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This is, largely, preaching to the choir. Nor can I say, incredibly, that with the murder allegation against Joe Scarborough, Trump has reached a new low. He has no bottom. No doubt his defenders will protest, "He didn't accuse Scarborough of murder. This is another instance of Trump Derangement Syndrome!" But he might as well have made an outright accusation; the effect on Scarborough and the family of the dead assistant is the same. And what kind of willful avoidance does it take not to ask yourself, what kind of person would say these things? "A cruel, sick, disgusting person"? Mika Brzezinski gets it about right.

No president in our history has been worse. It can't be happening that we have this man as our leader.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics ... story.html

DWill wrote:Trump has reached a new low. . . .

Even a FoxNews pundit thinks this President has reached a new low. He must have come down with "Trump Derangement Syndrome."

Brit Hume wrote:"30K retweets for this discredited tale, based on a three-year-old post from some wing-ding website," Mr Hume tweeted. "This is why even his critics should want DJT to play a lot of golf, because when he does, he's not tweeting c**p like this."

https://www.newsweek.com/joe-scarboroug ... on-1506329

DWill wrote: Nor can I say, incredibly, that with the murder allegation against Joe Scarborough, Trump has reached a new low. He has no bottom

Now people in the MSM are saying Trump accused Scarborough of murder to distract from the 100,000 milestone. From what I have seen of narcissists, this would be entirely in character.

So does that make the crime less bad, or worse? Do we make allowances for "mixed motives" as Dershowitz argued in the Ukraine impeachment hearings? If there is some iota of public policy rationale, (and re-election seems to be an acceptable one if you buy the Dershowitz line) does that little bit of end justify a massive violation by means? Or does the use of a "fig leaf" of rationale amount to a poisonous cynicism that drags everyone down and needs to be met by particular vigilance?

I tend to say, "both". That we can't rule out balancing tests, but neither can we ignore norm-busting, limit-pushing degradation of the public sphere. The Roy Cohns and Joe McCarthys and Dick Nixons and Elijah Muhammeds and Huey Longs of any culture need to be held at arm's length because buying into their behavior distorts and weakens the people who back them.

I tend to put a lot of faith in the private conversations by which people in authority juggle the various principles at stake. Those conversations can end up endorsing power and its ways, but they do make some room for private conscience and the sensitivity people have to right and wrong. I have seen it at work in Washington - someone putting in a private word, something for others to think about, without trying to "litigate" the issue with arguments that everyone recognizes have a self-serving side.

You can imagine the private conversations among the Republicans around the subject of the Trump Administration. The Devin Nunes "we will lose all this" argument, and the McConnell "don't give an inch" approach, are being tested by the degree of cynicism in the White House. Some never-Trump Republicans are creating super-PACs to oppose Trump, such as the Lincoln Project (featuring George Conway) and its ability to raise $1.4 million by putting an ad on Fox that triggered Trumpian temper.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/27/maga ... ogin=email [paywall after a certain number of stories in a month]

Their party leader has been impeached by a House representing the majority of Americans. And does he soften his approach in response? You must be thinking of the other Donald Trump, the one who understands checks and balances and doesn't fire IG's who irritate him by doing their job. So maybe gerrymandering and voter suppression will buy them some time? But in the meantime, they look worse and worse.

But they all have some conscience - even the narcissist in the Big House has some conscience - and they all know that they could end up like Jeff Sessions or Joe Scarborough for exercising that conscience. Neither Trump nor Murdoch/Ailes nor Rush Limbaugh created such a system, but Dear Leader has scratched and bit and caterwauled to make it as unforgiving as possible, and he regularly recruits worthless sycophants and ruthlessly jesuitical Macchiavellis to staff it out. We can all marvel at the crazy guy in "Cape Fear" who scares us with his sheer determination to extract every pound of flesh he can claim, but would you really want one leading your country?

I have noticed that Trump routinely and constantly makes major gaffes, but the very constancy of his gaffeness seems to lead to an "Oh that's just our Don" attitude.

For example his "Badge of Honor" gaffe about the US Covid mortality rate was incredibly stupid and cruel, but I never saw media calling it a gaffe.

By contrast, Biden makes a tiny joke and the gaffometer goes off the deep end.

Robert wrote:

By contrast, Biden makes a tiny joke and the gaffometer goes off the deep end.

Joe Biden:

Poor kids are just as bright and just as talented as white kids

Is the above just another "a tiny joke" or brute stupidity?

Possibly both. But in contrast, as Mr. Tulip says, we have endured continuous adolescent sociopathological bullying since Trump descended that escalator on 6/15/2015. It seems interminal because it's gettin' on to five years now!

Cities burn, shots are fired.

Although Trump was not helping matters when he suggested that looters be shot, I would like to give him credit, and to give a few others on the right (such as Rush Limbaugh, who "saw no way" to justify the police behavior, implying that he saw it as his purpose to find a justification) credit, for reacting honestly to the lethal abuse of George Floyd. Trump even called Floyd's family to express his condolences. But I fear that the way the right generally frames such issues will reassert itself before long, as Charlie Sykes has predicted. "Give it 24 or 48 hours," he said.

The police are "us" and the angry young people and people of color, are "them" and so they have to have the incontrovertible evidence of "To Kill a Mockingbird" (the defendant could not have done what he was accused of doing) before they are willing to hold the police accountable. To recognize that racism was at work is to implicitly accuse white people of oppressing black people intentionally, in this narrative, and thus to trigger all the white fragility that Trump embodies and speaks for.

Already Limbaugh has blamed the problem on Minnesota being "a blue state," "run by Democrats" (tell that to Jesse Ventura), and Laura Ingraham, incredibly, brought Mark Fuhrman (who framed O.J., thus resulting in his acquittal) on to her show, while Tucker Carlson responded to Ted Cruz denouncing Floyd's death by asking if was fair to bring a murder charge against the man who killed Mr. Floyd. "Why doesn't anybody stand up for the rest of us, for civilization?" Carlson asked, as though civilization requires the killing of anyone who resists in the least.

I have heard bone-chilling accounts of the things cops treat as part of "standing up for civilization" including breaking the skull of someone for peacefully asking them to follow the law by not searching without a warrant. If the repeated lethal abuses were not part of a larger pattern, I would say well, lets just look at the facts and sort it out and not get all riled up about it. I don't ever agree with violent protest, destruction and looting, but we have let things go too far down the road of oppression to think further violence is the right option.

And while I'm at it, I thought Trump's withdrawal of the special economic status granted to Hong Kong was appropriate and even timely. It has always been one of the "carrots" to induce China to move toward rule of law, and though it doesn't mean nearly as much as it did 20 years ago, it still has significance both symbolically and practically.

Trump's determination to confront China probably provided him the margin of victory in 2016 (I know that lots of other things can also be seen as pushing him over the line, but the surprise crumbling of the Blue Wall still owes more to the giant sucking sound of jobs going to China than to any other single factor) and it still represents the only thing he stands for that I agree with. I have, on the other hand, argued that he went about it in about as foolish a way as it was possible to do, and as a result has gotten nowhere, but this was an appropriate measure with appropriate rationale. Someone in the Administration is actually thinking strategically.

Harry Marks wrote: I fear that the way the right generally frames such issues will reassert itself before long, as Charlie Sykes has predicted. "Give it 24 or 48 hours," he said.

Right on cue, Dear Leader asked the military to remove peaceful protesters so that he could go and desecrate the Bible by posing in front of a church as part of a call to "dominate" by the government, including a threat to call in troops if the states do not "dominate" to the extent he seeks. He shows no awareness that it was just that kind of thinking that killed George Floyd.