Here’s another story on the deep weirdness of Mike Johnson, although it’s about his wife. Kelly Johnson for years has run some kind of “Christian counseling service” that is partly based on the writings of Hippocrates.
Kelly Johnson’s website listed a specialty in Temperament counseling, a specialty that she received training for from an organization founded in the 1980s by a Christian couple. According to the materials the organization provides, the National Christian Counselor’s Association is adamant that its offerings take place outside of more traditional state-licensed settings so that counselors and clients can be fully engaged through their faith.
“The state licensed professional counselor in certain states is forbidden to pray, read or refer to the Holy Scriptures, counsel against things such as homosexuality, abortion, etc,” a catalog of the organization’s offerings states. “Initiating such counsel could be considered unethical by the state.”
The temperament-based approach breaks people down into five types: Melancholy, Choleric, Sanguine, Supine, and Phlegmatic. Richard and Phyllis Arno, who established a test to identify people’s temperament, founded the National Christian Counselors Association in the early 1980s. They and their advocates prefer the term temperament over personalities as the term personality is characterized as a “mask” while temperaments are “inborn” and thus inherent to each individual regardless of outside influences such as parenting. Their work is largely based on Hippocrates’ view that there were four temperaments.
Does she know that Hippocrates wasn’t a Christian? Anyway, the website was taken down shortly after MAGA Mike became speaker. For more about how the forced-birth movement seems to have adopted Hiipocrates as one of their own, see The Shadow Medical Community Behind the Attempt to Ban Medication Abortion at The Intercept.
US District Judge Tanya Chutkan has reinstated Trump’s gag order.
Trump responded by attacking Attorney General Bill Barr, a potential witness in the case, while continuing his public assault on Chutkan.
Chutkan, who is overseeing the federal election interference case, reinstated a partial gag order that had been approved then temporarily appealed in October as Justice Department prosecutors and Trump’s legal team debated the First Amendment grounds of the order. Trump took to Truth Social barely an hour later to attack the judge and former Attorney General Bill Barr, a potential witness in the case.
“I called Bill Barr Dumb, Weak, Slow Moving, Lethargic, Gutless, and Lazy, a RINO WHO COULDN’T DO THE JOB. He just didn’t want to be Impeached, which the Radical Left Lunatics were preparing to do,” Trump wrote just 75 minutes after the gag order was reinstated. “Bill Barr is a LOSER!”
Your move, Judge Chutkan.
The most interesting thing I saw this morning is this item from the New York Times, How Trump’s Verbal Slips Could Weaken His Attacks on Biden’s Age. I apologize that I’m out of gift articles for the month. This article is arguing that Trump is making more verbal gaffes than usual, and that this may be a sign of deterioration of some sort. I don’t know that I’m taking this very seriously, as his head was never screwed on all the way as near as I can tell.
Mr. Trump has had a string of unforced gaffes, garble and general disjointedness that go beyond his usual discursive nature, and that his Republican rivals are pointing to as signs of his declining performance.
On Sunday in Sioux City, Iowa, Mr. Trump wrongly thanked supporters of Sioux Falls, a South Dakota town about 75 miles away, correcting himself only after being pulled aside onstage and informed of the error.
It was strikingly similar to a fictional scene that Mr. Trump acted out earlier this month, pretending to be Mr. Biden mistaking Iowa for Idaho and needing an aide to straighten him out.
In recent weeks, Mr. Trump has also told supporters not to vote, and claimed to have defeated President Barack Obama in an election. He has praised the collective intellect of an Iranian-backed militant group that has long been an enemy of both Israel and the United States, and repeatedly mispronounced the name of the armed group that rules Gaza.
He was saying “hummus” instead of “Hamas.” And last week he said Viktor Orban was President of Turkey. Now, again, I don’t know that this is as big a change as the article is letting on, as his spoken diatribes were never exactly what you’d call coherent. And I doubt that his groupies care.