I have said it before, but I am again confused this morning after President Donald Trump launched into another self-defeating and unpresidential tirade on Twitter. The target of the tweets is the husband of Kellyanne Conway. (For the record, she is a former student of mine). George Conway has published the criteria used to diagnose Narcissistic Personality Disorder and has suggested that Trump is clearly mentally ill. By attacking Conway, Trump has only magnified the allegations and drawn attention to the NPD criteria. While various White House officials struggled for months to keep Trump from responding directly to George Conway, Trump finally had enough after daily attacks. However, the result is manifestly bad for Trump. As should have been obvious, Conway responded by highlighting his prior allegation of mental illness and tweeted “You. Are. Nuts.”
President Trump blasted called Conway a “stone cold loser” and the “husband from hell.” In truth, I have always been surprised by George Conway’s relentless attacks given his wife’s position. Conway is not in the media and it would not seem too unreasonable to expect him to respect the delicate position of his wife as a close adviser to Trump.
None of that however explains for excuses this attack from Trump: “George Conway, often referred to as Mr. Kellyanne Conway by those who know him, is VERY jealous of his wife’s success & angry that I, with her help, didn’t give him the job he so desperately wanted. I barely know him but just take a look, a stone cold LOSER & husband from hell!”
Trump’s denial of knowing Conway is in conflict with known facts of a relationship going back many years as well as a reported offer for Conway to head one of the divisions at the Justice Department.
The continued name calling and personal attacks not only diminishes the office of the President but only works to reinforce the criticism. Indeed, George Conway responded in his own tweet, saying that Trump seems “determined” to prove his arguments, adding the hashtag “#NarcissisticPersonalityDisorder.”
This follows widespread criticism of Trump for his attacks on the late John McCain including core conservative senators who were shocked by the attack on McCain.
Polls show that Trump is still popular with Republicans but he is adding to the number of voters who committed to voting against him, including in key states like Florida. Even if Trump is unconcerned about how these tweets impact his office, they are clearly not working politically.
Re. the claims by George Conway and MSM that Trump is “clearly mentally ill:” Did you notice that the mental health professionals willing to make such public claim seem to have disappeared? The DSM-5 (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition) specifies that such diagnosis requires physical examination. I wonder if the State and Federal Licensing Boards notified health professionals who were diagnosing Trump without the required exam that they risked losing their license.
A diagnosis of being mentally ill can and often does trigger a whole host of legal ramifications causing severe loss of civil liberties. Interesting how the one-time Party of civil liberties has morphed into the exact opposite. Is there any subject wherein Progressives are not infinitely more guilty of exactly what they accuse the GOP of doing?
If a mental illness diagnosis did not require physical exam, then all every major Party out of power would ever have to do is get a diagnosis, and viola, no government! We’d have the military dictatorship the Left longs for!
George has severe personality defect. What kind of jerk publicly criticizes his wife’s boss, who feeds, clothes, and houses his whole family? Is George just projecting onto Trump the inadequacy George feels toward himself for being a failure? Remember that George applied to work for Trump and Trump refuse, obviously for good reason.
Tulsi Gabbard has a lot of good ideas, for any POTUS candidate
legalizing sex work…..decriminalizing marijuana at the federal level, finally!
She’s not bad looking either.
https://www.pinterest.com/pin/173740498103153786/
Be careful with your desire to legalize marihuana in a nation that has so much welfare and so many entitlements.
Ha good point. At least they will have to buy their own cheetos and pay for their own couches to sit on rather than get three hots and a cot on the taxpayer’s dime
Also so many of the states have legalized, the federal criminal aspect is making a lot of businesses into quasi illegal question marks that have trouble with banking etc.
It’s bad for everyone when the lines get blurred by inconsistent laws such as these. There needs to be a rationalization of the federal MJ laws consistent with popular state level efforts to decriminalize.
Roger Stone was into decriminalization, that’s how he met that leftist pothead that put him in touch with the Wiki people , Randy something or other, maybe that was contact that dragged Stone down. I try and stay away from potheads and substance abusers of all kinds, as a general rule, in spite of my interest in decriminalization as a social issue.
