliad, to cite one famous example.

(Everyone in the Achaean camp is aversion of Jeffrey Epstein.)

The impulse is deeply bred in the bone. A first cousin to this impulse lies at the heart of a great deal of the religious zeal which helps propel the current revolution. Greg Gutfeld suffers from the misfortune of having this poison and this consummate dumbness within. 

He works his woman hatred night after night. As he does, the much finer people—the people like Bai—know they must look away.

Also this: Gutfeld's undisguised misogyny is never mentioned at Mediaite. 

The misogyny is wholly undisguised—but even then, it can't be mentioned! It's the ancient cable news "problem that has no name!"

REVOLUTION: Revolutionary madness is in the air!

TUESDAY, AUGUST 19, 2025 

Who is the sitting president? On this very morning, the madcap madness of revolution was possibly in the air.

To appearances, that madness maybe possibly seemed to be lurking in several major headlines. In this morning's New York Times, one news report starts like this:

Trump Wants to End Mail-In Voting Ahead of Next Year’s Midterms

President Trump vowed on Monday to lead a movement to eliminate the use of mail-in ballots, continuing his legally dubious crusade against the nation’s voting rules, which he has long attacked and falsely blamed for his 2020 election loss.

Mr. Trump, who has opposed mail-in voting for years, wrote on social media that he would sign an executive order to “help bring HONESTY to the 2026 Midterm Elections,” though neither he nor White House officials provided any detail about what the order would entail. Later on Monday, while meeting with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, Mr. Trump said the executive order was being written “by the best lawyers in the country” to end all mail-in ballots.

As we noted yesterday afternoon, the president's vow was driven along by his usual wild misstatements. Adding to the air of madness, the news report includes this:

Last week, Mr. Trump said President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia had discussed the issue of mail-in voting during their summit on Friday in Alaska. Mr. Trump said in an interview with Fox News that the Russian leader had agreed with him that the 2020 election had been rigged in favor of Joseph R. Biden Jr.

“You know, Vladimir Putin said something, one of the most interesting things,” Mr. Trump said. “He said, ‘Your election was rigged because you have mail-in voting.’ He said, ‘Mail-in voting, every election.’ He said, ‘No country has mail-in voting. It’s impossible to have mail-in voting and have honest elections.’”

Having flown to Alaska to discuss a war, the pair were now talking about mail-in voting? At any rate, the upshot was this—after Dear Vladimir allegedly trashed the procedure, the sitting president jetted home and made a vow to ban it.

In fact, many countries have mail-in voting. The madness of the president's personal culture of endless misstatements is marbled all through this crusade. With respect to that personal culture of madness and crazy misstatement, this report is sitting on the front page of this morning's print editions:

An Ohio City Faces a Future Without Haitian Workers: ‘It’s Not Going to Be Good’
Springfield faced a crisis after Donald Trump falsely claimed Haitians were eating pets. Now his policies are driving out workers like Wilford Rinvil, who left for Canada.

Springfield, Ohio now seems be facing some problems. That's the story that was driven by the crazy misstatements, by the president and by the disordered beast at his side, about the way the Haitian residents were eating the city's pets.

Mail-in voting takes place all over the world; no one was eating the pets. That said, madness tends to accompany revolution. Skipping past this additional headline—"Trump Administration Scraps Research Into Health Disparities"—we'll note that a different type of revolution gripped China way back when. 

It was called the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. Just like that, and with great fury and great ardor, madness was in the air:

Cultural Revolution

The Cultural Revolution, formally known as the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, was a sociopolitical movement in the People's Republic of China (PRC). It was launched by CCP chairman Mao Zedong in 1966 and lasted until his death in 1976. Its stated goal was to preserve Chinese socialism by purging remnants of capitalist and traditional elements from Chinese society.

In May 1966, with the help of the Cultural Revolution Group, Mao launched the Revolution and said that bourgeois elements had infiltrated the government and society with the aim of restoring capitalism. Mao called on young people to bombard the headquarters, and proclaimed that "to rebel is justified." Mass upheaval began in Beijing with Red August in 1966. Many young people, mainly students, responded by forming cadres of Red Guards throughout the country. Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung became revered within his cult of personality. In 1967, emboldened radicals began seizing power from local governments and party branches, establishing new revolutionary committees in their place while smashing public security, procuratorate and judicial systems. These committees often split into rival factions, precipitating armed clashes among the radicals. After the fall of Lin Biao in 1971, the Gang of Four became influential in 1972, and the Revolution continued until Mao's death in 1976, soon followed by the arrest of the Gang of Four.

