Max Boot is an extremely thoughtful and insightful conservative analyst who is a senior fellow for the Council on Foreign Relations.  I don't agree with everything he writes, but I admire that thinking and perspective he puts into his work.

He wrote an article last week the Foreign Relations website which I was going to bring up here at the time, but other news stories got in the way.  It had a most-decided provocative title -- all the more so since he's generally a very low-key, even-handed writer -- though as blunt as the article is, he makes his points with highly-researched reasoning.  The article is "Donald Trump is Proving Too Stupid to Be President."  (The sub-heading is, "'You know, I'm, like, a smart person.'  Uh-huh."

He begins the article by saying that Trump is so far from being smart "that he may not be capable of carrying out his duties as president."  And Boot then goes on to give example after example.

Like Trump's exchange with a couple of Presbyterian pastors, bragging how well he did with evangelicals -- when they had to explain to him that they weren't evangelical.  When he demanded to know what they were, and they answered Presbyterian," he shot back, "But you're all Christians?"  The lager point isn't that they had to "reassure" him that they were -- but that Trump himself is Presbyterian.

Or the recent story where Trump tried to convince editors of The Economist that he had come up with the expression "Priming the pump."  (When I initially heard this story, it was beyond cringeworthy since I couldn't imagine Trump even having the slightest idea that pumps had to be primed.)

There are more examples, and Mr. Boot goes into a analysis of the difference between "stupidity" and "ignorance," the latter of which his defenders have been trying to explain Trump's gaffes, by his being "new on the job."  But as Boot points out, Trump is 71-years-old and has given no sense of learning on the job or wanting to.

As Boot writes, "The surest indication of how not smart Trump is that he thinks his inability or lack of interest in acquiring knowledge doesn’t matter. He said last year that he reaches the right decisions 'with very little knowledge other than the knowledge I [already] had, plus the words common sense, because I have a lot of common sense and I have a lot of business ability.'"

To which Max Boot asks, "How's that working out?"

His analysis jumps off from here, from his firing of James Comey to his responses toward the recent London terror attacks, and leading "code-level" top secret information to Russia, as well as starting a Twitter fight with Qatar, and pulling out of the Paris climate accord because he believes global warming is a hoax.  Boot gives Trump defenders' their say -- and then explains why they're wrong.

He ends the article this way --

"The 25th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution provides that if the vice president and a majority of the cabinet certify that the president is “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office,” he can be removed with the concurrence of two-thirds of both houses. That won’t happen, because Republicans are too craven to stand up to Trump. But on the merits perhaps it should. After nearly five months in office, Trump has given no indication that he possesses the mental capacity to be president."

You can read the whole thing here.

Hats off to CNN for bringing a courtroom artist into today's White House press briefing, where the Trump administration has been banning cameras.
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Anything the press can do to shine a big Klieg light on the pathetic offensiveness of the Trump people blocking news access is great.  The more the merrier.  Perhaps at one point, John Oliver will do a similar thing with White House press briefings that his show has done with Supreme Court sessions, using dogs as stand-ins...

This is an excellent, thoughtful and detailed article in Vox written by Julia Belluz about the problems of NBC doing a sit-down interview with Alex Jones of InfoWars.

She notes having spent many hours watching Jones -- doing the dirty work so that you don't have to -- as he rants and raves over a range of conspiracy theories, and is therefore able to put them in perspective.  As she says, too, under normal circumstances it wouldn't matter what Jones says, but since Trump has bizarrely pointed to InfoWars as a source of "information," that makes normalizing Jones' craziness to a larger pubic a risk.

It's not so much that Ms. Belluz doesn't think that Jones' should be reported on, but that this sit-down interview is the wrong format for it.

You can read it here.

One thing I've written extensively about -- here and elsewhere -- is keeping perspective amidst terror attacks, comparing the tragic deaths that occur to how many hundreds of deaths there are EVERY DAY -- every single day -- in the United States alone because of guns and cars.  The day of the attack, the day after, and then also the day after that...and after that, every day the following week, every day the following month, and year.  And year after year after year after year.  It doesn't lessen the sadness and tragedy of the attack, just puts it in perspective.

John Oliver address this point, though in a very different way.  And given that this is John Oliver -- wonderfully.  And at times hilariously.  

(I'm surprised that the one thing he left out was how Britain reacted as a nation during the time it actually was under siege, during the Battle of Britain with Hitler's bombing during WWII.  And even then, from all accounts, England went on pretty admirably.)

​My only complaint is that it's only 2-1/2 minutes.

