<....Yes, and no. It is well-known that perfidious the #vermontscumtsowned has been a toxic cyberbully for years and damn little gets done about it despite non-stop violations of the guidelines.

BTW, the highlighted post is a re-tread from pud's well-worn rolodex of chronic insults to deliberately mischaracterize others that are frequently repeated, repeated, repeated, repeated, repeated on the road to 60,000 dumps.>

<Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) on Thursday pushed a new excuse for former President Donald Trump's infamous phone call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger in which he demanded Raffensperger "find" him the votes he needed to overtake President Joe Biden.

Appearing on Steve Bannon's "War Room" podcast, Greene claimed that Trump simply believed that a large batch of ballots had been lost in the mail and that he wanted Georgia's top election official to seek them out.

"When President Trump got on the phone with our secretary of state... and said, 'Can you find the votes, where are they?' he was basically looking for ballots and these ballots have been lost in the mail," she said.

"And so there was nothing wrong with what President Trump said. In fact, I think he'll be vindicated easily by a lot of the work that I'm doing."

However, Semafor political reporter Dave Weigel did a quick check of Greene's claim — and found it to be utterly false.

"This is completely backwards," Weigel remarked on Twitter. "Trump wanted ballots already counted for Biden to be disqualified, until he (Trump) took the lead again."

He then posted relevant excerpts from Trump's call with Raffensperger that illustrated his point.

"We can go through signature verification and we'll find hundreds of thousands of signatures, if you let us do it," Trump told Raffensperger at one point.

"In Fulton [County], where they dumped ballots, you will find that you have many that aren't even signed and you have many that are forgeries... and you will find you will be at 11,779 [votes] within minutes because Fulton County is totally corrupt."

A little bit later in the call, Trump emphasized to Raffensperger that "the ballots are corrupt" and then hinted that the Georgia Republican could face legal consequences for not "reporting" on it.>

<Arizona’s Kari Lake has found herself at the center of several recent court cases, and none has gone her way. The Republican election denier first went to court in April 2022, asking that some local counties be blocked from using electronic election equipment. That lawsuit failed. In the wake of her defeat in a gubernatorial race, Lake filed another lawsuit, ostensibly to present evidence of election irregularities. That didn’t go well, either.

And then, of course, there’s the defamation case she’s now facing, which as NBC News reported, appears poised to become Lake’s latest defeat.

If you’re new to this story, Lake, in the aftermath of her 2022 defeat, took rhetorical aim at Republican election officials in Maricopa County, accusing them of helping “rig” the state’s gubernatorial race and manipulating ballots. One of the GOP officials, Steven Richer, soon after filed suit, arguing that Lake’s false claims not only hurt his professional life and harmed his reputation, but also led to death threats against him and his family.

Lake’s attorneys tried to have the case thrown out. Those efforts failed. Now, the former gubernatorial candidate — who’s currently running for the U.S. Senate — is prepared to stop trying to deny responsibility for her own rhetoric.

This matters to the extent that it won’t do her 2024 statewide campaign any favors, but there’s also a larger pattern to keep in mind as the defamation case reaches a new stage.

Rudy Giuliani faced a defamation case, lost, and was hit with a severe financial penalty. Donald Trump faced defamation cases, lost, and was hit with severe financial penalties. Fox News faced a defamation case, settled, and was hit with a severe financial penalty. (It was a different kind of case, but pillow guy Mike Lindell was recently hit with a severe financial penalty of his own.)

As a Washington Post analysis summarized, “The Trump political movement has long had a truth problem. That has now manifested itself as a very expensive defamation problem.”>

Still nursing your wounds over the latest shill's try at reinventing herself, <fredthecuck>?

Have a seance with the <tosspot of Budapest>. Might give ya both a swift thrill.

<Ever received a text message from a number you don’t recognize? I get a lot of texts from numbers that I have no idea who that person is. Instead of replying with “Ahem, who dis?” there’s a hack you’re going to use time and time again.

TikTokker Liz Perez put it on her channel and it blew up. If you get a text from an unknown number, mobile payment apps like Venmo, CashApp, Zelle or PayPal can help you put a name to that number.

Copy and paste the number into the app and the mystery sender’s name might just be unveiled.

I tested this out on a number that I knew someone had a Venmo. Their name popped up.

