I have no idea wha I'm going to write today, if anything

 I have a doctors appointment in a half hour for a upper respiratory infection that isn't Covid but has laid me low and made me feel miserable for over week. I won't bother with a list of symptoms but they are of concern enough for the doctor to have made an appointment for this morning after a telehealth Zoom visit yesterday afternoon. He may want to order a chest x-ray and put me on some broad-spectrum antibiotics.

I was wrong, no chance Trump will testify live, but perhaps J6 Committee thought he might

By Hal Brown

Trump by DonkeyHotey

I spent some time speculating in these blog posts (below) that Trump might decide he wanted to outsmart the January 6th Committee and run circles around them when he testified and have a huge national audience while he did this. Of course this was a grandiose delusion.

• Can Trump resist starring in the drama of testifying?
• Will Trump comply with J6 subpoena? Don't be surpr...
• 

  Will he or won't he? Part 3 on Trump testifying before J6 Committee

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  Will he or won't he testify? Don't assume he won't. Updated.

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  Will he or won't he testify? Don't assume he won't.

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First it was reported that Liz Cheney said that there was no chance he'll even have an opportunity to try this.

Cheney: Jan. 6 Panel Won't Accept Live TV Testimony From Trump

"He’s not going to turn this into a circus," the House committee’s vice chair, Rep. Liz Cheney, said of the former president's subpoena.

Then this came out:

"The committee treats this matter with great seriousness," she said. "We are going to proceed in terms of the questioning of the former president under oath. It may take multiple days. And it will be done with a level of rigor and discipline and seriousness that it deserves."

The panel, Cheney continued, will not allow the former president to turn his testimony into "his first debate against Joe Biden and the circus and the food fight that that became."

“This is far too serious set of issues. And we’ve made clear exactly what his obligations are. And we are proceeding with, with that set out,” she added.

Cheney's office later clarified her remarks, making clear that she was not ruling out the possibility of Trump's live testimony.

So I don't know what to make of this. Was I right or was I wrong? 

I might have been right in another way.

It's possible that the January 6th Committee thought he might actually agree to live testimony and knew that he would, as Liz Cheney said, turn his appearance into a circus or at least attempt to.

Perhaps Cheney and the committee knew what to expect and decided they wouldn't give him a megaphone to air his grievances, or at least make sure there were strict rules in place if they did allow him to testify live.

Perhaps they think the optics of refusing to allow him to testify live would look bad for the committee.

Congress's Crazy Caucus: Let's call it what it is

 By Hal Brown

Kevin McCarthy in the once Hallowed Halls of the House and the "Crazy Caucus" it has become. Click above to enlarge image. Background image here.

I thought of writing this after making this comment on an article on RAWSTORY.

Click above to enlarge

As a retired psychotherapist I look at this through a diagnostic lens. But to paraphrase Dylan “You don't need the psychiatric diagnostic manual to know which way the wind blows.” To varying degrees the "crazy caucus" is composed of people who are seriously in need of mental health intervention. It is eye-popping that the presumably mentally healthy members of Congress like McCarthy don't take this seriously. Are they going to let the inmates totally run the asylum? They may not be able to stop them.

Above is the comment plus the illustration which I put on this article:

Unfortunately the word "crazy" has too many meanings and is used in both positive and negative ways. 

The word isn't in the psychiatric dictionary or the diagnostic manual. 

Too many people think that even the craziness of someone like Marjorie Taylor Greene or Herschel Walker are just quirks.

They don't want to delve into an analysis as to whether Greene believes the things she says that would strongly suggest she has a delusional disorder. 

They don't want to consider whether Herschel Walker, who may end up in the Senate, still has a dissociative identity disorder. 

I wrote about Walker here:

I don't know if Greene was ever in therapy. Walker was and he claimed he was cured with the help of God and by Jerry Mungadze. He believes in exorcism, the occult, and demon possession.  I wrote about this here.

It is important not to stigmatize mental illness. Most people with a diagnosed mental illness who are functional enough to make it into public life have disorders like depression and anxiety. Generally they are aware of this because they suffer and frequently seek treatment.

One of the most problematic issues in mental health is that there are some disorders which don't cause people to suffer. These individuals may cause others to suffer but they lack the empathy to care about who they hurt.

The key is to differentiate people who do suffer themselves from those whose reality testing is severely impaired and who cause others to suffer, can't make decisions based on reality, or both.

Walker and Greene are just two examples of people who are now or may be members of Congress who may be diagnosable as having a mental illness which impairs their ability to determine what is real and what isn't. Greene seems to enjoy making people she considers enemies suffer. Walker, or some of his alter personalities, may not remember having made people suffer.

This brings me to the Unhinged Head Honcho, Donald Trump. While he meets every criteria for being a malignant (or sociopathic) narcissist this doesn't mean he can't tell what's real and what isn't. We know he lies but don't know how many of his lies he believes, hence the title and subject of this article:

Trump may end up being tried for one or two crimes (helping plan an insurrection or the documents theft) which could result in a jail sentence where a jury would have to see if his defense is credible. To suggest it would be interesting to see if his defense involved some kind of insanity plea is an understatement.