THIS IS ABSURD – AT 11:30 A.M. ET:  A traditional gimmick of the Soviet Union was to declare political opponents mentally ill.  They'd be sent to the Gulag, and they disappeared into "treatment programs."

The left in America periodically tries the same gimmick.  They tried it with Goldwater, Nixon, occasionally with Reagan, and now full blast with Trump.  Strange, we never hear of any liberal declared mentally ill.  From Buzzfeed:   

A member of the House Intelligence Committee is going where many of her colleagues have not: reaching out to people in the mental health field to talk about President Donald Trump.

“It’s one thing from my non-professional, non-clinical standpoint [to] believe that someone does not have the capacity to do the job, it’s another thing to talk to experts and [those] who can deal with mental psychosis on a daily basis, so I wanted to hear from them,” Rep. Jackie Speier, a California Democrat, told BuzzFeed News.

Speier is one of the most left-leaning members of Congress.

While many Democrats have steered clear of speculation about Trump, Speier appears not to be alone in talking to mental health professionals. Half a dozen lawmakers have contacted Bandy Lee, a psychiatry professor at Yale, to talk about the president’s mental state over the past several months, Lee told BuzzFeed News. Although Lee wouldn’t identify the politicians, she said they were Democrats in both the House and Senate.

Speier said she has not spoken with Lee, but that she reached out to two experts to discuss Trump’s mental health, including John Gartner, a psychologist. Gartner is the founder of Duty to Warn, a network of mental health experts across the country making a concerted push into politics and who appear to be circumventing their profession's own rules about diagnosing public figures they have never evaluated themselves. (The traditional concept of a “duty to warn,” ingrained in law in most states, says mental health professionals who have reason to believe a patient may become dangerous or violent toward others must reveal that information, or else risk legal liability.)

Without having directly evaluated him, the group is arguing that the president, as Gartner put it recently, is “deeply and dangerously psychologically disordered."

The roughly two dozen vocal mental health professionals involved in the group have drawn harsh criticism from others in the industry who argue that their statements have little clinical basis and risk casting their field in an unprofessional light and stigmatizing mental illness.

“The solution to Trump is not psychological name-calling, it’s political action,” Allen Frances, former chair of the department of psychiatry at Duke, told BuzzFeed News.

COMMENT:  And that, of course, is the point.  The Dems couldn't win the election, so they fall back on the old left-wing argument that their opponent is deranged. 

Both Lincoln and Winston Churchill had moments of severe depression – Churchill called it the black dog – but neither man was tossed from office. 

October 24, 2017