Kurtz, I don’t like to interfere with anyone’s right to live their lives the way they wish but I don’t feel I should be required to pay for anyone’s habit. I think today there is more danger from marijuana than many realize.
Kurtz, there is no logical reason pot should be a Schedule 1 drug. No reason whatsoever! I can’t understand for a moment why it remains in that column. Marijuana laws are the last Jim Crow law still enforced.
P Hill – I actually agree with you that it shouldn’t be a schedule 1 drug. It’s absurd to be jailed for a joint. I am just on the fence about the effects of complete legalization, but am open to a discussion.
Well, I have no problem if they have a disparate impact on blacks. That doesn’t bother me per se. I just don’t like that there are so many lazy schmucks locked up for sitting on a couch doing nothing. they can be lazy on their own nickel.
It’s also a medicine as you rightly observe
But Alan is right, there are dangers to it. It can trigger latent psychosis, which means, for a small percentage of the population with subrosa psychological problems, it can worsen them.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/not-the-whole-person/201801/can-marijuana-trigger-schizophrenia
Then again, alcohol can trigger all kinds of stupid and crazy behavior too.
I am ok for states to approach this in their own way and that’s why I favor a retreat from the topic by the feds.
Yeah, Alan, if we just keep jailing pot smokers sooner or later they’ll learn not to smoke it. Of course that hasn’t worked so far, but if we double down and give them longer prison sentences, a century from now the problem might go away.
Read this Peter. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanpsy/article/PIIS2215-0366(19)30048-3/fulltext
Peter, I didn’t mention jailing anyone and I even stated I didn’t like interfering with personal preference. I just don’t want to be forced to pay for someone else’s abuse of drugs. The risks based on the article above from Lancet released 2 days ago demonstrate a significant increase of psychoses sometimes irreversible.
You seem to have no end saddling other people with problems that could have been avoided but for the nanny state.
Peter, the above was from Allan.
We could tell, the stupidity transcends.
Come on, YNOT. Be nice.
When you stop being brain dead, I will note it that is the best I can do.
Karen has been one of the smartest and nicest persons on this blog. One can only laugh at YNOT and his comments.
YNOT, Do you think your remarks reveals any intelligence? No. I don’t think you have ever made any kind of remark that qualifies you to be considered even partially educated.
Read your own writings and then reflect. I don’t waste time arguing with idiots?
YNOT, I have some substance in what I say and I think most people recognize that, but you seem to have none. Instead you are pointing to your own image in a mirror and are too stupid to realize it.
YNOT
The time has come for you to stop your repeatedly uncivil behavior on this blog.
Alan, marijuana isn’t going away. A clear majority of Americans now want it legalized. There’s no point in jailing people. And if the law is unenforceable, then the logical next step would be to legalize with public awareness campaigns to warn of dangers.
“There’s no point in jailing people.”
Peter, did I say I wanted users jailed? Did you read the Lancet article published 3 days ago? It’s a bit scary but perhaps not as scary as 70,000 from all drug overdose deaths last year and rising. We should be concerned with the acceleration of drug deaths along with drugs that many think are absolutely safe but have been shown to cause a rise in psychoses by a considerable number. Some of that number labeled schitophrenic will not return to normal even with cessation of marijuana use and even the drugs presently on the market might not be able to help them.
Allan – you are absolutely correct about marijuana’s connection to psychosis. It also increases the risk of schizophrenics becoming violent. I guess the paranoid bad trip can have a bad effect on some people. In addition, the last time I checked, pot had 7 times more THC than it did in the 60’s.
Marijuana has significant value as a medical therapeutic, and deserves to be studied. It’s not saline. It’s not a panacea. DUIs are difficult, as the effects are far more long lasting than that of alcohol, and there are no breathalyzers that I am aware of. Breeders are working diligently to make it a hard drug, unfortunately.
I tend to be for personal liberty. I also agree with you that people’s choices can deeply impact the rest of society.
Should it be legalized at the federal level? I believe we should carefully study the issue.