On MSNBC's Sunday show The Point with Ari Melber, New York Observer Editor-in Chief Elizabeth Spiers gave what is being called an "explosive" interview, when she said that Jared Kushner had told her a while back that Trump didn't actually believe birtherism and had only pushed it because he said that Republicans were "stupid" enough to believe it.  The comment came as a result of Spiers telling Kushner that she was appalled by his father-in-law's pushing birtherism.

Now, it's certainly possible that the conversation didn't take place, or she misinterpreted it.  But for anyone dismissing her comments flat out of hand as nothing more than "Fake News and typical Main Street Media lies from the liberal press, they must remember one incredibly important thing -- at the time of the conversation in question, Jared Kushner OWNED the New York Observer.

One can only imagine how fun it is around the family dinner table with Family Trump these days when Jared comes over.

As my friend Bart Baker noted about the story, "What's sad is this is one case where Trump is right."

You can read the article here and see the embedded interview.

With the G7 conference now over, it turns out that Trump is the ONLY world leader there who did NOT hold a press conference afterwards with his country's reporters.  Beyond the obvious and very basic lack of transparency problem this causes for not keeping the American public informed, it also breaks a long American tradition for using the G7 to show openness and how Freedom of the Press works as an example to the world.

​I believe that this is officially called Making America Cowardly Again...

Keeping this theme of timidity going, when White House officials did deign to talk to the press, they would only do so off-camera and instead of the president sent out National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster and economic adviser Gary Cohn -- neither of who would even address reports about Senior Adviser Jared Kushner trying to set up clandestine back-channel communications with the Russians using Russian facilities.

Trump is already, of course, touting how great and successful his G7 conference was.  Probably the greatest ever, for all I know.  So great.  The most beautiful G7 of all time, much better than G6, a much bigger number.  The thing is, though, when a president is too scared to face reporters after such a supposedly great and successful conference, it's a pretty fair guess that the conference wasn't quite as great and successful as he wants other to believe.

Furthermore, rather than facing the press in person. he instead raced to the protection of his Tweet Room and took yet another attempt to try and trash the press with a tweet about the Montana congressional race, writing -- "Does anyone notice how the Montana Congressional race was such a big deal to Dems & Fake News until the Republican won? V was poorly covered."

Never mind that I don't know for certain what the "V" means in the last sentence, it's adorable to see him touting a candidate who attacked a reporter and had police charges filed against him.  And adorable as well to see him touting a race where Republicans dropped about 14 points in the outcome.  And adorable how he's unable to grasp the really basic concept that the public cares about a race when it's being run -- any race, political or on foot -- but once it's over they generally move on.  Almost all the time.  And as-always adorable to see him try to lash out again at "Fake" news, even when it's not remotely clear what "fake" thing he's referring to here.

And now that he's returned home and apparently got his "tweet privileges" back, there he is, tweeting up a storm  again and doing his best to tray and trash the press even more, tweeting -- "The Fake News Media works hard at disparaging & demeaning my use of social media because they don't want America to hear the real story!"

Because, of course, the Real Story can always be told in full in 140 characters or less.  No matter how incomprehensible. 

On the one hand, I do find all this galling how damaging it is to the country for the president to be on a clear mission of trying to undermine the confidence and trust of people in a free press, which is precisely what despots do -- as if Trump actually cared whether he damaged the country or not.  On the other hand, every time he goes SO overboard attacking the press and crying woeful tears of FAKE and hiding from the press it speaks volumes about how concerned he is with all the investigative reporting that the press is doing on the growing range of his administration's various inappropriate involvements with Russia.

​It's worth noting that trying desperately to trash the press is not going to stop them.  And with a 37% approval rating for Trump, it seems like the public has already reached the conclusion that the news is pretty darn true.

Okay, I will send up a yellow caution light here.  This is going to be a rant.  I think it's a well-deserved rant, and I even go to great lengths to explain why in detail.  But a rant none-the-less.  You've been warned.

​I had another piece all set to go for this morning.  And then I read a front-page, "top of the fold" article titled, "'Saturday Night Live' And Stephen Colbert May be Further Dividing Americans," written by Sara Boboltz who's the Entertainment Editor of the Huffington Post.  It may be one of the most ridiculous articles I've read in the whole presidential election cycle over the past two years.  In fairness to Ms. Boboltz, she may not have written the headline, the words of which comes from an interview in the article and, being so confrontational, makes the whole thing worse.  But given the whole thing, which you can read here, that's small comfort.

