Will White House Leaks Defeat Trump?

Despite his full blown assault on the free press, Der Fuhrer has one problem that may yet sink him and open the way for his removal from office: leaks flowing in a torrent from White House staffers and others. The picture that is emerging should surprise no one other than the most brainwashed or bigotry filled Trump supporters:  the occupant of the Oval Office is a thin skinned narcissist who cannot stand anything that does not further inflate his overweening ego and who will lash out at anything not in keeping with his alternate universe.  One can only hope that with time even the worse political whores in the Republican Party will wake up to the fact that Trump needs to go for the good of everyone in America.  I loath Mike Pence, but at least he isn't clinically insane and might be controlled by tradition and the ability to grasp some semblance of objective reality.  A piece in Talking Points Memo looks at the ongoing leaks flowing from the White House.  Here are highlights:

 We now have a story from The Washington Post ("The first days inside Trump’s White House: Fury, tumult and a reboot") to match yesterday's from The Times ("Rocky First Weekend for Trump Troubles Even His Top Aides"). They are each a classic type for a major newspaper.

But there is an underlying, not-made-explicit message to both which is perhaps the most important. We are three days into the administration and the Trump White House leaks not so much like a sieve as a bucket with no bottom.

The Trump White House not only leaks like crazy. It casually leaks the most intimate and humiliating details about the President - hurt feelings, ego injury, childlike behavior, self-destructive rages over tweets, media failure to credit his own grandiosity. We have simply never seen this level of leaking, with this little respect for the President's dignity or reputation, this early.

From The Post ...

Trump has been resentful, even furious, at what he views as the media’s failure to reflect the magnitude of his achievements, and he feels demoralized that the public’s perception of his presidency so far does not necessarily align with his own sense of accomplishment.

From Politico ...

One person who frequently talks to Trump said aides have to push back privately against his worst impulses in the White House, like the news conference idea, and have to control information that may infuriate him. He gets bored and likes to watch TV, this person said, so it is important to minimize that.

There is, to put it mildly, a rather clearly recurring theme: a torqued up man-child, alternatively rageful and fragile, both grandiose and profoundly insecure.

It is a bracing picture, chilling and hilarious. But don't lose the point: no White House leaks like this, leaks this much or leaks this casually about the President's emotional weakness. 

Again, no one should be surprised if they have even casually followed Trump over the years.  That said, it is frightening that we have someone mentally disturbed in the office of the presidency.  Trump needs to go and the sooner the better.  He is a clear and present danger to America and the world.

The Left’s Self-Defeating Hatred of Hillary Clinton

One sees on Facebook statements made and I have had friends say that if Bernie Sander is not the Democrat nominee, they will stay home on election day. What they expect this to accomplish other than putting a Republican in the White House and damaging the country for a generation, especially if the Supreme Court thrown to the far right for a generation or more.  Such anger and willingness to harm the country, not to mention, ultimately themselves, is irrational to me.  Indeed, it is more what one would expect from logic free Christofascists rather than progressives.  A piece in Salon looks at this irrational hatred and the damage it is doing to the cause these liberals claim to support.  Here are excerpts:

The media coverage of Hillary Clinton is a lesson in paradox: She’s the “most admired woman” in America, but no one is “excited” about her presidential campaign. She’s inevitable, but she can’t win an election. And even when she wins a debate, she still lost it.

This might seem like an indication of what we already know — that the former secretary of state is an extremely polarizing candidate, whose very name is treated as a curse word or a reason to break out the Holy Water during the Republican presidential debates. The New York Times’ Mark Leibovitch wrote earlier this year that “divisive” has become almost associated with her very name: “Clinton has worn the polarizing badge more than any other politician since the word came into its unfortunate vogue.” But as Leibovitch argued, Hillary’s status as a divider is less a product of her politics than our own.

Leibovitch compared the phenomenon to “Bush derangement syndrome,” a term coined by Charles Krauthammer to describe “the acute onset of paranoia in otherwise normal people in reaction to the policies, the presidency — nay —the very existence of George W. Bush. 

The biggest difference here is that before Krauthammer labeled Bush’s critics deranged, George W. already had three years of policies behind him. Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, hasn’t been in the Oval Office a single day, and her presidency is already being treated by some as an unmitigated disaster. What’s more, even members of her own party are getting in on the action. In a recent column for Salon, self-avowed millennial progressive Walter Bragman suggests that Clinton isn’t just a bad candidate — she’s a threat to the future of the Democratic party itself — and compares her to the second coming of Reagan, a corrosive force that will destroy the foundation’s of American progressivism.

We’ve clearly moved past derangement. This is the time of full-on Hillary hysteria.
You’ve heard all of this before, of course. Hillary Clinton isn’t trustworthy. She isn’t “relatable” or “real.” (However we happen to be defining those words today.) Her so-called likability problem is ancient news by now — the same nebulous idea that has dogged her all the way back to her time as First Lady. But while these criticisms would be perfect for your anti-Hillary poker night (“B-23 — ballbusting!”), they’re also indicative of just how much the aversion to her candidacy — even among those on the left — is removed from the realm of policy. Even in Bragman’s takedown of Clinton, he begins with her image: “Hillary’s personality repels me (and many others).”