Karen, only with legalization can we get the proper federal regulation marijuana deserves. But proper regulation will never happen with a patchwork of inadequate state laws.
And again there needs to be a public awareness campaign to educate the public to the potential dangers of pot. Such campaigns exist for alcohol and tobacco. We absolutely need one for cannabis!
No, I think you can take it off the federal naughty list, and leave it to the states. A proper federal legislation can rationalize the issue and leave some space for local experimentation just as with alcohol. I referenced Gabbard’s legislation but I ‘m actually not really well informed about her plan, just raising it for discussion
Karen, what I find interesting is how the left is so inconsistent. Their frequent argument is ‘for the greater good’, but immediately turn their backs when there is something they wish to promote that is not for the greater good. They lack stable principles and that is one reason their arguments are so frequently shallow.
“Should it be legalized at the federal level? I believe we should carefully study the issue.”
I once had a discussion with another about what the city of Christiana (in Denmark) would look like. I recall it was previously an anarchist haven where the most commerce involved stalls where all variaties of cannibis was sold legally. There was support from the state. I believe since then the stalls were closed and made illegal. My understanding is it is nothing like it was decades ago and their major item of trade, the cannibis stalls, were closed. The other party thought it would be an artistic haven. I thought it would be the pits.
I was interested so I made sure to travel there. It was a horrible dirty place where the only thing brightening the streets were the stalls selling cannibis. There was little to no art. The people were slovenly and I wouldn’t eat in their shapbby dirty restaurant. I did walk around and talk to many people. The ones that were lucid would tell me about the young deaths in their families.
I am more libertarian than not so I don’t want to tell anyone what to do, but at the same time I shouldn’t be forced to be responsible for the irresponsible actions of others.
I went to Copenhagen and made sure to stay the heck out of Christiana. It sounded like the pits. And there was lots of other stuff to see. I really enjoyed my visit.
Good link— that’s a serious issue about MJ and people should be more well informed about it especially young folks who have a history of heritable mental illness in the family.
whether it’s legal or not. but also we know it being illegal has not stopped very many teenagers from trying it thats for sure.
Kurtz, think of all the adventure you missed along with the stories that actual individuals involved could tell you. When I travel I don’t stick to the beaten path. Sometimes, especially in places like China, it is difficult because the translators are licensed and one has to leave them behind to see certain things they are told we are not permitted to see. I always have a significant amount of money hidden away should I get into trouble, but I don’t know if that actually works in China.
When I was young I wanted to see the upstairs of (I think it was) The National Palace in Mexico which had guards marching around to prevent people from getting into the offices of the President etc. When they marched one way I climbed the stairs and walked the halls continuing to do so until the guards pointed their rifles at me. The head of security came over and asked me what I was doing and I explained. He then took me for a tour of all the forbidden areas.
Cool story, I had something like that happened to me in Spain too, I think there is a cultural appreciation among Latins for bending the rules as a show of hospitality.
in China this is what I hear.
A) for now American tourists are still safe, and safer than the Chinese are for sure, when it comes to government bullying.
B) unless the Americans do something that will definitely provoke a problem like get into a fistfight. Then, you gotta pull out the bribes. The citizen has an excuse to complain and fuss, and must, to save face. Then the police gotta go through the motions to save face, too. This is all resolved by bribes. If the American has a local Chinese friend to negotiate the bribe, then you won’t get squeezed too badly.
C) there is no law in China in the sense in which we know it. So, in China, a good lawyer is a smart one who helps negotiate the bribes downward. But a bad lawyer is one that lies to the client and says, we can go to court and argue the law. No, there is no law there, there are only the relative values of the bribes required to stay out of trouble.
D) the best friend to have in china in any pinch, is a CP member. They are the friends to have. Expect to grow your business? Join the CP. Which by the way, is not easy. They only want people who can bring stuff to the table. It’s basically like a big nationwide gang. And, at the entry level, ideology is completely irrelevant. Or maybe all the way through to the top it is completely irrelevant– and maybe it always was.
