U.S. Representative Rosa DeLauro has invited professor Bandy Lee of Yale to address “a gathering of fellow Democrats” at her lavish digs in Washington DC. The subject of the gathering will be President Donald Trump’s mental imbalance.
As do many
Democrats, Dr. Lee thinks Trump is batty, according to an item in CTMirror:
Recently Lee and two professors from Columbia – a university named, unfortunately,
after Columbus – released a statement signed by 100 psychiatrists that said, “We
believe that (Trump) is now further unraveling in ways that contribute to his
belligerent nuclear threat.”
The Trump threat was a twitter taunt in response to a statement
from batty North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un that said, in effect, my nuclear
weapons are bigger than yours. Sigmund Freud is reported to have said about
cigars, “Sometimes a cigar is only a cigar,” meaning: try not to
over-Freudenize everything. Sometimes a threat is only a threat.
The DeLauro salon no doubt will be full of like minded folk.
DeLauro is not in the habit of inviting discussion during her regular Wednesday
salons; solidarity, not discussion, is mandatory for attendance. The 14 term congresswoman
is unused to political opposition. Connecticut’s Third District, centered in
New Haven and its suburbs, is a solid Democrat fortress. Since 1933, Democrats
have held the district for all but six terms. Occupying the second safest
congressional seat in Connecticut, DeLauro, one of the 50 richest members of
Congress, is also one of the most progressive members of Congress.
Based on financial disclosures filed by members of Congress in
2014, the Center for Responsive Politics
calculated DeLauro’s net worth at 15.2 million, 14 times more than the average member of Congress and 18 times more than the average representative.
DeLauro is a feminist, a hipster, and
a fashion forward one-percenter.
Of course, it would be foolhardy to deduce politics from personal
wealth. Democrat President Franklin Roosevelt was redundantly wealthy and a
progressive; Abe Lincoln was poor and a Republican. Is it not equally foolhardy
to deduce mental stability from tweets, or from what may appear to be an aggressive
foreign policy posture? Teddy Roosevelt, the first progressive president and a
Republican – until he bolted a Republican convention that declined to choose
him as a presidential nominee in the 1912 election and, like Lowell Weicker,
started a party of his own, the Bull Moose party – sent The Great White Fleet
around the globe to display America’s naval power to the world.
Mark Twain, among others, thought he was batty. Twain was
quite serious when he wrote to his friend Joseph Twitchel in 1905, “We are insane, each in our own way, and with
insanity goes irresponsibility. Theodore the man is sane; in fairness we ought
to keep in mind that Theodore, as statesman and politician, is insane and
irresponsible.”
To be sure, Twain
did not have a doctorate in psychiatry from Yale, and no one seriously attempted
to impeach TR while he was declaiming progressivism from his bully pulpit. The
attempt would have failed, because speaking softly – TR did not always do this –
while brandishing a big stick was regarded at the time as a successful foreign
policy gambit. And it worked.
Why have the
Democrats been attempting to hang a batty label around Trump’s neck?
It’s a long story.
Democrats began with a failed attempt – so far – to show collusion between
presidential candidate Trump and subversive Russians whose chief ambition was
to spoil the campaign of Democrat Presidential nominee Hillary Clinton. Actually,
the Putinista were doing what Putinistas usually do – sowing discord in an attempt
to delegitimize American democracy, and in this the Russians have been, and
are, alarmingly successful.
Conspiracy is a
crime, collusion is not. When an elected president opens discussions with
Russian diplomats – nearly always former KGB spooks -- he is practicing diplomacy
not collusion. The collusion charge was supported by an opposition research “dossier”
assembled by a dirt digger in the employ of Democrats whose presidential
nominee, Hillary Clinton, was a disastrous presidential candidate, overconfident
and, as Trump once said of one of his twitter victims, a low voltage
campaigner. When Democrat fingerprints began to appear on collusion theories, battiness
raised its ugly head.
Why go the batty
route? Because you can impeach batty presidents, and the anti-Trump effort all
along has pointed to impeachment. Hillary Clinton is not batty. And if she
were, she is not president, by the grace of God and the wisdom of the American
public, and therefore cannot be removed from office, which is the only outcome
of an impeachment proceeding.
The bottom line is
this: if you can’t win an election, you can always steal one. Rosa DeLauro has now
put her fashion-forward shoulder to the effort.
Comments