Now, this hack only works if you have an account with one of those mobile payment apps, and the sender has to use their real name and number in the app. But hey, it’s better than shooting in the dark, right? And there is the flip side. Be sure to disable your mobile payment app from sharing your name and phone number with other people. The steps vary from app to app. For example, in Venmo, open Settings, Friends and Social and toggle off Phone contacts.

Dialing *67 conceals your number from someone you call. There are similar numbers you can dial to respond to mystery callers.

The first is *69, which traces the number of the last person who called you. It works even for anonymous or hidden calls, so you can get the phone number and exact time they called. Once you have that number, you can block it on your phone so it can’t call you anymore.

There are more codes and secrets you can use to hunt down who called.>

<Former President Donald Trump's Georgia attorney, Steve Sadow, recently tried to persuade Fulton County Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee that his client's lies about the 2020 election are not only constitutionally protected speech, but that they are actually a form of truth-telling.

The Daily Beast's Jose Pagliery reported that Trump is now trying to get some of his charges in Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis' initial indictment dismissed based on the First Amendment. The charges of "false statements and writings" relate to the former president's false assertion to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensberger that he won the Peach State by 400,000 votes (he actually lost by more than 11,000 votes), that more than 5,000 ballots were cast in the names of dead residents (which is also false) and that poll worker Ruby Freeman illegally stuffed ballot boxes (another lie that former Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani was found to have been financially liable for in a defamation suit).

"Campaigning and elections has [sic] always been found to be at the zenith of protected speech. What we have here is election speech," Sadow said in McAfee's courtroom on Thursday. "As Socrates’ methods suggest, examination of a false statement — even if made deliberately to mislead — can promote a form of thought that ultimately helps realize the truth."

The prosecution countered that Trump's lies actively caused harm, and that it was a violation of Georgia state law to lie on official documents. Donald Wakeford, who is Willis' chief prosecutor in her office's anti-corruption division, quipped that it was "interesting to hear counsel for Mr. Trump tell us about the usefulness of lies."

"It’s not that the defendant has been hauled into a courtroom because prosecutors haven’t liked what he said,” Wakeford said. “It does harm to the government. That’s the reason that it’s illegal... it’s not just that you made a false statement. It’s that you swore to it in a court document.”

One of the key parts of the indictment against Trump is the allegation that he illegally pressured state officials to "find 11,780 votes," which would be enough to overturn the election results in Georgia. Wakeford said evidence like the January 2021 call to Raffensberger urging him to undo President Joe Biden's win in the Peach State proved the indictment's description of Trump and his legal team as "a criminal organization."

"It’s not just that he lied over and over and over again... it’s that each of those [lies] was employed as criminal activity with criminal intentions," Wakeford said during the Thursday hearing. "What we have heard here today is an attempt to rewrite the indictment... and he was just a guy asking questions. Not someone who was part of an overarching criminal conspiracy for trying to overturn an election he did not win."

The former president and more than a dozen others are charged with multiple felony counts under the indictment for allegedly interfering in Georgia's presidential election in 2020.

Previously, Judge McAfee struck a portion of the indictment, in which six counts relating to solicitation to violate oath of office were removed. McAfee said the indictment's claims were overly broad and could be interpreted in a number of contradictory ways, but invited Willis to clarify the charges in the indictment if she intended to re-file them at a later date.

Trump's Fulton County trial was sidelined for weeks after lawyers representing Trump's co-defendants alleged that Willis was engaging in a conflict of interest by having a relationship with her co-worker, special prosector Nathan Wade. McAfee ruled in Willis' favor, but made it clear that either she or Wade had to step aside from the investigation if it was to continue. Wade tendered his resignation later that day, and Willis accepted. No trial date has yet been set, and it's unknown whether Trump's trial in Georgia will happen prior to the November election.>

Getting a swift thrill out of it, <evilfred>? Maybe <antichrist> can console you in this time of need.

<We all have stories of meeting people who appeared wonderful at first but turned out to be just awful. Perhaps it was a charming suitor, or a charismatic colleague, or a fascinating new friend. They attracted you on initial impression, but before long, you started to notice behaviors that gave you pause. Maybe it was a little shading of the truth here and there, or a bit too much vanity and selfishness. Perhaps they constantly played the victim, or took credit for other people’s work.