The Cultural Revolution was characterized by violence and chaos across Chinese society. Estimates of the death toll vary widely, typically ranging from 1–2 million, including a massacre in Guangxi that included acts of cannibalism, as well as massacres in Beijing, Inner Mongolia, Guangdong, Yunnan, and Hunan. Red Guards sought to destroy the Four Olds (old ideas, old culture, old customs, and old habits), which often took the form of destroying historical artifacts and cultural and religious sites. Tens of millions were persecuted...

Estimates of the death toll range from 1–2 million? Nothing like that has happened here, even as our own revolutionary cadres struggle to smash our own society's alleged versions of "the four olds."

Nothing that sweeping has happened here! But madness comes at times like these, and questions like the one shown below can even be formulated, and then asked, right in the Oval Office:

President Zelensky, are you prepared to keep sending Ukrainian troops to their deaths for another couple years, or are you going to agree to redraw the maps?

In yesterday's Oval Office event, that was the first question directed at President Zelensky. 

Some have said that the question dropped a Kremlin-adjacent framework on the terrible dilemma facing the Ukrainian president, whose country has been under attack for well over three years.

The somewhat peculiar question came from the Fox News Channel. In fairness to its creator, President Trump had offered this somewhat peculiar Truth Social post on Sunday morning at 9:17 a.m., two days after his latest meeting with Vladimir:

Truth Details

Donald J. Trump 
@realDonaldTrump

President Zelenskyy of Ukraine can end the war with Russia almost immediately, if he wants to, or he can continue to fight. Remember how it started. No getting back Obama given Crimea (12 years ago, without a shot being fired!), and NO GOING INTO NATO BY UKRAINE. Some things never change!!!

It could almost be said that yesterday's question to Zelensky simply followed the company line.

In fairness, it has always been true! In theory, the leader of any invaded nation can always "end the war" simply by choosing to surrender. Given two days to think about his meeting with Vladimir, that was the somewhat peculiar thought that seemed to be back again in the revolutionary president's mind.

President Trump is the person who has triggered the revolutionary zeal which is apparent all through the land. His performance is characterized by his familiar wild misstatements and by his frequently shifting set of frameworks and rationales.

Last night, Lawrence O'Donnell stated a view about the president's mental functioning with which we're inclined to disagree. (We're glad he said what he did.) In theory, carefully selected medical specialists would have a better shot at assessing the matter at hand, but the mainstream press corps has agreed that such discussions must never occur.

The Cultural Revolution was swept along by the ardor gripping "many young people." In the current revolutionary moment, the wild misstatements of the sitting president are persistently smoothed and disappeared by the array of stooge foot soldiers who got to war on the Fox News Channel every day.

In yesterday morning's report, we showed you the way three of those soldiers fought back last Friday evening after that channel's correspondent has said that the day's Subarctic Summit seemed to have gone rather poorly.

As we noted, that pushback occurred a mere nine minutes later. Four hours later, with midnight approaching, Trace Gallagher was still trying to lay down the law.

At the end of that evening's Fox News @ Night program, he offered feedback from six Fox News Channel viewers. Feedback from viewers had been sought under terms of this chyron:

TRUMP-PUTIN SUMMIT
DO YOU THINK THE MEETING OVERALL WAS A SUCCESS?

Had the Stumblebum Summit been a success? Instant appraisals are often misguided, but battling now to keep hope alive, Gallagher ended his program by reading six alleged responses from alleged viewers. 

At 11:58 p.m. Eastern, he ended his program like this:

GALLAGHER (8/15/25): Steve says, "I believe that, all in all, it was a success. Unfortunately Trump didn't get a ceasefire. We'll get it on the next meeting."

The text of the messages appeared on the screen as Gallagher continued to read them:

Leo says: "President Trump didn't walk out like he said he would from a failed meeting. So there must have been progress."

Jim: "A success in that Putin came TO America. But it's just the first step."

Tammy: "It all depends on your definition of success. Although there was no ceasefire, evidently, Putin agreed to some things."

Joseph: "It was successful. Trump has Putin in the palm of his hand. There will be a trilateral meeting and peace."

And Scott says, "I think the fact that there will be a second meeting proves that this first one was a success."