The reference in question comes from Heather LaMarre of Temple University.  Just as a mere starting point to show you awful this article is -- and I apologize ahead of time for being so blunt and repetitive about using such expressions, but I can think of few other words to accurately describe it.  Ms. Boboltz is probably a fine writer and a very nice person and maybe was just having an off-day, as I do and so do we all, but I'm just not sure if political analysis is her strength -- she describes her source this way:  "To Heather LaMarre, who studies politics in entertainment media at Temple University..."  And my immediate thought was -- Say, what?  Wait, this is someone who just studies this?  She's a student??  You have to be kidding me?!!"  However, because I try to be diligent I took the effort to check things out -- something I'm going to guess most people reading the article didn't, as in 99.9999% didn't -- and I did my own research to check out who Heather LaMarre was at Temple.  And happily it turns out that she isn't a student, but teaches there and has a PhD.  Thankfully.  But seriously, how do you leave that out when the person is the source and focus of your information??

But this doesn't even touch on the point that Dr. LaMarre's expertise is not politics or sociology or psychology but rather mass communication.  That's okay, she at least studies communication in the political field which is substantive, it's just that the conclusions being drawn in the article seem far more about politics than communication.

And it's okay, too, that Dr. LaMarre is an assistant professor, not a full professor in the field.  That's absolutely fine. For all we know, Dr. LaMarre may be far more knowledgeable than those with more titles and experience, and ultimately she was merely asked her opinions and properly gave them.  Fair enough.  The problem is that it shows a weak effort by the reporter to make an established point and convince the reader that the conclusions are worth accepting.   However qualified an assistant professor may be (even if we all knew she was), readers need ballast to hang their trust on -- not only important titles that we accept as shorthand for one's background, but things like books written on the subject, a range of scholarly research, what career expertise exists and more.  And after tracking down Temple University's staff pages, I'm not sure if five published articles, the last of which was from four years ago is enough to make a conclusive, convincing point, even more so when the reader isn't told that, 

But to go further, the issue isn't just that one of the sources in the article is an assistant professor -- as I said, and honestly mean it, she really may be an expert in the field, for all we know, or not -- but rather the important issue is that she's the only source in the article, whatever her level of expertise, even the world's leading scholar.  There is no one else quoted in the article or even referenced to support the conclusions drawn.  There's no one else quoted to actually disagree with the point.  It makes for a very unconvincing premise to serve as the foundation of the article.

And that's just the premise.  The background.  We haven't even gotten to what's said in the article.  That's what's so head-banging here.  The premise?  That's just the title page.

Just a few examples of where the article goes deeply off-track into the weeds.

"But as biting as it can be," Ms. Boboltz writes, "the humor of 'SNL' and “'he Late Show' probably isn’t changing any minds.  If anything, the country’s love affair with political comedy may actually be deepening the divides that characterized the 2016 presidential election, according to one researcher."

Okay, swell, a blunt, provocative point.  Except -- there's no evidence presented to support this in the entire article.  I don't mean not enough evidence to be convincing, I mean literally none presented.  It's like if you were at a bus stop and some guy next to you blurted it out, and you said, "Well, okay, how do you know that?"  And that person then got on the bus and left.  I' suspect you wouldn't find it the most meaningful encounter.

All we get in the article after this initial opinion is the author telling us Dr. LaMarre's thoughts about political comedy in the past -- a time frame that is not even defined.  Is it five years?  A century?  We have no idea. That aside, there is nothing to support any research that's been done about this current situation and the public's actual reactions.  Nothing to show that no minds have been changed -- or have been changed, for all we know.  Nothing.  Zero.

(By the way, I would suggest that the current political climate in America is vastly different than anything this nation has seen not just in the recent past but ever.  That's just a guess -- though based on political commentary saying it for the last year -- but it does offer as much evidence as the article does on its conclusions.  And based of my guess, it would suggest that past models don't necessarily apply.)

Eventually, the article does actually finally quote Dr. LaMarre.

“'The people who were already anti-Trump are going to become more anti-Trump, and the people who are pro-Trump are not going to walk away from him just because of something a political comedian said,' LaMarre said."

Okay, swell.  But again -- do we have any evidence of this?  As in...any?  Any research, any studies?  Because it just comes across as a guess, even if an educated one.  But here's the significantly larger point --

Let's assume for the sake of argument that what is said here is valid, that neither side is going to be convinced by the humor.  (Not that that's necessarily the point of humor, but I digress.)  But the headline of this article, its very point, is that this TV humor "May Be Further Dividing Americans."  And yet nothing in this opinion which I quoted above supports that!  All she says is that it may be solidifying the opinion that already exists, not that it's dividing it further.  Those are two totally different things.

(And let us even gloss over the point that "may be" is a pretty banal and meaningless phrase, since...well, maybe it isn't.)