Or maybe your disillusionment with the person was not gradual, but through a dramatic—and dramatically unpleasant—episode. All it may take is a minor disagreement, and suddenly, you get screamed at, threatened with retaliation, or reported to HR. This kind of encounter leaves you, understandably, baffled, hurt, and confused.

Very likely, this person was a “Dark Triad” personality. The term was coined by the psychologists Delroy Paulhus and Kevin Williams in 2002 for people with three salient personality characteristics: narcissism, Machiavellianism, and a measurable level of psychopathy. These people confuse and hurt you, because they act in a way that doesn’t seem to make sense. As one scholar aptly described the ones whose behavior shades more obviously into psychopathy, these are “social predators who charm, manipulate, and ruthlessly plow their way through life, leaving a broad trail of broken hearts, shattered expectations, and empty wallets.”

But at least these people are rare, right? Wrong. Dark Triads counted for about one in 14 people in an international population sample, a proportion that means all of us will meet them on a regular basis in love, in work, in politics, and—most obviously—on social media. For the sake of our happiness, well-being, and wallets, we need to understand them, learn how to identify them, and steer clear of them whenever we can—so that we can find better companions instead.

Narcissism is the egotistical admiration of oneself. Machiavellianism is a duplicitous interpersonal style and disregard for morality. These characteristics are bad enough, but the element of psychopathy adds in an absence of empathy and remorse to complete the Dark Triad: It’s all about me, I am willing to hurt you for my gain, and I don’t care how you feel.

Sometimes, a person like this will display a fourth trait to make a Dark Tetrad: sadism, or the enjoyment of others’ suffering. Some scholars have argued, in effect, that all triad types are really tetrads, because narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy are all expressions of a governing tendency toward sadism. But whether such personalities enjoy their predation or not is beside the point; with three traits or four, they make life miserable for the rest of us.

The psychologist Scott Barry Kaufman, who has studied Dark Triads for many years, notes that the type’s characteristics exist on a continuum, and that everyone exhibits some degree of the personality. (In an earlier column, I noted that psychological characteristics act as dials, not as switches.) But based on what Kaufman believes to be a threshold of Dark Triad traits, above which they become dominant in a personality, he and a team of researchers found that such people constituted about 7 percent of their international population sample.

Popular perception commonly regards Dark Triads as evil geniuses. No doubt some are, but psychopathy especially tends to be associated with below-average intelligence, and, according to estimates, men within the prison population meet its criteria at disproportionately high rates. In partial contrast with that finding, prevalence of the Dark Triad rises with educational attainment up to a bachelor’s degree (but then falls away among those with advanced degrees). Men are more likely to display parts of the Dark Triad, and the traits are found less as people age....>

Gonna post this over at the support forum? Remind you of that self you loathe, yet never quite find the courage to face?

<....As far as the workplace is concerned, scholars have found that narcissists tend toward artistic, creative, and social careers; researchers also saw that Machiavellians, in particular, avoid careers that involve caring for others. Look out for Dark Triads, in other words, in professions that involve human contact, performance, and applause, but little concerned attention to other people. An obvious example might be politics; another would be show business. But the type can manifest in many careers and professions. At work, such individuals tend to exaggerate their own worth, show a distrustful attitude toward colleagues, act impulsively and irresponsibly, break rules, and lie.

If working with a Dark Triad is miserable, falling in love with one is worse. Confident and outgoing, they can be extremely attractive, especially to women. They show a strong preference for short-term relationships, and if they find themselves in a relationship, they tend to be unfaithful. And when a breakup inevitably comes, it can be very ugly: Dark Triads are known for “cost escalation” (they will make you pay), manipulation, and open confrontation.

Dark Triads involved in politics create a lot of damage, because narcissists are motivated by self-aggrandizement over public service, and psychopaths are drawn to extreme positions in a radicalized society. So watch out for Dark Triad personalities on the fringes of political and social causes (of either the right-wing or left-wing variety).

Not surprisingly, these personalities are ever-present on social media, which research has shown to be a Dark Triad paradise. They commonly exhibit “social media disorder,” which involves excessive use of internet platforms, and a review of the literature has shown that “trolls”—anonymous users who are abusive and like to whip up hatred and controversy—also tend toward Dark Triad traits.

