"In your guts you know he's nuts."

From LBJ Library (photos taken at a visit in 2007) — a reminder of what presidential politics were like in the 60s. Goldwater (1964) was crazy:



And the Democrats (in 1968) presented themselves from the female perspective:

"Libtard" is a portmanteau word, but of what? Liberal + ???

This topic arose in the comments to my post last night that took The New Yorker to task for publishing the sentence: "In India, Hindu supremacists have adopted Rush Limbaugh’s favorite epithet 'libtard' to channel righteous fury against liberal and secular élites." In fact, Rush Limbaugh never says "libtard."

I added: "'Libtard' is an offensive word, unnecessarily dragging in disrespect for the mentally challenged." I have always heard the word as a combination of "liberal" and "retard." But in the comments, MadisonMan asked: "Does the 'tard' come from retard, or bastard?" I think it's obvious: 1. "Retard" is often shortened to just "'tard" and no one ever says "'tard" to mean "bastard," and 2. The contempt expressed in the use of the word seems to be about stupidity and not orneriness.

Urban Dictionary confirms my understanding, in the top-voted definition and in all the competing definitions.

But here's an op-ed in the NYT (from 2014), "Testing the Ideas of India." See? It's India again.

The [the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party's] dominance during this election campaign has had unexpected benefits, including reviving the belief that secularism is a value — even if it’s a value that needs reviving, and redefining. In rambunctious Twitter arguments, “sickular” is often used as a pejorative term, along with “libtard,” a composite for “liberal bastard.” This language, however extreme, is a sign that between the small but noisy groups of Hindu supremacists and the small but equally vociferous groups of committed left-liberals lies a vast middle ground.

I don't know if that columnist got it right, and who knows how the word "libtard" came into being in India? It didn't come from Rush Limbaugh, but did it come from other Americans? If so, was the "tard" misunderstood as connected to "bastard" or was the NYT op-ed writer — Nilanjana S. Roy — just innocent of the American word "tard" and making her own assumption? Roy is a novelist born, educated, and living in India. She's not a good source of the origin of the American epithet "libtard," which seems to have a life of its own in India.

Democrats think: "Regardless of how poorly Democrats perform on inequality matters, they will never be as awful as those crazy Republicans."

But, according to Thomas Frank in "Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People?":

People do find other places to go, of course — they stay home, they join the Tea Party, whatever. But my purpose here is to scrutinize the tacit Democratic boast about always being better than those crazy Republicans. In truth, what Bill Clinton accomplished were things that no Republican could have done....

That a Democrat might be the one to pick apart the safety net is a violation of this basic brand identity, but by the very structure of the system it is extremely difficult to hold the party accountable for such a deed. This, in turn, is why only a Democrat was able to do that job and get away with it. Only a Democrat was capable of getting bank deregulation passed; only a Democrat could have rammed NAFTA through Congress; and only a Democrat would be capable of privatizing Social Security, as George W. Bush found out in 2005....

To judge by what he actually accomplished, Bill Clinton was not the lesser of two evils, as people on the left always say about Democrats at election time; he was the greater of the two. What he did as president was beyond the reach of even the most diabolical Republican....

Those crazy Republicans.... This is another post that gets my tag: the mental illness meme. Watch out for that crazy guy over there. Watch out for who's getting called crazy.

Is playing dumb — pretending not to understand what Trump means — a good tactic?

I'm really tired of it, but then I pay excessive attention to the jabber of the day. I find it hard to bother to talk about Trump's saying Obama is "the founder of ISIS" and Hillary Clinton is "the co-founder." Really, does anyone want to own up to being so deficient in language skill that they don't get it? Apparently they do. Here's Allegra Kirkland at Talking Points Memo: "Trump Now Says Claim That Obama Was ‘Founder Of ISIS’ Was ‘Sarcasm.'"

I remember when liberals liked to present themselves as the smart people. But these are not normal times.

OH: Are these times when I must say that my "these are not normal times" is sarcasm?

ADDED: I think Trump's comment is easily understood, so the tactic of focusing on it gets it more widely heard and contemplated.

