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Donald Fires FBI Director who's investigating Russian Election Hacking

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Good look at how Donald Trump has adjusted to the role of President.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/09/us/politics/donald-trump-president.html?referer=

WASHINGTON — Around 5:30 each morning, President Trumpwakes and tunes into the television in the White House’s master bedroom. He flips to CNN for news, moves to “Fox & Friends” for comfort and messaging ideas, and sometimes watches MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” because, friends suspect, it fires him up for the day.

Energized, infuriated — often a gumbo of both — Mr. Trump grabs his iPhone. Sometimes he tweets while propped on his pillow, according to aides. Other times he tweets from the den next door, watching another television. Less frequently, he makes his way up the hall to the ornate Treaty Room, sometimes dressed for the day, sometimes still in night clothes, where he begins his official and unofficial calls.

As he ends his first year in office, Mr. Trump is redefining what it means to be president. He sees the highest office in the land much as he did the night of his stunning victory over Hillary Clinton — as a prize he must fight to protect every waking moment, and Twitter is his Excalibur. Despite all his bluster, he views himself less as a titan dominating the world stage than a maligned outsider engaged in a struggle to be taken seriously, according to interviews with 60 advisers, associates, friends and members of Congress.

For other presidents, every day is a test of how to lead a country, not just a faction, balancing competing interests. For Mr. Trump, every day is an hour-by-hour battle for self-preservation. He still relitigates last year’s election, convinced that the investigation by Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel, into Russia’s interference is a plot to delegitimize him. Color-coded maps highlighting the counties he won were hung on the White House walls.

Before taking office, Mr. Trump told top aides to think of each presidential day as an episode in a television show in which he vanquishes rivals. People close to him estimate that Mr. Trump spends at least four hours a day, and sometimes as much as twice that, in front of a television, sometimes with the volume muted, marinating in the no-holds-barred wars of cable news and eager to fire back.
 
colton said:
Way to side-step my question. He was impeached for lying and obstructing justice, not for the abuse of power (which granted is something else that concerned me). So, was the impeachment for lying and obstructing justice a witch hunt, or something that Congress was correct to be concerned about?
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Of greater concern would be the general climate where "impeachment" is resorted to over trivial matters of no national importance, generally, by political opponents who don't believe the American voters really can be trusted with the power to affect their governance.

But, of course, no UN idolator would see that point.
 
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outl...529efe-da3f-11e7-a841-2066faf731ef_story.html
I study liars. I’ve never seen one like President Trump.
He tells far more lies, and far more cruel ones, than ordinary people do.
By Bella DePaulo December 8

Bella DePaulo is a social scientist who has published extensively on the psychology of lying. Her most recent book is "Alone: The Badass Psychology of People Who Like Being Alone."

I spent the first two decades of my career as a social scienatist studying liars and their lies. I thought I had developed a sense of what to expect from them. Then along came President Trump. His lies are both more frequent and more malicious than ordinary people’s.

In research beginning in the mid-1990s, when I was a professor at the University of Virginia, my colleagues and I asked 77 college students and 70 people from the nearby community to keep diaries of all the lies they told every day for a week. They handed them in to us with no names attached. We calculated participants’ rates of lying and categorized each lie as either self-serving (told to advantage the liar or protect the liar from embarrassment, blame or other undesired outcomes) or kind (told to advantage, flatter or protect someone else).

At The Washington Post, the Fact Checker feature has been tracking every false and misleading claim and flip-flop made by President Trump this year. The inclusion of misleading statements and flip-flops is consistent with the definition of lying my colleagues and I gave to our participants: “A lie occurs any time you intentionally try to mislead someone.” In the case of Trump’s claims, though, it is possible to ascertain only whether they were false or misleading, and not what the president’s intentions were. (And while the subjects of my research self-reported how often they lied, Trump’s falsehoods were tallied by The Post.)

I categorized the most recent 400 lies that The Post had documented through mid-November in the same way my colleagues and I had categorized the lies of the participants in our study.

The college students in our research told an average of two lies a day, and the community members told one. A more recent study of the lies 1,000 U. S. adults told in the previous 24 hours found that people told an average of 1.65 lies per day; the authors noted that 60 percent of the participants said they told no lies at all, while the top 5 percent of liars told nearly half of all the falsehoods in the study.

In Trump’s first 298 days in office, however, he made 1,628 false or misleading claims or flip-flops, by The Post’s tally. That’s about six per day, far higher than the average rate in our studies. And of course, reporters have access to only a subset of Trump’s false statements — the ones he makes publicly — so unless he never stretches the truth in private, his actual rate of lying is almost certainly higher.

That rate has been accelerating. Starting in early October, The Post’s tracking showed that Trump told a remarkable nine lies a day, outpacing even the biggest liars in our research.

But the flood of deceit isn’t the most surprising finding about Trump.

