I couldn't have guessed that. And you people elected him president...

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/chapman/ct-perspec-chapman-donald-trump-dumb-20171103-story.html

Donald Trump has many serious flaws, including incorrigible dishonesty, rampant narcissism, contempt for women and a fashion sense that makes him think that hairstyle of his is flattering. But nothing compares to his most prominent, crippling and incurable defect: He’s dimmer than a 5-watt bulb. (ouch!!!)

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson was reported to have called the president a “moron” — emphasizing that term with an adjective I can’t repeat here. Forced to hold a news conference to praise the president’s intelligence, Tillerson was too honest to deny what he had said.

The late William T. Kelley, who taught Trump at the University of Pennsylvania, said, “Donald Trump was the dumbest goddamn student I ever had.” Tony Schwartz, the ghostwriter of “The Art of the Deal,” says Trump had “a stunning level of superficial knowledge and plain ignorance.”

Trump’s feeble-mindedness is on daily view. When an Uzbek immigrant was arrested for allegedly driving a truck down a Manhattan bike path, k*****g eight people, the president responded in thunderously stupid ways. First, he tweeted that he had “just ordered Homeland Security to step up our already Extreme Vetting Program.” If you can step it up, why didn’t you do that before?

He fumed that the alleged k**ler wanted an Islamic State f**g for his hospital room. Really? The guy reportedly k**led eight people, and the f**g is what steams you? Trump demanded the death penalty — opening the way for the suspect’s lawyers to argue that the president has made it impossible for him to get a fair trial.

Trump has learned nothing from his past blunders. As a candidate, he said Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl was a t*****r who should be executed. Asked about the case as president, he doubled down: “I think people have heard my comments in the past.”

The military judge announced he would count Trump’s statement as “mitigating evidence” — which may be why he ended up giving Bergdahl no prison time. Not only was Trump’s remark unnecessary and inappropriate; it was self-defeating.

He’s just not bright enough to make connections between his conduct and its consequences. Trump’s travel ban has lost repeatedly in court because he has made clear he has an unconstitutional goal: shutting out Muslims because of their religion. If he had kept quiet, he might have gotten his way.

The evidence of his dimwittedness flows as continuously and voluminously as the Mississippi River. His tweets are studded with misspellings, random capitalizations and mystifying quotation marks.

He taps out tweets that f**grantly contradict what he tweeted when Barack Obama was president, making himself look ridiculous. When he holds forth on policy issues, it’s excruciatingly apparent he has no idea what he’s talking about.

Trump relies on a vocabulary the size of a second-grader’s. To combat opioid abuse among teens, he favors “telling them, ‘No good, really bad for you in every way.’ ” Those paper towels he tossed to a crowd in Puerto Rico were “very good towels.” He wanted to call the tax reform bill “the Cut Cut Cut Act.”

He pretends to be a master negotiator, but he has failed to get the Republican Congress to repeal Obamacare, enact protections for immigrants brought here illegally as children, and fund his border wall.

Trump tries to conceal his intellectual deficiency by insisting how smart he is. “I went to an Ivy League college,” he said last month. “I’m a very intelligent person.” He has to make such affirmations because all the evidence indicates his cranium contains an airless void.

I don’t mean to suggest his supporters are dumb. There are plenty of intelligent people who v**ed for him and plenty of stupid ones who didn’t. But the smart Trump supporters don’t hold his intellect in awe.

After Tillerson’s “moron” comment was reported, Trump said, “I guess we’ll have to compare IQ tests. And I can tell you who is going to win.”

I’m sure plenty of readers are now saying I’m the stupid one, with a brain far inferior to Trump’s. They may be right. So I put a challenge to him: We both take an IQ test, administered by an independent body, with the results to be made public.

This is a great chance to dazzle the world with his peerless mind. It’s a chance for him to humiliate someone in the “f**e news media” with his towering intellect.

But I’m betting Trump will never submit to any process that would document his actual intelligence for the public to see. He’s dumb. But not that dumb.

Steve Chapman, a member of the Tribune Editorial Board, blogs at www.chicagotribune.com/chapman.

This is what we call “unintended consequences.”

Led by David Hogg, for weeks a group of Stoneman Douglas High School mass shooting survivors have been clamoring like geese for more government restrictions to be needlessly imposed on America’s millions of law-abiding firearm owners.