Clinton has continued to occupy that same space for the better part of three decades now, a one-woman culture war who plays the political game the same way the men around her do. But unlike those men, Clinton is chided for being “disingenuous” and a “political insider.” Everyone else just gets to do their job.

If America as a whole has a complicated relationship with the former First Lady, one segment of the population stands out. Research from the Wall Street Journal this November showed that Hillary hysteria is coming from one major sector of the population — white men. “Sixty-four percent of white men hold an unfavorable view of Mrs. Clinton, compared with just 26 percent who see her in a positive light,” the Journal’s Aaron Zitner noted. “That’s a gap of 38 points.”

And while Clinton critics could point to her deficit among white men as reason to worry about her electability in the general election, Zitner also notes that “Republicans are in such [dire] need of minority-voter support that they can lose in 2016 even if Mrs. Clinton under performs Mr. Obama among white voters.”

The response from many among Sanders’ white male voter base to Hillary Clinton’s continued success in the polls is to refuse to vote for her in the general election, as if the only thing worse than a Republican presidency is four years of another Clinton. But instead of folding our arms like a pack of third graders who have been told recess is cancelled, Sanders supporters should hold Hillary Clinton accountable to the right things, instead of quibbling about how much we just don’t like her, make her a better candidate.

Bernie Sanders’ supporters might accuse Clinton of sounding like a Republican, but we’re the ones who are doing the GOP’s dirty work for them.

Having been active in politics for over 25 years, the reality is that one rarely finds the "perfect candidate."  Instead, one has to choose the better choice from the field of candidates.  Childish foot stomping and screams that one is taking their toys and going home accomplishes nothing.  Indeed, all it shows is the immaturity and irrationality of those throwing the conniption fits.  

GOP Debate Circus Reflections

Having watched the GOP "debate" last night - a form of self-inflicted torture - I was again stunned by the substance free nature of the performances of the supposed top three candidates all of whom appeared like elementary school (or at best junior high school) school yard braggarts and bullies.  It is frightening that this is what the Republican Party has become.  Some in the pundit class are breathlessly claiming that Marco Rubio was the winner last evening simply because he attacked Donald Trump.  They gloss over the fact that many of his statements were untrue and that his answers lacked details - and that he looked childish much of the time with his smirking behavior.  The only adult on the stage was John Kasich who in contrast to the other candidates tried to tone down the anti-gay rhetoric, perhaps remembering the the GOP's anti-gay stridency likely delivered Virginia and Ohio to Barack Obama in 2012.  In a column in the Washington Post (that has a hint of Maureen Dowd style snark in it), Joe Scarborough throws cold water on those grasping at straws to see Rubio gaining momentum to stop Trump.  Here are excerpts:

Expect the huddled masses of GOP insiders and conservative media commentators to tell us for the ninth time this election season that Marco Rubio had the debate of his life Thursday night and that the young senator’s tour de force will finally bring Donald Trump to his political knees. Some may even be delusional enough to once again utter the word “Marco-mentum”.

What exactly is “Marco-mentum”? If you judge Team Rubio’s hopeful slogan by actual results, it starts with a 4 point loss in Iowa, a 25 point drubbing in New Hampshire, an 10 point defeat in South Carolina, and an embarrassing 22 point loss in Nevada. Never mind that Team Rubio told reporters for six months to ignore any setbacks in the early states since Nevada would be their political “firewall”. In the end, the Silver State results looked more like a dumpster fire that torched The-Future-of-the-Republican-Party’s hopes to win a single state.

If you’re keeping score at home, Sen. Rubio is 0 for 4 and facing a string of Super Tuesday defeats that will extend that losing streak to fifteen. But relief will surely come in Florida, when Rubio returns to his Sunshine State. Right? Well, no.

Thursday’s Quinnipiac poll of likely GOP voters in Florida showed Donald Trump crushing the sitting Florida senator 44 percent to 28 percent. Among the tea party voters who propelled Rubio to the Senate in 2010, Rubio is getting pummeled 54 percent to 14 percent.

Sen. Rubio has shown an amazing ability to spin yarn into gold, celebrating one ugly election defeat after another with concession speeches that owe less to Ronald Reagan than Baghdad Bob. After losing by 22 percent in Nevada, Rubio criticized Donald Trump for “underperforming.” Before that, he distracted media sycophants and desperate money men from the fact he had no real organization in early states by inventing a “3-2-1″ strategy that vanished into thin air after an embarrassing 5th place finish in New Hampshire.

Regardless of what the future holds, Marco Rubio’s campaign for president is effectively over.

His campaign was fueled more by the promise of things to come than the reality of the present. Glowing press reviews and headlines declaring Rubio the future of the Republican Party were never grounded in substance, but instead on the plodding assumption that a political party bleeding support from young voters and Hispanics could only save themselves by embracing a young Hispanic politician — even if that campaign was little more than a bag of cotton candy.

One day, the hype surrounding Mr. Rubio may be replaced by hope grounded in more than crude demographic calculations. But with the upstart senator facing fifteen straight campaign losses without a win, it seems my tough take on Marco Rubio’s presidential prospects may have been far too kind.

Ouch!!!