No, it’s not just you. Trump has been especially loony the past several days. Evidence of bad news on the way, according to pal-turned-critic Joe Scarborough. Evidence of a deteriorating mental state, says ghostwriter Tony Schwartz. Evidence that Trump is not doing this strategically, that he really is this fucked up, says David Graham.
It’s one thing for a single person, even if it’s the president, lose the ability to tell reality from his own delusions. That can happen to anyone, though of course the responsible thing for those around him would be to remove such a person from office. But what do you do when the mass delusion affects an entire political party? That’s where we are with the GOP Congress, which is ignoring warnings from Kansas Republicans about how GOP tax policies work in reality, as opposed to Ayn Rand’s fiction.
No problem, though. Apparently the entire party has figured out that, with their own “news” sources willing to carry and amplify their lies, they can tell them with impunity. So it was that, while the press chased the latest misbehaving penis, Sam Brownback, the governor who engineered the Kansas disaster, stood before his former Senate colleagues and lied his pious ass off, claiming that the Kansas experiment “worked.”
Spreading lies brings us right back to Trump, who yesterday tweeted out truly fake news — anti-Muslim videos from a far-right British fringe group that were debunked by the end of the day. The fringe group was thrilled at the publicity, but also reacted to the shout-out by frantically deleting pro-Putin material from its Facebook page. Funny how those grass roots smell of vodka.
Have you noticed that, unlike the presidencies of both G.W. Bush and Obama, nobody seems to care that we’re getting no news from the government about the wars we’re fighting? Well, a few have, so the Daily Beast went digging and found evidence that U.S. special forces might have massacred civilians in Somalia.
Someone yesterday complained about all the things I didn’t write about. That’s the point of the open thread, folks. Add anything I didn’t talk about, and talk about it yourself. Give us some links. You don’t have to attack what we do write about to bring it up yourself.