But even worse -- all that this "conclusion" looks at is people who are "already anti-Trump" and those "who are pro-Trump."  Well, gee, here's a question -- what about all those people, say, in the middle, probably about 40% of Americans who are still trying to figure things out??  Who don't already have a definitive opinion.  How does the TV political humor affect them?!  That middle is where most elections are won, by the way.  Swaying the independents and undecideds.  And the only people discussed here are the people who've already decided their opinions.  That's a massive, critical segment to leave out.  "Late-night TV probably isn't changing any minds" is how the sub-headline reads.  "Any"??  The entire middle of America is just an incomprehensibly large number to ignore.  They actually do count among "any."  And "probably" seems to require at least some evidence to support it.

Following this quote, incidentally, Dr. LaMarre adds, "Especially if they think of that comedian as a Hollywood elite."  Well...okay -- so, do they?  Does the viewing public think of Colbert and SNL and all the other many political humorists on TV (only Seth Meyers is mentioned once) think of them as Hollywood elites?  For that matter, Colbert and SNL -- and Seth Meyers -- aren't even in Hollywood, they're in New York.  Does the public differentiate between Hollywood elites and effete New York snobs?  And do they think of these people this way?  Or some other way entirely?  For that matter, James Corden is from London -- is he ignored for being an outsider, or seen as an objective voice?

The article pushes on, not particularly being convincing one way or the other -- since nothing is presented to support the opinions, and there are no opinions from others presented to put it all in perspective. (To be fair, Colbert is quoted once, talking to an audience, not making a scholarly point, and there is a Trump tweet quoted about how bad SNL is, not funny, really terrible television.  And all from the perspective of mass communications, not from the studied view of politics or sociology or psychology, or politics.  (Yes, I know I said "politics," already, but it strikes me as...well, really important.)  But in the end, the article finishes with something essential that is missing --

As noted, the headline point of the article is that all this TV political humor may be "dividing Americans."  And the implication (accepting for just the moment that "may be" turns out to be "is") is that the act of dividing Americans is a bad thing.  Which suggests therefore that, since it's bad for the country, all of these divisive TV comedians should stop making jokes about Trump and not divide America anymore.  Which strikes me as a horrific conclusion because that means leaving Trump on his own, without being chided or ridiculed as humorists have done towards politicians since the beginning of time.  Leave him alone, instead, to the serious political analysts to criticize and defend him -- although that appears to be pretty divisive on its own with partisan and official spokespeople defending their ground   So, maybe we should just leave Trump alone, period, and not critique or joke about him.  Give him the platform on his own and just let him talk and tweet away.

No, that isn't the point the article makes.  It's just the only logical conclusion it leads to.  As for it's point, I am yet to figure it out.

I had a somewhat unexpected occurrence yesterday, but much-appreciated because it helped assuage an awkward feeling I had.

I don't think it's really possible for most people, if anyone to adequate the feelings one has when a tragic massacre happens like that in Manchester.   You can use the same cliched words because the feeling in universal, but that's about as far as one can go.

And you turn on the television to get some coverage of what happened.  But for me, that generally tends to last about 20 minutes, because at that point in the news no one has anything more to report.  It's just the same words over and over, the same videos, the same experts and nothing new is being said.  I understand the need that many feel for a sense of community, but I still want news, and if there isn't anything different to say, then I don't want it said over and over, for five hours.  That's me.  When there's news to report, report it.  But there is other news happening, and I want to know it, to not only keep informed, but to keep it all in perspective.

And the day after -- yesterday -- there was even more of the same, still going on, nothing new, but still being reported.  Though as the day progressed, there finally was something new, with the investigation leading to an arrest.  But mostly, the same things were being repeated.  Out of curiosity, and with that sense of perspective, because I was in my car that has Sirius/XM Radio, I decided to put on the BBC World Service.  If I was going to hear news about Manchester, I at least wanted to hear it from England.

And to my surprise -- unlike in the U.S. on television...the story they were covering wasn't about Manchester!  Nor was the next one!  They did address it with the third story, but then I had reached my destination and left for lunch.

When I got back an hour later, I put the BBC back on -- and again, they were covering something else.  The next story was about the attack, but from a completely different angle than anything I'd heard on American TV -- it was a report on how to deal with children at such times.  It was interesting and profoundly low-key.

And then when that was over --

They went to a program about technology!  And did a story on government innovation.  

There, in the middle of the storm, life was going on.  The story was being covered.  And being covered well.  And in detail.  But it was being covered when they had something to report and talk about.  And done in a mature, thoughtful way that respected the listener.  Yes, I know, this was "the Beeb," and that's their style, even during a tragic bombing in their country.  But they covered it as Really Important News -- not the only news.

​And it was done wonderfully.

Alex Jones' conspiracy theory site, InfoWars, was just given White House press credentials.  Well, bully for them, though it might be a challenge for their staff if they have to turn in their tin foil hats at the press room's metal detector.  I just sent a tweet to their staff member who rejoiced over this on Twitter. 
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