You may be allowed a measure of schadenfreude—without being accused of sadism—to learn that Dark Triads are usually not particularly successful in life. They are not, in general, capable leaders; they don’t have close friends; they report lower-than-average life satisfaction. If you are worrying about whether you qualify, then, for your own happiness’s sake, seek help. Well-designed Dark Triad tests can guide that decision.

More useful for the other 93 percent of us is advice on how to identify and avoid Dark Triads. The traits to look for are self-importance, a sense of entitlement, vanity, a victim mentality, a tendency to bend the truth or even openly lie, manipulativeness, grandiosity, a lack of remorse, and an absence of empathy. Probe for these characteristics particularly when on first dates and in job interviews. You might even want to take that test imaginatively on behalf of someone you suspect may have Triad traits and see what result you get.

Of course, you can’t avoid all social contact for fear of coming across a Dark Triad. We each need romance, friends, and colleagues in life, so simply shunning other people is not a very compelling or realistic strategy. So rather than spend time dodging Dark Triads, look for their opposite. Happily, Kaufman and a team of psychologists profiled this type for us as well, which they call the Light Triad....>

<....The characteristics of a Light Triad include faith in humanity (trusting in people’s fundamental goodness), humanism (believing in the dignity and worth of each person), and a Kantian adherence to the idea of universal moral law (in this context, refusing to objectify or instrumentalize others). Compared with the 7 percent that are dark, Kaufman finds that fully 50 percent of his international population sample qualify as Light Triads, and that the average person has more light than dark personality traits.

Look for these three characteristics in people you might date, work with, or befriend. One way to test for this is simply to see how you feel around a particular person. Do they inspire you to be a better, more loving person? This is a phenomenon called moral elevation, by which mere proximity to moral beauty makes you feel moved, uplifted, and optimistic. Some researchers even report such physiological sensations in subjects as a feeling of warmth in the chest. A case of the warm fuzzies can be a telltale sign that you’re in the presence of a Light Triad.

To this point, I’ve focused on how Dark Triads negatively affect people, how each of us can spot them and avoid them, and how we can seek out Light Triads instead. But we should also consider the ways we contribute to social incentives: How we choose to reward people—with our dollars, our votes, our clicks—can affect society as a whole. People commonly ask why such areas of life as politics and social media are dominated by so many toxic, polarizing people. The answer is not some big technological mystery; we reward these people and give them greater prominence.

No one person can single-handedly fix this problem any more than they can clean up the environment. We try to do our little part by recycling, disposing of our trash properly, and conserving resources as well as we can. We can extend this ethical hygiene to the culture at large—by withholding our attention, time, support, and resources from the Dark Triads in public life who coarsen our society and threaten the commonweal.>

Really, your acting out your sociopathy and malignant narcissism here are more'n a trifle tiresome.

Capisce, <messenger of evil>?

<It's often said that we can all only be as accomplished as the people we surround ourselves with, so choosing who we allow into our inner circle is a vitally important decision. It's also no small task — nobody wants to be hurt, of course. But the company you keep has also been shown to have an impact on your success in everything from hobbies to your career.

Instagram mindset gurus @mindset.unchained recently posted some great advice on how to manage this and make sure that your nearest and dearest are people who will build you up rather than drag you down.

Here are 6 types of people you should always be wary of trusting:

1. People who disguise insults as jokes

We've all known — or even been — this type of person at one time or another, the kind whose jokes all of sudden start to seem weirdly personal, if not outright mean.

Psychologists say this kind of passive-aggressive behavior, sometimes called "negging" or backhanded compliments, can even become bullying and abuse — they're among narcissists' favorite tools, for example.

And because these comments center on a kernel of truth — whether an actual failing on your part or just an insecurity you have — they can create anxiety and self-doubt, which is often the commenter's goal in the first place. Maintain firm boundaries with these people and don't let them into your head.

2. People who refuse to take accountability but readily blame you

This is also known as "blame-shifting," and is also sometimes a form of abuse. Even if it doesn't rise to that level, though, it's at best unkind and shows a lack of integrity.

Being willing to take ownership of your mistakes is a fundamental part of maturity, empathy, and good character. Passing the buck onto someone else? Not so much. Tread carefully.

3. People who say they want the best for you, but then work against you

This of course can take many forms, including open sabotage. But more common — and just as insidious — are the more subtle types.

The parent who says they just want you to be happy but then criticizes what you want to do with your life. The friend who tells you your goals are ridiculous while claiming to also care deeply.

