At least Lucy Van Pelt would be honest about what her opinion is worth.
But Charlie Brown must be awfully grateful he didn't have his mental health analyzed by the mainstream media. Not only would they engage in amateur diagnoses without the slightest idea what they're talking about, they'd also treat as news the fact that so many of them are doing it.
The media story about media stories about so many media people talking about a thing that must therefore be a story because so many of them are talking about it.
Follow that? Me neither, and I wrote it, but it's a pretty accurate description of how today's media exercises news judgment. A topic can be about nothing, worth nothing, based on nothing and indicative of absolutely nothing. But the talk isn't going away! Thus we must have stories about the talk, and how it won't go away.
President Trump, you're insane. How do I know? Because there's so much talk!
When Republican Sen. Bob Corker said last week that President Trump hasn't "been able to demonstrate the stability" needed for success and recommended he "move way beyond himself," it was news mostly because Corker has been one of Trump's key supporters in Congress.
Then James Clapper, who served in top intelligence jobs under former Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, Wednesday morning questioned Trump's "fitness to be in this office" and said he was worried about the president's access to the nuclear codes. Clapper, who had a long military career, is a close friend and longtime colleague of Trump's Defense Secretary, Jim Mattis, a former Marine Corps general.
"If in a fit of pique he decides to do something about Kim Jong Un, there's actually very little to stop him," Clapper, former head of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, said on CNN. "The whole system is built to ensure rapid response if necessary. So there's very little in the way of controls over exercising a nuclear option, which is pretty damn scary."
Until now, talk of Trump's erratic behavior and alleged narcissism was common on social media, late-night talk shows and among political opponents. But Trump's "fire and fury" comments about North Korea, a raucous rally in Arizona Tuesday and changing response to the violent protests in Charlottesville, Va., crossed a line for some Republicans and brought the conversation into the mainstream, even among some supporters.
A poll by the media and technology company Morning Consult over the weekend showed 55% of respondents said Trump was not stable.
Repeat a lie enough and you can get people to believe it. Then you can take a poll, which ostensibly proves your lie is true because so many people feel the same way - even though what it really shows is that you've managed to put the lie in the ears of lots of gullible people, and oh yes, there are a lot of those.
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Now 55 percent of poll respondents are amateur therapists, just like the people who write these stories for USA Today.
Let's look at the two examples USA Today cites as evidence of Trump's instability. First, he warned Kim Jong Un not to nuke Guam or he would face "fire and fury" the likes of which he had never seen. Can someone explain why this is supposed to be a crazy statement. Last I checked, the whole reason we have a massive nuclear stockpile is so prospective enemies understand they will face, er, fire and fury if they try anything. As is his wont, Trump's lanague in expressing this was more colorful than a more conventional president, but it was completely accurate and 100 percent consistent with the U.S. strategic policy of nuclear deterrence.
If what Trump said is crazy, then every president who has presided over the creation of this nuclear firepower is even more crazy for making it reality, as opposed to merely saying it.
Now, on to Charlottesville. This is rich. The media spend two weeks lying through their teeth about what Trump said and didn't say, and then they tell us he's crazy based on their fictional version of these events. His response has been consistent from the moment the violence started up to the present time. If you think otherwise, you're being lied to, and it's well past time you stopped believing the people who are feeding you this Bolshevik.
By the way, what prompted all this was President Trump's speech in Phoenix on Monday night, particularly the part where he responded in painstaking detail to the media's lies about his Charlottesville comments. Because this section of the speech was long and quite animated, this is supposed to be evidence that Trump is crazy.
Watch it for yourself. Yes, it's long, and yes, he appears to have had it with the media, against whom he pulls no punches. But you'll notice that it's also a carefully laid out, point-by-point refutation of the things he's been accused of. When I wrote my piece on Monday making these very same points, it was also very long. That's because when someone is slandering you, it often requires an extensive look at the real facts to demonstrate that the slander is false.
Sometimes a very long discussion about something will be described as "rambling," when in fact it's not rambling at all but simply methodical in covering the many points that need to be made in proving a point.
Anyway, here we are: Journalists and political analysts sitting there and diagnosing a man as mentally unstable is an exercise in absurdity. Yet they're not only doing it, but they're presenting the fact that they're doing so much of it as evidence that there must be something to it.
No. There's nothing to it, except for this: In Washington, there is a certain way you're expected to act, or you'll be deridden as "odd" or "unstable" or whatever. Trump doesn't act like this, which is one of the best things about him. When the mob decides to gang up on someone for refusing to act like them, it's always the mob you should view with suspicion.
