Hal Brown blog January to early Feb 2019
Title : Hal Brown blog January to early Feb 2019
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This blog contains links to my almost 100 Capitol Hill Blue (CHB) columns plus selected news items of the day.
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This blog contains links to my almost 100 Capitol Hill Blue (CHB) columns plus selected news items of the day.
Jan. 28, 2019
Twitter recently designated an anti-Trump Twitter account that often comes up when someone starts to search Donald with the word "parody." You can view it here.
I post my columns there to increase readership. Here's an example:
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| This one got 122 "likes" which may not seem like much but it is the way a column can build readers |
- When President Trump brings senators, New York friends or other guests to the Oval Office, he occasionally opens a door near his desk summoning them to follow. Flashing a grin, he wants his friends to see where Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky reportedly began their sexual encounters.
- “We’ve remodeled it since then,” he said on a tour in December, said a person with direct knowledge of the event. In a visit in 2017, Trump told a TV anchor, “I’m told this is where Bill and Monica . . .” — stopping himself from going further...
- He’d rather roam around and B.S. with people than hunker down.”
- The president’s desire to show off his abode fits a pattern. At Trump Tower in New York, he would show guests celebrity relics, such as basketball great Shaquille O’Neill’s shoes, signed magazine covers and photos with athletes.
- Aides said Trump is often gregarious and charming when showing off the residence, rather than displaying the churlish demeanor he sometimes shows in West Wing meetings.
- Trump often has groused about flies in the White House and has told groups that his aides have mixed luck killing them. “Swarming everywhere,” he said...
- Numerous people who have gone on the tours describe a president boasting about the artifacts and art in his temporary home.
- He often shows off the Louisiana Land Purchase, the Gettysburg Address and other historic documents, visitors say. He has commented on particular presidents — Andrew Jackson, whom he praises, and Ulysses S. Grant, whom he called “not so good,” according to a person who visited the residence in 2018.
- Trump also has bragged during some visits about the pictures of him on the walls of the West Wing — including one with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and another of his inauguration — and how photos of him get framed and hung quickly by White House staff members when he asks.
- He is obsessed with the chandeliers in the White House and called the main staircase “beautiful, just really luxurious,” a person who heard the comments said. He brags about how many television sets there are in the West Wing and his fancy system of toggling between channels made for him — he calls it a “Super TiVo,” according to White House aides and Sims’s book..... “I think it’s one of the greatest inventions,” Trump has said, according to Sims. The author said the comment was made “with a smirk, as if to acknowledge his reputation as a television addict.”
- .. Trump has exaggerated at times in describing the tours. “They start to cry,” he has told others in explaining how people react when seeing the Oval Office, according to current and former White House aides. Two senior White House officials said they had never seen any visitor cry in the Oval Office.
These photos are from the animation in the Washington Post column by Carlos Lozada:
What it would take
Can impeachment appear legitimate in a hyper-partisan universe?
“Some mode of displacing an unfit magistrate is rendered indispensable by the fallibility of those who choose, as well as the corruptibility of the man chosen.” — George Mason, Constitutional Convention, June 1787
“We’re going to go in there. We’re going to impeach the motherf—er.” — Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), Jan. 3
“We’re going to go in there. We’re going to impeach the motherf—er.” — Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), Jan. 3
The contrast between these two statements reveals everything about the challenge of exercising Article II, Section 4 of the Constitution and attempting to remove President Trump from office. By now, the “unfit” condition of this magistrate is clear, as is his disdain for the principles and traditions of American public life. But the fitness of Congress, the sole branch empowered to impeach and convict the president, also bears scrutiny.
Even if the new Democratic majority in the House decides to move forward on impeachment, the Senate remains in Republican hands. Reaching 67 senators seems unlikely, except when recalling the Nixon era. “Nixon’s saga reveals that when support for an embattled presidency fades, it cascades,” Engel writes. “Why did so many Americans change their minds so quickly? Because the facts changed.”
That is why, if lawmakers do begin an impeachment process, truth, not partisan fury, must remain the foremost value — and that means offering a full accounting of Trump’s offenses. There is a compulsion on the part of some of the president’s critics to hinge everything on the work of special counsel Robert Mueller, the Godot of the Trump era, as if specific legal misdeeds are the only issue. “Proof that a crime occurred can feel comfortingly objective,” Tribe and Matz write. “It relieves us of the need to exercise judgment and casts a technical gloss over bitterly divisive political questions.”
Obstruction of justice, violation of the emoluments clause, the betrayal of trust to a foreign adversary — any one of these is a significant misdeed that should be core to any impeachment process. Yet they all reflect Trump’s greatest offense against the American public and the American experiment, which is his lack of interest in faithfully executing the office of the president. His biggest lie, out of so many, occurred when he swore the oath and then, in his inaugural address, pledged to be a leader for all Americans. Trump governs for his own interests and those of his family, and for the cheers of his base. His opponents righteously declare that he is “not my president,” forgetting that Trump made that choice for them long ago.
Jackie Kennedy: Vassar College George Washington University (BA); "Lady Bird" Johnson, St. Mary's Episcopal College for Women University of Texas, Austin (BA, BJour); Pat Nixon, Fullerton College University of Southern California (BS); Betty Ford, (who did some modeling at age 11) attended the Bennington School of Dance in Bennington, Vermont, for two summers, where she studied under director Martha Hill with choreographers Martha Graham and Hanya Holm; Rosalyn Carter, attended Georgia Southwestern College, but later dropped out; Nancy Reagan, Smith College (BA); Barbara Bush, discontinued her studies at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts after meeting George Bush; Hillary Clinton, Wellesley College (BA) Yale University (JD); Laura Bush, Southern Methodist University (BS) University of Texas at Austin (MS); Michelle Obama, Princeton University (AB) Harvard University (JD); Melania Trump, attended the Secondary School of Design and Photography in Ljubljana and studied architecture and design at the University of Ljubljana for one year before she dropped out.