Sincerely caring and criticizing aren't necessarily mutually exclusive, of course. But for your own emotional well-being, you'll want to be careful about how much you let someone like this in.

4. People whose words and actions don't match

Major red flag, obviously — and one that can wreak havoc on relationships of all kinds, from working dynamics to marriages.

But not everyone who exhibits this behavior is doing so nefariously — cognitive dissonance, the tension between two opposing ideas or behavior that doesn't match values and beliefs, is a common part of the human condition.

Common doesn't mean healthy, however, so when a person's actions and words don't align, you'll want to be cautious about how deep you let your relationship with them go.

5. People who sow doubt under the guise of concern

Similar to #3, these are the people who subtly tear down your ideas, plans, or dreams by highlighting the negatives and potential pitfalls because they think they're helping by doing so.

But the people you trust most should build you up — and be able to raise concerns without denigrating your entire plan or desire. If you have a person in your life who can't strike this balance, it may not be a good idea to let them in on your most deeply held dreams.

6. People who sabotage you, then make excuses

Similar to the blame-shifters but worse, these manipulative types are just plain old bad to have around you.

The bottom line when dealing with these people is to trust your gut. If their excuses and stories aren't adding up and it seems more likely they're undermining you, they probably are. Better to keep a suspicious eye on them than continue giving them the benefit of the doubt.>

....or those who mendaciously stalk in their jejune, jealous rages by way of compensation for their own insignificant, wretched lives.

G'ahead: post this elsewhere and whinge of how hard done by you are.

Ain't that so, <evilfred>? <the Budapest tosspot>?

<Presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump drew criticism Friday for posting a video on social media that contains the image of a hog-tied President Joe Biden painted on the tailgate of a passing truck.

The Biden campaign was quick to condemn the video for suggesting physical harm to the sitting Democratic president. Biden has portrayed his likely 2024 opponent as someone who freely evokes Nazi imagery with regard to immigrants, while also stressing in speeches that Trump's efforts to overturn his loss in the 2020 elections ultimately led to an assault on the U.S. Capitol.

"Trump is regularly inciting political violence and it’s time people take him seriously — just ask the Capitol police officers who were attacked protecting our democracy on January 6," said Michael Tyler, the Biden campaign's communications director.

Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung responded Friday night: “That picture was on the back of a pickup truck that was traveling down the highway. Democrats and crazed lunatics have not only called for despicable violence against President Trump and his family, they are actually weaponizing the justice system against him.”

The U.S. Secret Service released a statement saying it "does not confirm or comment on matters of protective intelligence.”

The former president posted the video on his social media site, Truth Social. His caption said the video was taken in Long Island, New York on Thursday, when the former president attended the wake of a New York City police officer who was killed during a traffic stop.

The posted video shows a passing truck decked out with “Trump 2024” and flags claiming support for police, with the picture of a seemingly helpless Biden with his hands and feet tied painted on the rear of the vehicle. Shares in Trump Media & Technology Group Corp. began trading on the stock market Tuesday, with the valuation adding billions of dollars to his fortune.

Seeking a return to the White House, Trump has painted an apocalyptic picture of the country if Biden secures a second term.

“If I don’t get elected, it’s going to be a bloodbath for the whole — that’s going to be the least of it. It’s going to be a bloodbath for the country,” he warned at an Ohio rally earlier this month while talking about the impact of offshoring on the country’s auto industry.

Trump has talked about immigrants “poisoning the blood of our country,” echoing the rhetoric of Nazi leader Adolf Hitler. And he once described his enemies as “vermin,” language that his opponents say reflect his authoritarian beliefs.

At one recent rally, Trump went so far as to cast Biden’s handling of the border as “a conspiracy to overthrow the United States of America.”

Last year, before his indictment in New York over hush money paid on his behalf during his 2016 campaign, Trump posted a photo on social media of himself holding a baseball bat next to a picture of District Attorney Alvin Bragg.

In a 2018 speech, Biden discussed lewd comments that Trump had made about women and registered his disgust by suggesting a willingness to physically fight the then-president.

“If we were in high school, I’d take him behind the gym and beat the hell out of him,” Biden said at the time, adding that any man who disrespected women was “usually the fattest, ugliest SOB in the room.”>

Yes, and the ugliest sumbitch of spirit has demonstrated his contempt for human morals yet again for all the world to see.