Gallagher read six texts. The assessment was unanimous. The president had Putin in the palm of his hand. The fact that he didn't walk out of the meeting showed that there had been progress.

That said, the president would soon say that he had changed his mind about a ceasefire, thereby following Vladimir's lead.  By Sunday morning, he was back to angrily saying that Zelensky can end the war any time he wants.

The employees at Fox will continue to drive the messaging forward. Out in the country, six out of six Fox News Channel viewers will agree on the current points.

Some of the fervor comes from religious belief; some of the fervor doesn't. But what's going on with the president? 

We tend to disagree with something O'Donnell said last night, but who is this person? Who is the person who misstates elementary facts so crazily, who lurches from one basic stance to the next?

Tomorrow, we'll return to that basic question. For today, remember this:

Vladimir said mail-in voting is no darn good! Just like that, the commander in chief returned to his crazy misstatements about that topic as he launched his latest crusade.

Tomorrow: His darling Clementine

MONDAY: The Great I-Am has struck again!

MONDAY, AUGUST 18, 

Also, the cluelessness of NAME WITHHELD: By the time he was 12 years old, President Trump was already being mocked for his grandiosity by his older brother.

He'd been given the nickname "The Great I-Am." Or at least, so said the president's niece, Mary Trump, in Chapter 3 of her best-selling family memoir, Too Much and Never Enough:

CHAPTER THREE
The Great I-Am

[...]

Encouraged by his father, Donald eventually started to believe his own hype. By the time he was twelve, the right side of his mouth was curled up in an almost perpetual sneer of self-conscious superiority, and [his brother] Freddy had dubbed him “the Great I-Am,” echoing a passage from Exodus he’d learned in Sunday school in which God first reveals himself to Moses.

He was soon shipped off to military school. As we discussed at length in late April, Chapter 3 of the book is built around the development of those personality traits. 

For the record, Mary Trump is a clinical psychologist. That doesn't mean that her assessments of her famous uncle simply have to be right.

With respect to her famous uncle, it isn't entirely clear that the grandiosity ever left. Today, the president is running the D.C. police. He's also reshaping traditions of congressional elections, and he's directing a sweeping program of "mass deportation" which may, or may not, match what he said he wanted to do when he ran for election last year.

As of today, he's also decided to stage a crusade to change the method by which many Americans vote. As usual, he's advancing his new ambition with the standard barrage of claims which are baldly inaccurate—claims he may even believe.

There he's gone again! Earlier today, CNN's Daniel Dale offered the ten millionth useless fact-check:

Fact check: Trump falsely claims US is only country that uses mail-in voting

President Donald Trump made a series of false claims about elections in a Monday social media post in which he pledged to “lead a movement to get rid of MAIL-IN BALLOTS” and voting machines—including an inaccurate assertion that states have to run elections in the manner the president tells them to.

Here is a fact check of some of Trump’s comments.

“We are now the only Country in the World that uses Mail-In Voting. All others gave it up because of the MASSIVE VOTER FRAUD ENCOUNTERED.”

False. Dozens of other countries use mail-in voting, as CNN and others have pointed out when Trump has made such claims before. These countries include Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, Australia, and Switzerland.

And so on from there.

That's the start of Dale's report on this latest blizzard of misinformation. With respect to the ludicrous claim that no one uses mail-in balloting but us, the president repeated that ludicrous claim as part of a rambling side trip during this afternoon's Oval Office press event with President Zelensky.

He's off on his latest crusade, trailing absurd misstatements behind him. Once an idea gets into his head, almost nothing can get it out.

With that, we'll briefly revisit another of the topics cited above:

The logic of district construction:

In last year's presidential election, Candidate Trump received 38.3% of the vote in California. That worked out to roughly 40% of the two-party vote.

A similar two-party distribution prevailed during last year's congressional elections in California. In those elections, Republican candidates received 39.2% of the votes across the state. Democratic candidates received 60.5%.

Once again, this raises a basic question:

If forty percent of some state's population belongs to Political Party B, is that political party entitled to something approaching 40% of the seats in that state's congressional delegation? 

An outcome like that might seem to be fair, but the long-standing answer to that question is no. Indeed, if the political blend of that state's population is spread evenly across the breadth of the state, Political Party A may end up winning every House race by a 60-40 margin.

Political Party B may end up with no congressional seats at all! There's nothing in American law or tradition which entitles the less popular party in a state to any House seats at all.

