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.

Bernie Sanders' Continuing Delusions

Fresh off wins in the Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico, Hillary Clinton is within roughly 30 delegates of what she needs to cinch the Democrat nomination.  Objective reality and simple math, however, mean nothing to Bernie Sanders whose ego and need for adulation grows with every passing day.  Despite the insurmountable math, Sanders continues to mislead his followers and claim that he has a path to victory.  The man seemingly is as delusional and self-absorbed as Donald Trump and makes his fitness for the White House doubtful.  A piece in The Economist looks at Sanders' delusional claims of a winning end game.  Here are excerpts:

[T[he outpouring of Bernie-love offered up by a crowd of 20,000 Sandernistas, at an open-air rally in Oakland on May 30th, seemed mostly inane.

As almost anyone would, Mr Sanders, who a year ago was hardly known to most voters, shows signs of believing the hype. He revels in the adulation more visibly than he used to. More important, and bizarrely, he appears sincerely to believe he can win.

He is currently trailing Hillary Clinton in the Golden State by around seven percentage points: a formidable gap, given her advantage with the Hispanic voters who make up over a quarter of its electorate, but closable. All the same, Mr Sanders’s prediction seems so unlikely as to be almost delusional.   

Mr Sanders appears to have lost. Yet he is hurting Mrs Clinton by refusing to acknowledge this. The excitement around his campaign always showed up her woodenness as a campaigner; it takes a lot of loud pop music to work up an atmosphere at Mrs Clinton’s rallies. His persistence in winning clusters of smallish states that play to his strengths—typically those, recently including Washington, Utah and Idaho, that hold caucuses—has meanwhile given his supporters, and some journalists, an exaggeratedly rosy view of his progress. For the most part, this has been to Mrs Clinton’s advantage; it suits her to be seen fighting. 

Desperate to heal their feuding party, and turn its fire on Mr Trump, Democratic bigwigs have for weeks implored Mr Sanders to bow out. If the way the Republicans are rallying to Mr Trump is a guide, the reunification could happen rapidly—indeed the Democrats’ primary wounds look less deep than the Republicans’ did. Asked whether they would support Mrs Clinton in November, many of those in Oakland recoiled at the question: “Of course we would!” 

It is also apparent that some of Mr Sanders’s advisers are turning their thoughts to what he might demand as the price of his surrender. There is talk of making Mrs Clinton raise her pledge of a $12 minimum wage to the $15 Mr Sanders is promising.A defeated candidate is not generally in a position to make such demands. But Mr Sanders, who only joined the Democratic party last year and is aggrieved by its leaders’ preference for Mrs Clinton, seems minded to test that.

Painfully for Mrs Clinton, Mr Sanders meanwhile persists in criticising her personally, especially over her fund-raising on Wall Street, thereby softening her up for Mr Trump. How long can it go on? Mr Sanders has no serious chance of overhauling Mrs Clinton’s lead of 268 delegates in the nine remaining votes, the last of which, Washington, DC, is on June 14th. He would need to secure 68% of the delegates available, which, given that the Democrats hand them out in proportion to vote share, not all to the winner, is almost unimaginable. To justify his pledge to fight on, he therefore needs at least to win most of the remaining states; above all California.

Yet if Mr Sanders loses California, on the night that Mrs Clinton is likely to cross the requisite threshold of 2,383 delegates, counting superdelegates, they would be immaterial. Mr Sanders would have lost his last shred of an excuse for fighting on. Even his closest advisers admit this. According to Mr Devine, “California is the sine qua non.”

Sanders has become a nutty gad fly who simple needs to accept reality and end his campaign.

Evangelicals and the Carson Illusion

I typically disagree with most everything columnist Ross Douthat has to say.  He's far too believing in religious fairy tales and too often believes that "godly Christians" deserve undeserved deference or, worse yet, special rights.  But on occasion, he does to get things at least partly right.  In this case, it's his analysis of the idiocy of the evangelical Christian crowd and their growing attachment to retired surgeon Ben Carson who one of my sisters (a nurse practitioner) once knew when they both worked at Johns Hopkins medical center. - she thinks Carson has gone crazy compared to the man she once knew.  When one bases one's life on fantasy and myths, one is likely to be hoodwinked by frauds and charlatans - and the down right crazy.  Here are highlights fro Douthat's column in the New York Times:

Over the last month, as Donald Trump expanded his polling lead, prominent conservatives passed from a mild bemusement to a weary patience to a slow-burning fury with the voters — the “Trumpen Proletariat,” as National Review’s Jonah Goldberg memorably dubbed them — who support him.The fed-up columnists have reasonable questions for Trump-supporting Republicans.