<Donald Trump’s mental acuity was questioned on Fox News by Democratic strategist, Jessica Tarlov, during a segment of The Five on Wednesday night.

Co-host Jeanine Pirro said, “You know, Jessica, Trump took a mental acuity test and aced it – why won’t Biden?”

“Well, this mental acuity test, which included identifying animals and counting backwards by a factor of seven, is something to give to people who have been in traumatic accidents... it’s embarrassing when Trump says that and when he did ‘man, person, woman, camera, whatever he said to [former Fox anchor] Chris Wallace,” Ms Tarlov said.

Trump’s mental acuity questioned on Fox News

Mr Trump has mentioned the test several times in the past.

“It was 30 or 35 questions. The first questions are very easy. The last questions are much more difficult,” he told Fox News in 2020.

“You’ll go, ‘person, woman, man, camera, TV’,” he added. “They say, ‘could you repeat that?’ ... So it’s, ‘Person, woman, man, camera, TV.’ OK, that’s very good. If you get it in order, you get extra points,” he added.

In July of 2020, he told Fox News host Sean Hannity that “I proved I was all there because I aced it”.

He claimed that the doctors at the Walter Reed Medical Center in Maryland told him, “That’s an unbelievable thing. Rarely does anybody do what you just did”.

The questions are similar to the questions on the Montreal Cognitive Assessment, Newsweek noted. The test screens for early signs of dementia.

Fourteen Republican members of the House called on President Joe Biden to take the test in June 2021. One of the signers of a letter arguing for the test was former White House physician Ronny Jackson, now a Texas House Republican representative.

During his time as the White House physician, Dr Jackson said in 2018 that Mr Trump had got a perfect score on a cognitive test, adding that there was “no reason whatsoever to think the president has any issues whatsoever with his thought processes”.

Dr Jackson was recently demoted by the US Navy following an inspector general’s report finding that he drank and took drugs while working in the Trump White House, The Washington Post reported earlier this month.

The report found that Dr Jackson’s “overall course of conduct towards subordinates disparaged, belittled, bullied, and humiliated them, and fostered a negative work environment,” and “engaged in inappropriate conduct involving the use of alcohol”.

Navy spokesperson Joe Keiley said: “The substantiated allegations in the DoDIG [Department of Defense Office of Inspector General] investigation of Rear Adm (lower half) Ronny Jackson are not in keeping with the standards the Navy requires of its leaders and, as such, the Secretary of the Navy took administrative action in July 2022.”>

<When Donald Trump announced that he would attend a wake for slain New York City Police Officer Jonathan Diller, the conservative New York Post wrote approvingly that the former president was “expected to cite the young cop’s shooting death as another example of runaway crime.” And so he did. At the ceremony for Diller, who was killed at a traffic stop Monday. Trump was uninterested in trying to bring the country together to make sense of the tragedy. In other words, he was himself.

“It’s happening all too often and we’re just not going to let it happen,” he said to the press outside the funeral home. “We have to get back to law and order,” he went on. “The only thing we can say is, maybe something is going to be learned. We’ve gotta toughen it up, we’ve gotta strengthen it up. This should never be allowed.”

Trump’s picture of a national hellscape in which law and order have disappeared is false. Crime is down dramatically over the last year, including in the very cities that Trump characterizes as thunderdomes of mayhem and murder. Boston, for instance — a city of 650,000 people — has had only two homicides so far in 2024. Perhaps the Massachusetts liberals have something to teach the rest of the country about preventing crime?

But distortion of the truth is only part of Trump’s problem. Every president is forced to respond to unexpected tragedy, whether it’s a single police officer gunned down, a mass shooting that kills dozens or a natural disaster that takes hundreds of lives. The messages they send at those moments tell us a good deal about how they view themselves in relation to the country.

Most presidents usually grasp for unity, trying to find in shock and grief something that can transcend political differences and forge some common purpose, even if only temporarily. Not every president succeeds, either because of their own weaknesses or because too many resist their call to come together. But for some, the high points of their presidencies came when tragedy called them to bring the country together.

