Expect more revelations about others engaged in Weinstein parallel type behaviour and the impact on the Democrat/Hollywood connection and its hypocrisy. I believe it will continue.
Pelosi and her crowd may not understand how this will hurt them politically,because they believe Trump's own boorishness is an offset and they will make it their defense. However, I believe they will learn there is no comparison. Trump is no angel but neither is he the devil they make him out to be and want you to believe he is. It is not a wash.
Finally, the mask has been ripped away and Dr. Jeykll turns out to be Mr. Hyde (Harvey.)
Hollywood is a tinsel town whose questionable values have been portrayed through movies who anointed moguls make and distribute and which have shaped our nation's culture and values for decades and whose earnings have become an income fountain for Democrats. This connection has now been exposed and punctured. What will be the final result no one really knows but there will be political fall out as Democrats distance themselves, at least for a while, from the ties that have bound them.
Hollywood, also, is where some creative and great movies and story telling has occurred and, though this fact has been smeared, what has come out of this industry has been some of the greatest entertainment the world has ever experienced and some of the entertainers/actors the greatest and most generous and entertaining citizens to populate our world.
Today, however, when Jane Fonda was interviewed and said she is ashamed for not speaking out regarding what Weinstein allegedly did to a friend who confided in her, it brought back memories of seeing "Hanoi Jane" sitting on an anti-aircraft gun in her youthful willingness to help the Viet Namese win over her fellow Americans. Yes, she was much younger and naive but it is hard for me to erase that visual stain. Some things remain indelible like a stained blue dress.
I do not claim to be virtuous but I have never betrayed my country, kneeled or burned my nation's flag.
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Iran and deception. (See 1 below.)
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Psychiatrists go nuts trying to figure out Trump. One concluded it is America that is insane.
In truth, Trump functions fairly well but drives others crazy it seems, particularly liberals who are, themselves, paranoid. (See 2 below.)
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One of my dear friends e mailed that someone attacked me and he defended me, for which I am grateful and then I received this from an old and dear friend of our family and fellow memo reader:
"Dick, I so thoroughly appreciate your writings and the articles you share. So often I say to myself “finally someone has the courage to speak up”. And, you do so in such an articulate and compelling way. Kudos to you for your extraordinary efforts to bring some sanity to this madness. L----"
I often ask myself, by speaking my mind in an open manner, am I actually hiding behind words but I have always enjoyed writing and then, when I am attacked, and it happens more now that Trump is president, I generally consider the source and it rolls off my back but it also bothers me because of what is happening on our campuses. This is of wider and deeper concern.
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Dick
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1) Israeli Lawmaker: Iran Believes It Can Deceive the West
THE ATLANTIC, Yair Lapid
Reading through the Iranian foreign minister’s article in The Atlantic this week, one is struck by paradox. It is so full of lies, distortions, and half-truths that in the end it yields one fundamental truth—it’s not a set of errors, it’s a methodology. The goal is to turn Iran into a regional nuclear power. The method is to make the West believe it isn’t happening.
There is no need for a sustained intelligence effort to expose the blatant lies in Zarif’s piece, so I will highlight just a few of the most egregious examples: Iran didn’t improve the accuracy of its missiles to avoid “civilian or non-combatant deaths” (I admit I had to read that sentence twice to believe he wrote it), but rather to intensify the threat and ability to sow destruction. Iran is not a democracy, as he portrays it, because a democracy doesn’t hang homosexuals from cranes, doesn’t enshrine in law the right to stone adulterers to death, and doesn’t maintain a force like the Basij, an Iranian paramilitary of around 11.5 million people whose role is to enforce Sharia law and prevent Western influence. Iran isn’t the victim of terror as Zarif pretends, but the country that funds and arms Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen, the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and a long list of other terror organizations. Iran does not show “good will and peaceful intentions,” because if it did it wouldn’t have sent the Revolutionary Guard to help the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad murder more than half a million people in Syria and create over 11 million refugees through the use of barrel bombs and chemical weapons. Iran is not interested in the “promotion of peace, stability, progress, and prosperity in the region” because earlier this year Zarif’s boss, the Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, called Israel “a cancerous tumor” and a “fake entity” which needs to be destroyed. On another occasion he announced that Iran will support anyone who aims to “wipe Israel off the map.
