October 26, 2022

I'm still sick, being treated at home for pneumonia, so just a bit about Herschel Walker (again)

 before I go back to rest in bed while I recover from pneumonia....



Herschel Walker is in the news again with another accusation of him getting a woman an abortion. 

A woman who claims she was in a years-long romantic relationship with Herschel Walker says the Republican Senate nominee for Georgia pressured her into having an abortion in 1993, she announced at a press conference on Wednesday.

The woman, referred to as Jane Doe to protect her identity, attended the press conference virtually with her lawyer, Gloria Allred, and read her statement. Her voice was heard, but her face was not shown.

Doe said she decided to tell her story now to highlight what she said is Walker’s hypocrisy. “He has publicly taken the position that he is about life and against abortion under any circumstance when in fact he pressured me to have an abortion and personally ensured that it occurred by driving me to the clinic and paying for it,” said Doe.

At a campaign event in Georgia prior to the press conference, Walker called the allegation a “lie.”

“I already told people this is a lie, and I’m not going to entertain, continue to carry a lie along. And I also want to let you know that I didn’t kill JFK either,” Walker said, adding that Democrats are doing and saying whatever they can to win the Senate seat.

He says it's a lie. Like previous accusations he said it never happened. No way... why won't anyone ask him if there have been other incidents in his life when he didn't recall things other people said they knew happened because they saw him do them or heard him say them?

Read:



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October 25, 2022

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.

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October 24, 2022

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.



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.

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October 23, 2022

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.

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October 22, 2022

Can Trump resist starring in the drama of testifying?

 

Can Trump resist starring in the drama of testifying?
By Hal Brown
Previous editions in archives >>>:




From The NY Times: In the most basic sense, any legal arguments seeking to get Mr. Trump off the hook would merely need to be weighty enough to produce two and a half months of litigation. If Republicans pick up enough seats in the midterm elections to take over the House in January, as polls suggest is likely, they are virtually certain to shut down the Jan. 6 committee, a move that would invalidate the subpoena. NY Times

 


A few words (my bold) in The New York Times subtitle ("If the ex-president turns down the drama of testifying, his legal team could mount several constitutional and procedural arguments in court") of all that I've seen, comes the closest to addressing my speculation though there's nothing about it in the article itself. 

The photo they used does suggest how much Trump likes to have the spotlight on him.


I am stuck on this subject because it seems that anybody with a public forum is saying Trump will wait out the clock hoping that the GOP takes control of the House in January and dissolves the J6 Committee.

This presupposes he doesn't want to have the ginormous megaphone which such testifying would give him as long as the Committee acceded to his demand that his appearance be televised live. I am hearing that he could end up testifying for two or three days.

Accepting the subpoena and testifying live would make must-see television for both his cult who want to see him make fools of his interrogators and those who want to see the J6 Committee members and their lawyers eviscerate him. 

He does have another option, albeit a lesser one, aside from insisting his testimony be live.

What Steve Bannon did after his trial, which wasn't televised, gives him another way to gain public attention. 

Steve Bannon is a boisterous buffoon and I doubt many hardcore Trumpers take him all that seriously. Some may even wonder why Trump allows himself to have his photo taken with him, even when it looks like he's holding his breath so as not to inhale the noxious fumes I can imagine emanating from the man who looks like he hasn't bathed in a week.
You may notice that if you do an image search for the two of them most show them a fair distance apart from each other.
Click above to enlarge


Donald Trump, to his cult, is their epideictic emperor, not that many even know the meaning of the word epideictic. 

Trump could decide that he could testify behind closed doors because he knows that he'd have the opportunity to say anything he wanted and have his remarks (or rant) televised on every station afterwards.

Bannon took only a few minutes but Trump could go on like he does at his rallies for as long as he wanted to. He knows that networks, even Fox News, have stopped broadcasting his rallies.  I am sure Trump misses this. Each network just broadcasts what they think are newsworthy snippets. 

Trump may not be willing to admit it to himself, at least not fully, but at some level I think he knows he needs to revamp his act because his performance has gotten stale to all but his most loyal cult members.

If he made a speech after testifying in private I think it would be covered, if not in its entirety, for a long time on most networks. I can see MSNBC and other stations cutting away if and when he starts repeating himself and lapses into an unhinged string of lies and grievances.

Regardless, he would be able to star in his own show without being interrupted by pesky interrogators and, like Bannon did, he'd refuse to take questions from reporters



More recent blog editions:

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