We mention this because of NAME WITHHELD, one of our dumbest "cable news" savants. The gentleman keeps insisting that California must already be heavily "gerrymandered" because its current House delegation includes 43 Democrats and only 9 Republicans.

Was gerrymandering involved in that outcome? We have no idea. That said, the breakdown of the California delegation follows the basic demographic pattern of the state, in which less heavily populated eastern parts of the state are more heavily Republican.

As you can see in the map at this link, the nine (9) Republican seats mainly come from those Republican inner-state regions. The population of the rest of the state is heavily Democratic, as are almost all members of Congress from those districts.

Under normal rules and procedures, we know of no reason to assume that something was wrong with the way California's independent districting commission created the 52 districts which produced that lopsided delegation.

NAME ITHHELD lacks the first freaking clue about the logic of this situation. He does know what he's supposed to say as a major figure on the Fox News Channel. Within our pitiful public discourse, the cluelessness about this basic matter is never going to end.

Now we're engaged in a great civil war about mail-in balloting itself! No one votes that way but us, The Great I-Am is now saying again. 

This is who and what we actually are! So is the silence of the various lambs at the various major news orgs of our self-impressed but unimpressive Blue American nation.

Mary Trump wrote a dangerous book. As we've noted in the past, everyone agreed to avoid those parts of her best-selling book!

REVOLUTION: It didn't seem good, Fox viewers were told!

MONDAY, AUGUST 18, 2025

Then, Kellyanne Conway stepped in: First impressions are frequently imperfect, incomplete or just basically wrong.

That said, first impressions last Friday weren't especially good, not even at the Fox News Channel.

Putin had spoken for almost nine minutes. After that, President Trump had then stumbled through a formless three minutes. In fairness, he did manage to cite the "Russia, Russia, Russia hoax" for perhaps the ten millionth time.  

That said:

To our own (imperfect) eye and ear, President Trump's brief remarks were characterized by the way he clung to an illusion—to the illusion of what we'd call his "desperation friendship" with the man he kept calling "Vladimir." He first-named Putin three separate times in the course of his three-minute statement. We were struck by the extent to which he seems to want to believe. 

(As a point of comparison, see the YouTube entry, "Dr. Strangelove: Hello, Dimitri" from the 1964 film. For a longer excerpt, complete with a bit of a MAHA vibe, you can just click this.)

So it had gone, up in Alaska, after The Subarctic Summit. On Fox, Brian Kilmeade was guest hosting for Laura Ingrahm, and when he threw to Jacqui Heinrich, a plainly dispirited Heinrich started with this:

KILMEADE (8/15/25): Jacqui, I was surprised no questions. I was surprised no details on what progress was made.

HEINRICH: I think you and me both, Brian. And everyone else in this room was also surprised.

You know, we were told that we were going to have an opportunity to put questions to both leaders after a joint press conference in the event that the meeting went well enough that they could set the stage for a second meeting. And President Trump said, if that didn’t happen, he was likely to call off the joint presser and just address the media solo and then send Putin home. 

Neither of those things happened. And what was really stunning to me, as someone who has been in a lot of these press conferences, was a few things that were very unusual. 

For videotape of this full exchange, you can just click here.

To her credit, Heinrich is part of the Fox News Channel's news division. As a general matter, she isn't one of the stooges the channel drags out, at all hours of the day and night, to rattle its messaging points in robotic succession.

At this point, Heinrich's response to Kilmeade was just getting started. Just for the record, President Trump was never going to "call off the joint presser and just address the media solo and then send Putin home." 

That was never going to happen. That was simply the bluster in which this challenged man tends to engage until he has "Vladimir" standing right there before him.

As Heinrich started, she wasn't making the day's events sound especially good. But as her response to Kilmeade continued, her portrait of the presser rapidly rolled downhill.

Remember—this is the way his event was being portrayed on the Fox News Channel. This was the very first picture of the event that channel's viewers received:

HEINRICH (continuing directly): You had Putin come out and address the press first, and we are on U.S. soil here. And that left the media scrambling to get their headsets in. Usually, it is the leader of the country—the host country of a summit—that speaks first and addresses the room in their language. 

But Putin started right off, in Russian, and we all had to get our headsets on and listen to him rattle off this diatribe about the history of the U.S.-Russia relationship...

