Unhinged

 

It might have been a heat-of-the-moment comment or it might have been calculated. One never knows with politicians. But Pelosi was right to say that Trump is “…deranged, unhinged, dangerous…”

 

That's been clear for a while now.

 

That doesn't mean he isn't also a sociopath, a narcissist, a would-be Hitler, a con man, or the world's champion pathological liar. He can be all those things, and is. But Trump having parted ways with reality is the best argument for asking Pence to gather half the cabinet and invoke Section 4 of the 25th Amendment:

 

"Whenever the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall immediately assume the powers and duties of the office as Acting President."

 

An unhinged president is "..unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office."

 

Any of Trump's public actions attempting to overthrow the election could be seen as evidence that he's a sociopath, narcissist, would-be Hitler, etc. But one phone call, with Georgia Secretary of State Raffensberger, that wasn't meant to be public, shows he is also detached from reality.  

 

Like the emperor of the fairy tale, parading around in his majestic new clothes, Trump paraded his imaginary missing votes before Georgia’s election officials:

 

- 200,000 or more  forged signatures;

- at least 50,000 Trump voters who showed up at polls, only to be told, they had already voted (presumably because evildoers had forged their signatures and voted in their names);

- 18,000 voters who gave vacant houses as addresses;

 

- another 18,000 fraudulent ballots for Biden in suitcases that mysteriously appeared after election workers and poll watchers were evacuated due to a water main break.

 

And there was more, he claimed.

 

The conspiracy against him included countless co-conspirators, he insisted, including, he hinted, election officials like Georgia Secretary of State Raffensberger.

 

Raffensberger tried to play the role of the brave little boy, telling Emperor Trump that all the above had been investigated. And all was fairy tale. But Trump's delusion, being more persistent than the naked emperor's, could not be shaken.   

 

If this were your Fox and Newsmax-obsessed elderly relative shouting at the holiday dinner table about suitcases full of fraudulent ballots, you'd exchange a look with the person next to you and change the subject to little Johnny's report card. You wouldn't  let your elderly relative drive Johnny to school on Monday, knowing there was a danger he'd get lost along the way.

 

And this is why Section 4 of the 25th Amendment exists: to remove someone  who has lost the ability to perform the duties of the president, but is incapable of recognizing his/her own loss of ability.

 

If Trump said what he believed in his call to Raffensberger, as a reading of the full transcript suggests he did, in a functioning government, Section 4 would have been invoked already.

 

​We haven't had a functioning government for a while now. The party that Trump leads is willing to keep a demented sociopath in power if it means that members of that party keep their power, too.

 

Think about that.​

 

 

Election Madness and the Erosion of Our System: From Maddow to Hannity

 

No one wants to hear this but... the "stolen election" conspiracy theories Newsmax and OAN are spewing, that Trump supporters gobble up, are different only in degree, not kind, from the Russian collusion theories Hillary Clinton voters adored hearing from Rachel Maddow and her ilk re Hillary's defeat.

Yes, we can stipulate that there was indeed attempted Russian interference. But it was minuscule—enough to affect an election for dogcatcher in Podunk, maybe, but not enough to swing the presidential race. Hillary lost. Period.

Meanwhile, there's zero, none, no evidence for the Trump "stolen election" theories. Those are made up entirely of bad faith and vapor. The Trump lawyers argue a completely different set of facts and claims in court than the crazed fraud allegations they and Trump present to voters.

But Democratic and GOP conspiracy-believing voters have a few more things in common than any are likely to admit:

1) They each place a religion-like trust both their preferred "news" sources and their politicians. If voters in either group did some independent investigation (examine the evidence presented to respective courts and investigators instead of simply listening to their side's explanation of it) they'd discover that both "news" sources and pols were conning them; 

2) Neither group appears to want the evidence that they are (and were) being conned. How else to explain why they are so carefully selective with their "news" sources, and why many of them lash out when those sources are contradicted;

3) Each group believes the other group is crazy, deceitful, and/or clueless because members of each group are well aware of the shenanigans perpetrated by the rival group's "news" sources and pols (their "news" sources and pols have given them all the details) but blissfully unaware of those perpetrated by their side.

So, this is what we get in 2020 according to reporting today in the Washington Post. And it's not going to get better going forward unless/until citizens of the USA decide that they can handle--and will pay attention to--the truth. Read and weep. Better yet, watch the accompanying video:

>>It wasn’t just White men carrying the Trump flags and banners. Korean and Vietnamese immigrants, young gay couples and Black, White and Latina women, many with children, marched alongside conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and members of the Proud Boys hate group. They wound slowly from Freedom Plaza to the Capitol to the Supreme Court, demanding, among other things, that Biden be sent to prison and the election be handed to Trump. 

 

For hours, we talked to protesters who weren’t merely skeptical of the election outcome; they believed it to be a total fraud. They distrusted the count, the voting machines, the media that reported the results, even the state officials, many of them Republican, charged with certifying the outcome.<<