Ronald Reagan gave one of the most affecting speeches of his presidency after the Challenger space shuttle exploded in 1986. Because one of the crew members was a schoolteacher from New Hampshire, he spoke directly to the schoolchildren who had watched the horrible event unfold: “I know it is hard to understand, but sometimes painful things like this happen. It’s all part of the process of exploration and discovery. It’s all part of taking a chance and expanding man’s horizons. The future doesn’t belong to the fainthearted; it belongs to the brave. The Challenger crew was pulling us into the future, and we’ll continue to follow them.”

George W. Bush had the most memorable moment of his presidency standing atop the rubble at the World Trade Center, when he responded to someone shouting that they couldn’t hear him by saying “I can hear you, the rest of the world hears you and the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon!” The events of the next few years made his ad-libbed speech more than ironic, but at that moment it seemed to be exactly the resolve many Americans wanted to hear....>

<....Barack Obama had more than his share of mass shootings to mourn, and if his eloquence did not unite the country, it was only because so many refused to hear anything positive from him. At one of those memorials, after Rep. Gabrielle Giffords was shot and six people killed in Tucson, Arizona, in 2011, he said, “As we discuss these issues, let each of us do so with a good dose of humility. Rather than pointing fingers or assigning blame, let’s use this occasion to expand our moral imaginations, to listen to each other more carefully, to sharpen our instincts for empathy and remind ourselves of all the ways that our hopes and dreams are bound together.”

That quest for unity was one of the core themes of Obama’s career, and his failure to achieve it was not for lack of trying. His opponents were so venomous in their hatred that they wouldn’t grant him their agreement even in those darkest moments when he appealed for nothing more than a little introspection and thought for our common humanity.

Likewise, Joe Biden has made repeated pleas for the parties and the country to come together. The word “unity” appeared eight times in his inaugural address, in which he said, “My whole soul is in this, bringing America together, uniting our people, uniting our nation. And I ask every American to join me in this cause.” As it was for Obama, that goal remains unfulfilled, not because Biden hasn’t sincerely pursued it but because he finds so few takers in the other party.

Between Obama and Biden, Republicans elected the darkest of presidents, one who is incapable of even trying to create unity out of tragedy. Trump sees death and despair only as a means of setting Americans against each other or aggrandizing himself. While smoke was still rising over the World Trade Center in 2001, he bragged that a building he owned was now the tallest in lower Manhattan (it wasn’t). After a gunman killed 17 people in a school shooting in Parkland, Florida, Trump mused that had he been there he would have stopped the shooter (“I really believe I’d run in there even if I didn’t have a weapon”).

It may not be the worst of his many character flaws, but it is one thrown into especially sharp relief by the presidency. When the country needed him most — at those moments when Americans look to their president to bring them together — Trump was often at his worst. And there’s every reason to think he’ll be even worse if he takes office again.>

<[Event "Boylston CC Championship"] [Site "Boston Mass"]
[Date "1995.??.??"]
[Round "7"]
[White "Chase, Christopher"]
[Black "Mishkin, Paul"]
[Result "1-0"]
[ECO "B31"]
[WhiteElo "2430"]
[BlackElo "1920"]

1.d4 Nf6 2.c4 e6 3.Nc3 Bb4 4.a3 Bxc3+ 5.bxc3 d6 6.e3 e5 7.Bd3 O-O 8.Ne2 e4 9.Bb1 Be6 10.Ng3 Bxc4 11.Nxe4 Nxe4 12.Bxe4 d5 13.Bd3 Bxd3 14.Qxd3 c5 15.O-O c4 16.Qb1 Qd7 17.f3 Nc6 18.e4 f5 19.e5 Na5 20.a4 Nb3 21.Ra2 Rf7 22.Ba3 Re8 23.Bd6 f4 24.g4 fxg3 25.hxg3 Qh3 26.Qe1 Re6 27.Rh2 Qf5 28.g4 Qd3 29.f4 Rd7 30.f5 Re8 31.f6 Qg6 32.Qh4 Rf7 33.Be7 gxf6 34.Bxf6 Re6 35.Rf5 Kf8 36.Qg3 Ra6 37.Qf4 Rxa4 38.Rh6 Ra1+ 39.Kh2 Ra2+ 40.Kh3 Nd2 41.Rxg6 hxg6 42.Bg7+ 1-0>

The twin axes of evil may yet rant of how all my posts are worthless, how there are far too many of them, how much they loathe their content, and any of innumerable other imaginary scenarios; but I shall not be deterred in my determination to improve this site.