E) the corrolary of all this, is that American companies doing business in China, have found euphemistic ways to avoid getting in trouble under theForeign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA). Which prohibits paying bribes. I am not in a big law firm so I don’t know how they manage it, just smoke and mirrors prolly, because nobody can get things done anywhere in China without profuse bribery.
While the Special Counsel is out there prosecuting Manafort for cozying up to Ukrainians, there are thousands of executives at American companies that could go to jail under the FCPA for bribery in China IF the DOJ actually wanted to enforce the law and had the will to try. So there is a lot of hypocrisy out there, jes sayin!
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5548405/Kellyannes-husband-goes-rogue-George-Conway-spends-month-laying-Trump-Twitter.html
This article is a year old. Given George Conway’s long history of Twitter attacks on Trump, it’s no big surprise that Trump retaliated.
It’s unusual for Trump to “let it go” without responding to such a long period of sustained Twitter attacks against him, so within that context, the surprising thing is that George the Fat got a free ride for a long time without Trump firing back at him.
Tom, presidents have always been attacked by critics. Sustaining endless criticism has always been a given reality of the presidency. It was Harry Truman who said, “If you can’t take the heat, get out of the kitchen”.
Trump, one should note, spent 8 years fanning ‘birther’ conspiracies against Barrack Obama. Obama rarely responded to those attacks. Yet Trump came to office with this attitude that he ‘must’ respond to every single critic. That was never considered part of a president’s job.
And ‘why’ does Trump keep attacking John McCain..?? It seems to indicate deep insecurities on the part of Trump. The fact that he considers McCain a threat from the grave is utterly irrational.
Usually the criticism does not flow freely for months on end from the spouse of a president’s key adviser.
George Conway’s “diagnosis” of Trump’s NPD was probably the straw that broke the camel’s back.
Conway’s been spoiling for a fight with Trump for a long time, and going forward, Trump is no longer likely to ignore that slob’s tweetstorms.
Usually there is not a reason.
It’s odd that George won’t stop when his wife is an employee. There comes a point where one has to seriously question KellyAnne’s loyalties. In any event, Trump’s attacks on McCain are stark raving mad. Which seems to vindicate George Conway.
They are two separate issues….Trump’s ill-advised responses to McCain’s insults do not “vindicate George Conway”.
Conway was clearly spoiling for a fight with Trump, and his tweets attacking Trump have been going on for a long time.
Since Conway wants a public Twitter fight with Trump and has worked so hard and so long to get it, Trump could not be expected to refrain indefinitely from responding.
You can either question KellyAnne’s loyalties, or George Conway’s loyalties.
They’ll resolve their differences one way or the other.
A major reason that George Conway’s Tweets get attention is that he is exploiting his wife’s position in the Trump Administration to draw attention to himself.
If his name was George Smith his outspoken opposition to Trump would be just another one of thousands buried in Twitterland.
P Hill – I feel very sorry for Kellyanne. George is publicly backstabbing her.
I also agree that Trump needs to let McCain lie. It is McCain’s fault that we still have Obamacare, as well as the rest of Congress who ran on repealing that human catastrophe and then failed to do it when they had the chance. Sure, McCain did a 180 after promising to support the measure, but it also took other Republican senators to completely fail the American public for it to fail.
McCain is dead. What happened, happened. We need to move on. Bringing him up just hurts his family, and it doesn’t accomplish anything.
Tom – I would add that no President in history has ever suffered this level of abuse, from the media, Hollywood, social media, private individuals…
The existence of the Internet and Social Media alone exponentially increase the scope and severity of attacks on conservatives in general and POTUS specifically. People say astonishingly awful things in anonymity online. They extemporaneously spew out whatever they’re feeling, and there is no cooling off period of typing it up, getting an envelope, addressing it, licking the stamp…You just hit enter, and you can’t call it back.
The President’s actions sometimes call for criticism, but the intensity of the vitriol is really bad.
Another thing I would point out is that the Left has been outraged at the tenor of the President’s remarks against his critics. But this is what it has been like for conservatives for decades. Open animosity against conservatives and dehumanizing them has been mainstream at K-grad school, the media, and on the Big Screen for many years.