Does anyone think Trump is actually confused and just getting something wrong? He's making an attack and getting it spread virally. It's memorable and (darkly) funny. I could see thinking that a President shouldn't indulge in figures of speech that can be misunderstood, but the current criticism is mostly trying to deprive Trump of the power to say things in a vivid, effective way. Trump knows that, as his dialogue with Hugh Hewitt shows:

DT: No, it’s no mistake. Everyone’s liking it. I think they’re liking it.... do you not like that?

HH: I don’t. I think I would say they created, they lost the peace. They created the Libyan vacuum, they created the vacuum into which ISIS came, but they didn’t create ISIS. That’s what I would say.

DT: Well, I disagree.... I mean, with his bad policies, that’s why ISIS came about.... If he would have done things properly, you wouldn’t have had ISIS.... Therefore, he was the founder of ISIS.

HH: And that’s, I’d just use different language to communicate it...

DT: But they wouldn’t talk about your language, and they do talk about my language, right?

Yes, they do, so it's effective... until it's not effective. And that's what Trump's antagonists would like to take away from  him. They would like us to hear his speech as evidence that this man is mentally unbalanced. That is, they want to unbalance our minds, so we no longer hear him and understand but hear him and are triggered to think he's mentally unbalanced. 

"The American Psychiatric Association issues a warning: No psychoanalyzing Donald Trump."

That's the WaPo headline. Here's an excerpt. See if you notice what I notice:

Back in 1964, a whole bunch of psychiatrists decided they would like to psychoanalyze Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater. The result was what's known as the "Goldwater Rule."...

The American Psychiatric Association first began to follow the rule in 1973, but given recent events, it saw fit Wednesday to remind psychiatrists across the United States that the rule exists and must be followed.

"The unique atmosphere of this year’s election cycle may lead some to want to psychoanalyze the candidates," Maria A. Oquendo, president of the APA, wrote, "but to do so would not only be unethical, it would be irresponsible."

It's not clear whether Oquendo's post was a direct response to Flier's tweet or Scarborough's comments ["We’re asking ourselves — I didn’t say this, but this is what everybody is saying: Is Donald Trump a sociopath?"], but the timing certainly seems to fit. She did not respond to a request for comment....

Flier is Jeffrey Flier, the former dean of Harvard Medical School. His tweet was "Narcissistic personality disorder. Trump doesn't just have it, he defines it."

Do you know what I'm about to say? WaPo is highlighting the things people are saying about Trump, but the APA warning came out Wednesday and is more closely synchronized with attacks on Hillary Clinton. WaPo doesn't even mention the spate of analysis of Hillary Clinton that followed her "short-circuited" remark. The "timing certainly seems to fit" — if anything — a desire to protect Hillary from attacks. The analysis of Trump's mental health has been going on for a while.

And here's my post from this morning observing that discussion of Trump in terms of mental illness has unleashed a corresponding approach to attacking Hillary Clinton. I'm against this kind of cheap, phony medicalizing of political discussion, whether it's done by psychiatrists or amateurs — or WaPo columnists like Kathleen Parker who thinks her own experience with brain injury puts her in a "unique position" to talk about Trump's brain.

You know, some real human beings actually do suffer from mental illness. It's offensive to degrade these people...

... in a clumsy rush to attack the political candidate you want to defeat. It's too late to expect either side to step back from this disgusting level of discourse. It would be grandiose — though not in a mentally ill way — to think I could persuade many people to cut it out.

And I understand the instinctive resistance — not that I think it's mentally ill — to unilateral disarmament. If Hillary people are going to say Trump is mentally ill, Trump and his supporters are going to think that Trump would be a sucker to restrict himself to earnestly endeavoring to prove he's mentally healthy.

How can he prove he's perfectly sane? He'd have to tone down his personal style and avoid everything that could be called bragging or self-promotion. His opponents would benefit from that. And, even if he tried, he'd never be able to squelch every single thing that could be seized upon and portrayed as evidence of mental illness. Confirmation bias kicks in. Once the theory is known, any damned thing that seems to support it gets noticed and flogged.

So now we have the Trump side promoting the theory that Hillary Clinton is mentally deranged. Every time she misspeaks or mugs or jerks her head around, that's material for videos like this...



... which comes from the Trump campaign itself. And there are less slick viral things like this...



... and this....



If you think that's all in good fun or that we really do need to protect ourselves from the psychos among us, consider whether you would use the Trump/Hillary-is-mentally-ill meme in the presence of someone who you knew has personally struggled with mental illness.