Both the college students and the community members in our study served their own interests with their lies more often than other people’s interests. They told lies to try to advantage themselves in the workplace, the marketplace, their personal relationships and just about every other domain of everyday life. For example, a salesperson told a customer that the jeans she was trying on were not too tight, so she could make the sale. The participants also lied to protect themselves psychologically: One college student told a classmate that he wasn’t worried about his grades, so the classmate wouldn’t think him stupid.

Less often, the participants lied in kind ways, to help other people get what they wanted, look or feel better, or to spare them from embarrassment or blame. For example, a son told his mother he didn’t mind taking her shopping, and a woman took sides with a friend who was divorcing, even though she thought her friend was at fault, too.

About half the lies the participants told were self-serving (46 percent for the college students, 57 percent for the community members), compared with about a quarter that were kind (26 percent for the students, 24 percent for the community members). Other lies did not fit either category; they included, for instance, lies told to entertain or to keep conversations running smoothly.

One category of lies was so small that when we reported the results, we just tucked them into a footnote. Those were cruel lies, told to hurt or disparage others. For example, one person told a co-worker that the boss wanted to see him when he really didn’t, “so he’d look like a fool.” Just 0.8 percent of the lies told by the college students and 2.4 percent of the lies told by the community members were mean-spirited.

My colleagues and I found it easy to code each of our participants’ lies into just one category. This was not the case for Trump. Close to a quarter of his false statements (24 percent) served several purposes simultaneously.

Nearly two-thirds of Trump’s lies (65 percent) were self-serving. Examples included: “They’re big tax cuts — the biggest cuts in the history of our country, actually” and, about the people who came to see him on a presidential visit to Vietnam last month: “They were really lined up in the streets by the tens of thousands.”

Slightly less than 10 percent of Trump’s lies were kind ones, told to advantage, flatter or protect someone else. An example was his statementon Twitter that “it is a ‘miracle’ how fast the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police were able to find the demented shooter and stop him from even more killing!” In the broadest sense, it is possible to interpret every lie as ultimately self-serving, but I tried to stick to how statements appeared on the surface.

Trump told 6.6 times as many self-serving lies as kind ones. That’s a much higher ratio than we found for our study participants, who told about double the number of self-centered lies compared with kind ones.

The most stunning way Trump’s lies differed from our participants’, though, was in their cruelty. An astonishing 50 percent of Trump’s lies were hurtful or disparaging. For example, he proclaimed that John Brennan, James Clapper and James Comey, all career intelligence or law enforcement officials, were “political hacks.” He said that “the Sloppy Michael Moore Show on Broadway was a TOTAL BOMB and was forced to close.” Talking about green card applicants, he insisted that other “countries, they don’t put their finest in the lottery system. They put people probably in many cases that they don’t want.” And he claimed that“Ralph Northam, who is running for Governor of Virginia, is fighting for the violent MS-13 killer gangs & sanctuary cities.”

The Trump lies that could not be coded into just one category were typically told both to belittle others and enhance himself. For example: “Senator Bob Corker ‘begged’ me to endorse him for reelection in Tennessee. I said ‘NO’ and he dropped out (said he could not win without my endorsement).”

The sheer frequency of Trump’s lies appears to be having an effect, and it may not be the one he is going for. A Politico/Morning Consult poll from late October showed that only 35 percent of voters believed that Trump was honest, while 51 percent said he was not honest. (The others said they didn’t know or had no opinion.) Results of a Quinnipiac University poll from November were similar: Thirty-seven percent of voters thought Trump was honest, compared with 58 percent who thought he was not.

For fewer than 40 percent of American voters to see the president as honest is truly remarkable. Most humans, most of the time, believe other people. That’s our default setting. Usually, we need a reason to disbelieve.

Research on the detection of deception consistently documents this “truth bias.” In the typical study, participants observe people making statements and are asked to indicate, each time, whether they think the person is lying or telling the truth. Measuring whether people believe others should be difficult to do accurately, because simply asking the question disrupts the tendency to assume that other people are telling the truth. It gives participants a reason to wonder. And yet, in our statistical summary of more than 200 studies, Charles F. Bond Jr. and I found that participants still believed other people more often than they should have — 58 percent of the time in studies in which only half of the statements were truthful. People are biased toward believing others, even in studies in which they are told explicitly that only half of the statements they will be judging are truths.

By telling so many lies, and so many that are mean-spirited, Trump is violating some of the most fundamental norms of human social interaction and human decency. Many of the rest of us, in turn, have abandoned a norm of our own — we no longer give Trump the benefit of the doubt that we usually give so readily.
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colton said:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outl...529efe-da3f-11e7-a841-2066faf731ef_story.html
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Putting it unkindly, it's easy enough to be sarcastic and refer to him as our Liar-in-Chief.

I'd like to point to a paragraph from the article you posted and compare it with observations noted in the article I posted, which were based on NY Times interviews with "60 advisers, associates, friends and members of Congress."

