Just when you thought The Donald had set the standard for political craziness, Young Johnny McCranky opens his trap

Young Johnny McCranky reminds us that when it comes to the political crazy, nobody can outdo him.

by Ken

In a DailyKos post, "Abbreviated pundit roundup: Trump's poll numbers take a huge dive," Georgia Logothetis brings together a broad range of sources sounding alarms about the stink bomb that is the Trump presidential campaign, including this from the Washington Post's Eugene Robinson, from a column today called "The challenges in covering Trump's relentless assault on the truth":

In 2016’s race to the bottom, Donald Trump is going to find out if you can become president when two-thirds of Americans don’t like you — and a majority can’t stand you. [...]

Trump is setting modern records for political toxicity — at least for a major-party candidate this far out from an election. Seventy percent of Americans surveyed in an ABC News/Washington Post poll out this week had an unfavorable opinion of Trump, up 10 points over the past month. The poll showed Trump’s favorable rating cratering at 29 percent, down from 37 percent last month.

I think it's worth backing up to the beginning of this Gene Robinson column:

Donald Trump must be the biggest liar in the history of American politics, and that’s saying something.

Trump lies the way other people breathe. We’re used to politicians who stretch the truth, who waffle or dissemble, who emphasize some facts while omitting others. But I can’t think of any other political figure who so brazenly tells lie after lie, spraying audiences with such a fusillade of untruths that it is almost impossible to keep track. Perhaps he hopes the media and the nation will become numb to his constant lying. We must not.

One reservation: I have to quibble with the notion that The Donald is unique in modern political discourse. Oh, I don't dispupte that his habit of lying is more brazen, more unashamed, and just plain wackier than what we've become used to from the Right, but not more unbroken. As I've been screaming for going on a decade now, the Right has somehow taken unto itself the Right to Lie without reservation or apology, presumably under the justification of access to a Higher Truth. And for me the tipping-point event was the 2008 presidential campaign of Arizona Sen. Young Johnny McCranky, in which the candidate never, to my hearing, uttered a word of truth, and better still, in his attempt to pander to assorted constituencies, staked out multiple positions (two, three, or even more) on virtually every issue which were not only mutually exclusive but stitched together entirely from lies and delusions.

Of course, the scope of his lyingness went mostly uncalled out. And so, despite my jubilation at the Obama victory, signaling an end to the long nightmare of the "Chimpy the Prez" Bush years, I was filled with foreboding considering how close McCranky made the final vote count, given the terrifying imbecility, dishonesty, and delusionality of his campaign. And it didn't take long to see the impact on governing of the Republicans' embrace of total dishonesty. While Obama himself would disappoint in a number of ways, for most everything he did try to do he would be largely thwarted by a Republican Party united on a single tactic: to sink the country in the shithole of its diseased imaginings in the hope of scoring tactical political advantage.

So I was less surprised than I might have been to have Young Johnny jumping into the Orlando swamp blithering -- as DailyKos's Brainwrap put it yesterday -- "something just as, if not even more insane and offensive than Donald Trump," calling President Obama "directly responsible" for the event, "due to [as Washington Post's Mike DeBonis puts it] his failure to combat the rise of the Islamic State terror group." Later the Crankyman claimed to have "misspoken," but I don't doubt that what he blithered was pretty much what he thought, for want of a better word.


ESPECIALLY WORTH NOTING IN GEORGIA L'S POST
IS THIS QUOTE ON GUNS FROM STANLEY McCHRYSTAL

It's from a NYT op-ed piece by the retired general called "Home Should Not Be a War Zone," on the subject of gun laws:

As this national crisis continues to rage, I ask my fellow veterans — patriots who have worn the uniform, who took an oath to protect our Constitution and the Second Amendment, who served this great country — to add your voice to this growing call for change. America needs you.

In my life as a soldier and citizen, I have seen time and time again that inaction has dire consequences. In this case, one consequence of our leaders’ inaction is that felons, domestic abusers and suspected terrorists have easy access to firearms.

Some opponents of closing these gaps in our laws will continue to argue that dangerous people will obtain guns in our country no matter what, and therefore that taking steps to make it harder for them is fruitless. That is both poor logic and poor leadership.

Smartly said, General Stan.

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