George Will: We Need to Quarantine Donald Trump

Year's ago I quoted, approvingly, George Will on a point of psychology that underlay the main argument in a book I was writing: "Something in us is drawn toward what we are ashamed of being drawn toward."

George Will was there for me 20 years ago, so I am here for him now.

His essay, "Trump Has a Dangerous Disability," posted yesterday evening, contains wisdom that I would quote approvingly if I were writing a book today:

It is urgent for Americans to think and speak clearly about President Trump’s inability to do either. This seems to be not a mere disinclination but a disability. It is not merely the result of intellectual sloth but of an untrained mind bereft of information and married to stratospheric self-confidence....

What is most alarming ... is not that Trump has entered his eighth decade unscathed by even elementary knowledge about the nation’s history .... the problem isn’t that he does not know this or that, or that he does not know that he does not know this or that. Rather, the dangerous thing is that he does not know what it is to know something....

His fathomless lack of interest in America’s path to the present and his limitless gullibility leave him susceptible to being blown about by gusts of factoids that cling like lint to a disorderly mind.

Americans have placed vast military power at the discretion of this mind, a presidential discretion that is largely immune to restraint by the Madisonian system of institutional checks and balances. So, it is up to the public to quarantine this presidency by insistently communicating to its elected representatives a steady, rational fear of this man whose combination of impulsivity and credulity render him uniquely unfit to take the nation into a military conflict.

Newt Gingrich, Sob Sister

The things one learns from the Sunday morning gasbags!

First, we hear George Will say the greatest thing that President Obama has done -- really, an act of sheer statesmanship -- is to remove the "buy American" provisions in the stimulus plan.

Less than an hour later, some senator from Arizona (McCain, I think his name was) said that it's just plu-perfect AWFUL that the bill has a "buy American" provision in it.

One of these two gentlemen is right and the other is lost somewhere in the space-time continuum.

But the best yuck of the morning came out of the mouth of Newt Gingrich on ABC's "This Week." Newt was alarmed -- perhaps even a little saddened, in that smug, self-serving way of his -- about the "partisanship" that has reinvaded Washington, all because President Obama thinks that it was Republican policies that got us into this mess. It's just a fact: Newt's shit don't stink.

And, oh yes, via the new chair of the Republican National Committee Michael Steele: a government-created job is not actually a job. It's really more of a social indiscretion, like paying your sister $37,000 out of campaign funds for work she didn't actually do.

Conservative Columnists Host Muslim Socialist and Get Cooties

Look who came to dinner at George Will's place!

With a whole host of conservative bloviators passing the mashed potatoes: William Kristol, David Brooks, Charles Krauthammer, Larry Kudlow, Peggy Noonan, Rich Lowry, Michael Barone, Paul Gigot, and others yet to be ratted out.

Go to any right-wing website and read the reactions, for example, this one. You'd get the impression that George Will shared Obama's prayer rug.

Reacting to screams of "traitor" on the right, Charles Krauthammer joked: "And I'm here to tell you that, speaking for myself, [Obama] has succeeded. I am brainwashed entirely. I'm in the tank, and I am a believer of hope and change and, above all, audacity."

Rush Limbaugh's feelings were hurt because he wasn't invited.

John McCain, Getting the Jump on Halloween

"John McCain Loses His Head." That's the title on George Will's column today -- George Will?

A few of the adjectives Will applies to Senator McNasty:

"childish"

"unpresidential"

"shallow"

"impulsive"

"erratic"

Bottomline: John McCain is unsuited for the presidency. Saith Brother Will.