But if you’re looking for the candidate whose polling surge looks most like a march of voter folly, the Donald and his Trumpistas wouldn’t be the place I’d start. Instead, I would pick the Ben Carson phenomenon, and the evangelical Christians who increasingly form the core of his support.

[T]he growing evangelical embrace of Carson is arguably a greater folly than Trumpmania. That’s because the Donald, for all his proud ignorance about policy detail, is actually running an ideologically distinctive campaign:  . . . .

It’s a class revolt, driven by a sadly-justifiable sense that Republican elites don’t have working-class interests close enough to heart. And it’s already won some (very) modest victories for populism — by prodding Scott Walker to make an economic case against low-skilled immigration, for instance, or by encouraging Jeb Bush to go after hedge fund managers in his tax plan.

Carson, on the other hand, is running a more content-free campaign. Like Trump, he’s underinformed and prone to wild rhetorical flights, but unlike the Donald he doesn’t have a distinctive platform. He’s offering a collection of pieties and crankery; mostly, his candidacy is just about the man himself.

And unfortunately evangelical voters have a weakness for this kind of pitch.  . . .
the evangelical tendency has been to look for a kind of godly hero, a Christian leader who could win the White House and undo every culture-war defeat.

Such unrealistic ideas are hardly unique to the religious right. But evangelical culture, as James Davison Hunter notes in “To Change the World,” his magisterial account of recent Christian engagement with American politics, has a particular fondness for the idea of the history-altering individual, the hope that “one person can stand at the crossroads and change things for good.”

As Hunter’s book points out, neither political nor cultural change usually happens like this.

In this election cycle, though, the evangelical hero quest is particularly self-defeating. With same-sex marriage established nationwide and social liberalism ascendant, religious conservatives have a clear policy “ask” they should be pressing every major Republican contender to embrace. They need guarantees that the next G.O.P. administration will move proactively — through something like Senator Mike Lee’s evolving First Amendment Defense Act — to protect religious schools and charities from losing grants or accreditation or even tax-exempt status because they maintain a traditional position on sexual ethics.

I’m sure that a President Ben Carson would deliver these protections. I’m equally sure that the longer the fantasy of a Carson presidency persists, the less likely it becomes that religious conservatives will get them.

Sadly, Douthat still cannot get beyond his own religious beliefs and realize that the only Americans who have their religious freedom under attack are those who are not the evangelicals and Christofascists.  Having one's ability to inflict ones beliefs on the rest of the populace is not persecution. Indeed, such restricts merely stop the Christofascists from persecuting others.  Perhaps if Douthat and like minded far right Christians were not so self-centered and selfish, they would be able to grasp this simple reality.

Delusional Jeb Bush Claims There is No Negative Bush Baggage for 2016 Run

The saying used to be that of the Bush brothers, Jeb Bush was the smart brother and George W. was - well we all fond out what the Chimperator was and "smart" wasn't one of the descriptions that appropriately attached to him.  Cretin, religious nut case on a crusade, war criminal, etc., etc., yes, but never ever smart.  Now, Jeb Bush is proving that perhaps he is just as stupid as his brother after all.  How?  He is claiming that should he run for president in 2016, he will not be hobbled by any negative baggage from his brother's disastrous regime.  Never mind that current a number of presidential historians are ranking George W. Bush as one of the worse presidents in the history of the country.  And never mind that the Chimperator knowingly took America to war in Iraq on false pretenses and  outright lies.  Raw Story looks at Jeb Bush's incredible denail of reality.  Here are highlights:

Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush (R) is insisting that his famous family name will not hurt him at all if he decides to run for president in 2016.

Fox News host Chris Wallace pointed out to Bush on Sunday that his brother, George W. Bush, had been “somewhat unpopular” when he left office in 2009.

“Do you think there is any Bush baggage?” Wallace wondered. “Do you think that would be a problem?”

“No,” the former Florida governor replied. “I don’t think there’s any Bush baggage at all. I love my brother, I’m proud of his accomplishments, I love my dad, I am proud to be a Bush.”

“And if I run for president, it’s not because of something in my DNA that compels me to do it. It would be that it’s the right thing to do for my family, that the conditions are right and that I have something to offer.”

According to a 2009 CBS News/New York Times poll, former president George W. Bush left office with an approval rating of 22 percent, the lowest approval since the Gallup began asking the question 70 years earlier.

Given Jeb Bush's apparent total detachment from objective reality, he is obviously the perfect candidate for a party out of touch with reality and a majority of the American electorate.