Regarding his propensity for "unkind lies", from the article you posted:

"The most stunning way Trump’s lies differed from our participants’, though, was in their cruelty. An astonishing 50 percent of Trump’s lies were hurtful or disparaging. For example, he proclaimed that John Brennan, James Clapper and James Comey, all career intelligence or law enforcement officials, were “political hacks.” He said that “the Sloppy Michael Moore Show on Broadway was a TOTAL BOMB and was forced to close.” Talking about green card applicants, he insisted that other “countries, they don’t put their finest in the lottery system. They put people probably in many cases that they don’t want.” And he claimed that “Ralph Northam, who is running for Governor of Virginia, is fighting for the violent MS-13 killer gangs & sanctuary cities.”

The Trump lies that could not be coded into just one category were typically told both to belittle others and enhance himself. For example: “Senator Bob Corker ‘begged’ me to endorse him for reelection in Tennessee. I said ‘NO’ and he dropped out (said he could not win without my endorsement).”

------------------------------------------------------

Now, consider the view he has of his office, and the situation he finds himself in as President, and as described by the Times article I posted:

"As he ends his first year in office, Mr. Trump is redefining what it means to be president. He sees the highest office in the land much as he did the night of his stunning victory over Hillary Clinton — as a prize he must fight to protect every waking moment, and Twitter is his Excalibur. Despite all his bluster, he views himself less as a titan dominating the world stage than a maligned outsider engaged in a struggle to be taken seriously, according to interviews with 60 advisers, associates, friends and members of Congress

For other presidents, every day is a test of how to lead a country, not just a faction, balancing competing interests. For Mr. Trump, every day is an hour-by-hour battle for self-preservation. He still relitigates last year’s election, convinced that the investigation by Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel, into Russia’s interference is a plot to delegitimize him. Color-coded maps highlighting the counties he won were hung on the White House walls.

Before taking office, Mr. Trump told top aides to think of each presidential day as an episode in a television show in which he vanquishes rivals. People close to him estimate that Mr. Trump spends at least four hours a day, and sometimes as much as twice that, in front of a television, sometimes with the volume muted, marinating in the no-holds-barred wars of cable news and eager to fire back."

------------------------------------
"Before taking office, Mr. Trump told top aides to think of each presidential day as an episode in a television show in which he vanquishes rivals".

I suggest, that since he sees every day as a battle to protect himself and his position, he takes every opportunity to slam those he perceives as his enemies, and thus we see him telling far more "unkind lies" then might otherwise be the case. He's in a prizefight every day he sits in that office. He slams his "enemies", including our 4th estate, our press, the watchdogs of our democracy, and indeed telling lies about them is only natural from his perspective. The fact that some in that free press have been quite sloppy with the facts of late certainly does not help, and helps him in this daily war against anyone who opposes him.

Further, creating a totally fake reality is a part of his path to vanquishing his enemy, and maintains the support of his base. It's basic: tell a lie often enough, and people begin to believe that lie. Hence we find ourselves in the situation that exists today: a fake reality or fake narrative that butts up against the truth of the matter all the time, and which is helping create a situation where a % of the American public are fully committed to that fake narrative, believe in it 100%, and are unwavering in believing their President is actually telling the truth with his lies, and is under attack by "the lying media".

Those who have eyes to see can readily see what's going on here, and our understandably concerned by his tactics, since it is clearly damaging to our democracy to help create a fake narrative/reality that will continue to exist after he has left that office. It's the whole problem of the so-called Post Truth era that nobody more then Donald Trump and his propaganda organs, like Fox News, are helping to establish as the norm in the United States. When we get to the point where facts vs. alternative facts(thanks Kelly Conway!) is the daily fare, we are in deep trouble.
 
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You'd have to be living in a cave somewhere not to have know that this tweet was on its way before the ink on the New York Times report was dry. Simply recall a previous lie by Trump: that he has no time for watching much TV because he's too busy reading documents. And anybody believing Trump spends a lot of time reading anything(well I understand he does read newspapers) would also have to be living under a rock. So, here we go with Trump's latest lie, he does not watch TV 4-8 hours a day and the New York Times is lying by saying he does. The Times stands by its report:

http://thehill.com/homenews/adminis...ort-that-he-watches-up-to-8-hours-of-tv-a-day
 
Red said:
You'd have to be living in a cave somewhere not to have know that this tweet was on its way before the ink on the New York Times report was dry. Simply recall a previous lie by Trump: that he has no time for watching much TV because he's too busy reading documents. And anybody believing Trump spends a lot of time reading anything(well I understand he does read newspapers) would also have to be living under a rock. So, here we go with Trump's latest lie, he does not watch TV 4-8 hours a day and the New York Times is lying by saying he does. The Times stands by its report:

http://thehill.com/homenews/adminis...ort-that-he-watches-up-to-8-hours-of-tv-a-day
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Of course it's a lie. I mean, he's tweeting from 5-9. If he's doing that he clearly can't be watching faux and friends.

rite?
 
I bet trump is president till atleast 2020! he will at least sit out this term!

100 bucks donated to murderous planned parenthood in red or thrillers name
 
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