But also, without knowing the full background of it, there was something he said that was a little alarming, I thought, that seems like some of the things that he has said in the past—setting up false flags and that kind of thing, saying that we hope that Ukraine doesn't do anything to sabotage the progress that we have made today, knowing full well that Ukraine has agreed to a ceasefire, unconditionally, for the last several months, and it has been Russia that has not agreed to a ceasefire. 

That was President Trump's main objective today, and when we did hear from the president, he said we didn't get there, but we think that we can.

President Trump didn't achieve his main objective, Fox News Channel viewers were told. That, of course, was simply one person's instant assessment, but Heinrich was painting a gloomy picture in which Putin had seized control of the press event and had perhaps shoved Trump to the side.

That was one correspondent's instant assessment. But as she continued, her portrait of the event just kept getting worse:

HEINRICH (continuing directly): So a lot of questions remaining for the president, Trump—not just about what was discussed in that room and what might be happening now, but also how that all happened back there [gesturing toward the stage].

It was just very unusual, atypical, and I think we're all awaiting the read-out, because the way it felt in the room was not good. It did not seem like things went well, and it seemed like Putin came in and steamrolled—got right into what he wanted to say and got his photo next to the president and then left. 

Of course, that is only the piece of the picture that we have right now, and certainly President Trump, who is the host and who is the president, would not want to, I think, enable something that would make him look weak. But we are eagerly awaiting to hear the background on that.

"It did not seem like things went well," Heinrich said. "It seemed like Putin came in and steamrolled." she said. Most horribly, she even said this:

In her estimation, President Trump "would not want to enable something that would make him look weak!"

As Heinrich finished, she strained for a slightly hopeful sign—she said she hadn't seen "any scowls on the faces of the likes of Steve Witkoff or Secretary Rubio or any of the other members of the U.S. delegation." 

She hadn't seen any scowls. But she painted a very gloomy portrait of what seemed to have happened in the presser:

"The way it felt in the room was not good," she said. She even suggested that "Vladimir" may have made President Trump seem weak.

That was one correspondent's instant assessment. First impressions of this type will often turn out to be incomplete, inaccurate, wrong.

That said, that was the assessment offered to viewers of the Fox News Channel! It fell to Kilmeade to make his way out of the hole into which he had now been thrown.

This being the Fox News Channel, help was on the way. After a less scathing but unenthusiastic assessment by Mike Pompeo, out came a trio of messaging agents who seemed to know what Fox News Channel pundits are expected to say.

Heinrich concluded her assessment at 7:13 p.m. Eastern. Nine minutes later, out came this trio of messengers:

Kilmeade's trio of guests:
Kellyanne Conway: Fox News contributor
Jason Chaffetz: Fox News contributor
Charlie Hurt: co-host, Fox & Friends Weekend

Out the messaging agents came—and they quickly set things right. You can watch the tape of their segment by clicking here. You'll find that the videotape appears at the Fox website under this dual headline:

Kellyanne Conway: 'Everything came up Trump and the US today'
A panel featuring Kellyanne Conway, Jason Chaffetz, and Charlie Hurt reacts to the Trump-Putin summit as well as the press conference.

Everything had come up Trump! Inevitably, that's what the trio said.

Kilmeade threw to Conway first. In addition to the statement quoted above, the event had been "a huge win for our president," she said.

With that, it came time for Chaffetz to speak. According to Chaffetz, the event had been "a huge win for President Trump, for the United States."

Hurt was possibly not quite so sure, but he proceeded with valor. He said he was impressed by the way President Trump had delivered his three minutes of remarks "off the cuff. He had no notes."

"Trump was talking almost like the wheels were still churning," Hurt said—and Kilmeade jumped in to agree. So it went, on the Fox News Channel, in the immediate aftermath of Friday's semi-summit.

Last week, we focused on the idea that an undeclared revolution is underway here within the American nation. This week, we'll focus on some of the different cadres found within that revolutionary brigade.

Plainly, the revolution is driven from the top. Rightly or wrongly, wisely or otherwise, the Fox News Channel maintains a large brigade which helps maintain the revolution's self-assurance.

Today, Zelensky may appear in the Oval Office again. Once again, a snarling beast may sit by the side of the American president.

Will he attack Zelensky again? Just as it ever was, so too here in this flailing nation:

For better or worse, times of revolution have always called for revolutionary zeal.

Tomorrow:  Several different brigades