No president in the last 150 years has spent most of his days in a wars of words with his perceived enemies, and he begins many of these fights himself. His purposeful division of our country – along with his constant lying, bragging, and bullying – constitute a new low – very low – in Presidential behavior which we should all hope is not the new normal.
No President has ever been abused to the extent this President has faced. No President had to put up with a DOJ or FBI that has acted illegally and against their departments own rules along with acting collusively with the mass media. No President has ever had to put up with an opposition party which not only doesn’t support the President but will do so in a way that can greatly harm America. No President has ever had to deal with an opposition that changed what it said it believed in (border walls) just because the opposition won.
The Democratic Party is no longer the party it was before. No JFK or RFK would survive today in the Democratic Party. They would likely be considered to the right of Donald Trump.
Karen, Honey: that fat slob is NOT the valid President, so stop trying to treat him like he is. He is a cheater who colluded with Russia to manipulate the 2016 election results because he needs to borrow money from Russia and Middle Easterners to keep his business running because is not a good businessman and consistently defaults on loans. They own him. His foreign policy is to do their bidding, regardless of consequences to the United States. He is deferential to Putin, a brutal murderer of those who criticize him. He refuses to even acknowledge that MBS ordered the murder of U.S.-based journalist Jamal Kashoggi, much less do anything about it.
How is he being “abused”? By pointing out the truth about him? He lies all of the time. Every single day, since he wrongfully entered the Oval Office, he lies, lies, lies. He has admitted, on tape, bragging about assaulting women he finds “beautiful”. He had sexual relations with a porn star and Playboy models, who were bought off to purchase their silence. He praised White Supremacists after they killed Heather Heyer. He is a proven racist. He has made all sorts of wild promises he cannot possibly keep just to reel in gullible people like you. He never had an alternative health care plan, and still doesn’t. He never had any strategy to force Mexico to pay for a wall.
Saying these things is not engaging in vitriol. Trump is ethically and emotionally unfit to serve. He is a failure. Nothing he has done so far has been successful, other than making work for lawyers and the privateers who are charging $750 per day for each illegal migrant who is in custody. If he were a smart dealmaker, he should use this money to pay Mexico to turn these people back where they came from. They can’t get to the U.S. border without going through Mexico. Now, Mexico is hiring buses to haul these people to the border, because they don’t like Trump. The White House just hired 17 more lawyers to fight subpoenas from Congressional investigative committees. What does he have to hide?
You really, sincerely, need to stop watching Hannity. You are literally repeating, verbatim, his rhetoric attacking “the left” for “victimizing” poor little Donnie. Most of this country does not like Trump, did not vote for him, and have consistently disapproved of him for the past 2 years. We are not all “the left”. Those are facts. No one is “attacking” him. As POTUS, he is accountable for his conduct and performance. He is not a victim. The reason there is so much more criticism of him than other Presidents is because he is so less qualified than anyone who ever previously occupied the Oval Office, because he is a consistent, habitual liar, because none of his programs have worked and because of his malignant narcissism. He is not even a “conservative”. Conservatives believe in reducing the national debt and for fiscal responsibility. Since Trump took over, the national debt has grown by the largest percentage in history. The tax cuts for the uber-wealthy are part of the reason. The tariffs haven’t worked, either. Companies are still closing factories and shipping jobs overseas. He promised to preserve Social Security and Medicare, but his budget proposal calls for cuts to these programs to pay for the Mexico wall. What does it take to make people like you wake up?
” Or even thought possible”….autocorrect wrote “or even the possible”.
Same person, but may have taken a Psych 101 class in the interim.
We have a number of the “5 cent” Lucy-style analysts practising here.
I gave my thoughts on this subject earler in the day (is it still Wednesday?) and have been dodging bullets ever since….I mean to say, such stimulating discoourse! I feel like Susanna Dickinson when she left the Alamo after the seige….. Well, almost. 😊
Go back to Alabama with that banjo on your knee, O Susanna.