Thanks to the combined efforts of the National Rifle Association and conservative media, both of which have rightly sought to protect the Second Amendment from the whims of the inordinately ignorant, America’s gun rights still remained firmly intact as of early April.

Yet interestingly enough, Hogg and his merry band of demagogues’ constant fear-mongering regarding guns had at least eng****red one rather serendipitous side effect, as noted Monday by Campus Safety magazine:

Students returning to Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School following spring break will face added security and safety measures.

All students will be required to use clear backpacks, which they will be given for free when they arrive on Monday morning. They will also be required to wear newly-issued student ID badges at all times, reports NBC. …

Students will be allowed to bring large sports equipment or band instruments in non-clear bags or cases but should expect to have their bags searched, says Superintendent Robert Runcie, who calls the clear backpacks an “initial measure, not a permanent one.”

When students arrive, they will be able to enter using four entry points from 7:00 a.m. to 7:45 a.m. Afterwards, the front office will be the only entry point. By the end of the first quarter of 2019, all schools in the district will have a single point entry for visitors.

But that’s not all. Students at the school must now also contend with “an increased police presence,” real-time surveillance cameras and metal-detecting wands. Full-fledged metal detectors may likewise be installed sometime in the near future.

Sound draconian and totalitarian in nature? Team Hogg certainly certainly believes so:

--Lauren Hogg: Today when I walk into school I will be greeted with armed police, wand detectors and clear backpacks.

Is this what my high school experience is going to be like? 3 more years of this...

Someday when my kids ask me about my high school experience what am I going to tell them?

--Delaney Tarr @ Delaney Tarr: Starting off the last quarter of senior year right, with a good ol’ violation of privacy!

--Sarah Chadwick//@NEVER AGAIN: Tomorrow we will have to go through security check points and be given clear backpacks, my school is starting to feel like a prison.

Even Reason magazine contributor Robby Soave, a libertarian, admitted that these new security measures have indeed made Stoneman Douglas quite “prison-like.”

However, he noted the almost comical irony of it all, writing, “Policies aimed making it harder for people to own firearms aren’t fundamentally different from the above security measures.”

Exactly!

Or, as pithily stated by Brandon Morse at RedState, “[Y]ou cannot ask for more safety without losing some freedoms. That’s just the natural order of things.”

Except, instead of robbing gun-owning Americans of their constitutionally guaranteed Second Amendment rights (all on the premise that doing so would somehow enhance safety), Hogg’s fanatical gun control team wound up robbing itself of its own rights to feel free at school.

“Every day, students lose more and more freedoms at MSD,” one of Hogg’s classmates, Kai Koerber, whined to CNN this week. “Students of color have become targets and white students have become suspects. We do not welcome the militarization of MSD. It is terrible to see our school lose control over the protection of their students and their families.”

Sure, but you asked for it, son. Led by Hogg, you and others like you spent weeks making it clear to the entire country that the most basic American rights mean nothing to you. And now you’re surprised that YOUR RIGHTS have been rescinded? Hah. Welcome to reality, kid.

Better yet, welcome to the notion of principles, i.e. the principles that led you to resent these draconian measures perfectly mirror those of the firearm owners who resent YOU trying to subvert their rights.

Long story short, “No one’s liberties should be infringed just because agents of the state arbitrarily decide that a new policy might somehow make somebody feel safer.” (~Soave)

Let’s just hope you learned your lesson this time. If not, perhaps next week your school district can implement a policy that forces you and your peers to walk with your hands behind your backs. Just sayin’.

Class dismissed.

How does that work? A person decides everything is f**e news, so no attempt is made to hear what facts surface and even attempt to decide if they are real or not. And it results in continuing to deny things even as evidence comes out that can't possibly be denied.

Each and every thing as it comes out needs to be carefully looked at, any number of false things have no bearing on future things. One lie does not make the next 20 things lies.

Come on, be honest, doesn't it seem a bit odd to you to decide it's all lies before you even know what they are?

And what about when one of "your" guys like Hannity gets busted selling ridiculous ideas, why is that an "oh well, the rest of what he says is spot on. This is a very odd system of deciding what to believe. Why doesn't occasional inescapable facts break through to where you realize maybe more is true than you are being led to believe?

It's one thing to adopt a position of flat not caring what Trump does, but don't also add a dialog of it all being f**e news too. Big difference between the two.