Also reviewed: ‘Twilight of American Sanity’ by Allen Frances.
Many Americans have spent two years diagnosing the mental state of Donald J. Trump. It’s a favorite topic around dinner tables and water coolers. Why does he say these things? What’s he doing? Is he, you know . . . all there?
Members of the mental-health profession would like to remind us that this is their job, not ours. Consider “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President” ( Thomas Dunne, 360 pages, $27.99),edited by Bandy X. Lee. Readers may remember the “ Goldwater rule,” a 1973 amendment to the American Psychiatric Association’s Principles of Medical Ethics; the rule states that psychiatrists should not comment on the mental health of individuals whom they have not personally examined. It came about as a result of Fact magazine’s claim, in 1964, that more than a thousand psychiatrists believed Sen. Barry Goldwater to be mentally unfit for the job of president. All these discussions occurred simultaneously with a post-Kennedy debate over what to do with an incapacitated president, which led to the passage of the 25th Amendment—now pointed to by some as an alternative to impeachment for removing Trump from power.
Dr. Lee is part of the “Duty to Warn” movement. Its advocates dismiss or sidestep the Goldwater rule on the grounds that mental-health professionals can and should “warn” Americans about Mr. Trump’s mental unfitness for the presidency. The “public trust,” Dr. Lee explains, is “violated if the profession fails in its duty to alert the public when a person who holds the power of life and death over us all shows signs of clear, dangerous mental impairment.” But surely it’s a touch delusional to believe you’re “warning” Americans about the single most talked about phenomenon in contemporary America? Even Mr. Trump’s supporters understand, I suspect, that there is something strange, even unsound, about the mental state of this hyperactive agitator; many voted for him not because they thought he’d be a steady pair of hands in a troubled time but precisely because they felt our political culture needed a shock.
It’s striking, in any case, how many of these authors sound a little—how to say it nicely?—paranoid. “With such a leader,” writes John D. Gartner, founder of the “Duty to Warn” group, “all who are not part of the in-group or who fail to kiss the leader’s ring are enemies who must be destroyed.” Tell me, Mr. Gartner, about these people who want to destroy you. . . .
Allen Frances, an accomplished psychiatrist and professor emeritus at Duke University, takes a very different approach in “Twilight of American Sanity” (Morrow, 326 pages, $27.99). He dismisses the idea that Mr. Trump suffers from a disorder, for the simple reason that disorders prevent sufferers from functioning, and Mr. Trump functions fine. The president “causes great distress in others,” Dr. Frances writes, “but shows no signs himself of experiencing great distress.”
But this initial discussion of the president’s mental state is, it turns out, just a set-up. “Trump isn’t crazy,” he writes, “but our society is.” The book isn’t about sanity or insanity except in a metaphorical sense. Dr. Frances uses his psychiatric credentials as a kind of rhetorical tool with which to rail against certain features of American life as proof of our collective craziness or “societal insanity”: “our inability to respond meaningfully to the increasingly urgent dangers that threaten human survival—overpopulation, global warming, resource depletion, and environmental degradation.”
What’s most surprising about Dr. Frances’s tirade is how uncareful he is as a writer. “ Einstein famously defined insanity,” he writes in the next paragraph, “as ‘doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.’ ” Einstein said no such thing, as a Google search would have confirmed and as a professor of psychiatry ought to have known.
Dr. Frances shows no interest in convincing anyone who’s not already fully convinced. The most haphazard anecdotal evidence is good enough: The “Trump effect” has increased tribalism, he observes, based on a story told him by a friend whose 5-year-old’s peers get in fights about Mr. Trump on the schoolyard. On almost every page, Dr. Frances levels wildly one-sided charges without exhibiting the slightest awareness that there may be counterarguments or that his claims require citation or some form of corroboration. Taking one at random: “The United States already provides the most meager social and economic safety net of any developed country; the GOP would like to cut it altogether in order to give the rich yet another tax break.” Full stop, no endnote, on to the next claim.
I assume Dr. Frances would never be this careless in his academic work. Surely the widely used “Essentials of Psychiatric Diagnosis,” which he authored, isn’t riddled with this sort of slipshod pontification. If there is indeed a “Trump effect,” maybe this is it: The sane go mad.
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