Jan. 26, 2019
There may be two!
Today's column:
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| Special for blog readers Marquis DeTrump or Donald DeSade: I don't know which name was better. I'm not putting this into my Capitol Hill Blue columJan 25, 2019 |
Nancy Pelosi Knocks Trump: ‘What Does Putin Have On The President?’
The House speaker also took aim at the indictment of Roger Stone, calling Trump’s choice of friends “staggering.”
Following the arrest of longtime Donald Trump confidant Roger Stone, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) delivered a damning rebuke of the president’s choice of friends, questioning the legitimacy of his election and his ties to Russia.
“The indictment of Roger Stone makes clear that there was a deliberate, coordinated attempt by top Trump campaign officials to influence the 2016 election and subvert the will of the American people,” the congresswoman said in a statement Friday evening. “It is staggering that the President has chosen to surround himself with people who violated the integrity of our democracy and lied to the FBI and Congress about it.”
“This indictment is significant because it alleges coordination between the Trump campaign and WikiLeaks,” said Barbara McQuade, a former federal prosecutor who called the language in the paragraph “particularly alarming” because it used the passive voice when describing the campaign officials. “This language is very different from other language we have seen Mueller use,” she told POLITICO. “He usually is careful to use some identifying language so that the person can be referenced easily. One reasonable inference is that the person who directed the senior campaign official is someone who cannot be indicted: the president himself.”
The juiciest morsel in Mueller’s charges against Roger Stone
I added the last paragraph to this Wikipedia page about Frank Pentageli. I thought someone else would beat me to it.
Just observing:
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| Upper left today |
These are my comments to the article:
Dr. Allen Francis said Trump couldn't suffer from NPD: His reasoning: Trump “does not suffer the disorder and impairment required to diagnose mental disorder.” Trump meets every other criteria (and those for malignant personality, not an official diagnosis in DSM-5, too). However Trump DOES suffer personally from the disorder as evidenced by his extreme distress whenever his narcisstic self-image is attacked. His rage attacks (look up narcssitic insult and rage) are suffering - reports that he shouts, rants, and raves are proof he is suffering. Whether Trump himself saying "I am suffering" is irrelevant. Over-reacting to what we call narcissitic insults is impairment. He is suffering.
I emailed Dr. Francis and he responded saying he wouldn't engage me in a discussion on this.
RE: "To date, no major network, newspaper or magazine has run an in-depth analysis of Trump’s mental health." To his great credit Lawrence O'Donnell of MSNBC was the first, and continues to be, the most cognizant and insightful TV host when it comes to recognizing that Trump is mentally impaired. He has had Dr. John D. Gartner, founder of the Duty to Warn group of which I was an early member, on his show. He's also had psychiatrist Lance Dodes discussing Trump's psychiatric condition. He had forensic psychiatrist Bandy Lee, editor of "The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump" on as well. Dr. Gartner and I consider Trump to be a malignant narcissist (look it up), but regardless of the actual diagnosis all of the therapists sounding the alarm view him to be dangrously unfit because of his mental condition. Hal Brown, MSW, retired psychotherapist and mental health center director.
I hope Allen Francis is reading this and looking at my comments. Here's my third: Dr. Allen Francis is no fan of Trump, quite the contrary. However he has taken a stand that has set the Duty to Warn cmmuity back because of his stature. He wrote the following in a 2017 letter to the NY Times:
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Most amateur diagnosticians have mislabeled President Trump with the diagnosis of narcissistic personality disorder. I wrote the criteria that define this disorder, and Mr. Trump doesn’t meet them. He may be a world-class narcissist, but this doesn’t make him mentally ill, because he does not suffer from the distress and impairment required to diagnose mental disorder.
Mr. Trump causes severe distress rather than experiencing it and has been richly rewarded, rather than punished, for his grandiosity, self-absorption and lack of empathy. It is a stigmatizing insult to the mentally ill (who are mostly well behaved and well meaning) to be lumped with Mr. Trump (who is neither).
Bad behavior is rarely a sign of mental illness, and the mentally ill behave badly only rarely. Psychiatric name-calling is a misguided way of countering Mr. Trump’s attack on democracy. He can, and should, be appropriately denounced for his ignorance, incompetence, impulsivity and pursuit of dictatorial powers.
His psychological motivations are too obvious to be interesting, and analyzing them will not halt his headlong power grab. The antidote to a dystopic Trumpean dark age is political, not psychological.
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Francis misses a major point. It is that Trump's mental instabily makes him dangerous. The diagnosis is relevant for this reason. It is more than merely narcissitic personality disorder. There are elements of sociopathy too.. There are also suggestions he is at times delusional and paranoid. Not only that he is so narcissitic he doesn't heed the advice from experts, often listening to Fox News commentators instead. He is also dangerously impuslive.
In answer to someone who write "Dr Allen Francis is probably the one with the personality disorder... not just Trump." I wrote:
I think he means well but is mistaken about the NPD diagnosis even if he wrote it. He is among many who think that diagnosing someone like Trump stigmatizes those truly suffering from psychiatric illness. A miniscule percentage of those with a psychiatric diagnosis commit bad acts or do bad things. However, among those who do bad things some have a diagnosis which influenced or led to their behaviors, and some don't. People who would be described as mean or nasty, lacking in empathy, are greedy, are insentive to the feelings of others including loved ones, don't usually even have a diagnosable psychiatric disorder.
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Hal Brown blog January to early Feb 2019
Enough news articles Hal Brown blog January to early Feb 2019 this time, hopefully can benefit for you all. Well, see you in other article postings.
Hal Brown blog January to early Feb 2019
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