Where Do You Rank on The G Scale?

One of the most famous approaches was a series of questions that was referred to as the "F Scale." Today, CityWatch is proud to present our own contribution to behavioral science with the G Scale, a measure of human gullibility. 

The CWLA G Scale has one question: 

Do you believe that Donald Trump actually meant to say "wouldn't" rather than "would" when he referred to Russian meddling in his Helsinki press conference? 

A Yes answer equates to gullibility. 

It's been an interesting couple of days. Old-line conservative George Will followed up on his previous call for Republicans to vote for Democrats in November. His current column in the Washington Post is pretty remarkable for the post-war era. 

"America’s child president had a play date with a KGB alumnus, who surely enjoyed providing day care. It was a useful, because illuminating, event: Now we shall see how many Republicans retain a capacity for embarrassment." 

And further along, "We shall learn from special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation whether in 2016 there was collusion with Russia by members of the Trump campaign. The world, however, saw in Helsinki something more grave — ongoing collusion between Trump, now in power, and Russia. The collusion is in what Trump says (refusing to back the United States’ intelligence agencies) and in what evidently went unsaid (such as: You ought to stop disrupting Ukraine, downing civilian airliners, attempting to assassinate people abroad using poisons, and so on, and on)." 

Those of a certain age may remember Robert Welch, the founder and long-time leader of the John Birch Society. For younger people, suffice it to say that the JBS was the prototype for extremist anti-communist organizations. Welch is most famous for the following statement about the American president: 

""But my firm belief that Dwight Eisenhower is a dedicated, conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy is based on an accumulation of detailed evidence so extensive and so palpable that it seems to me to put this conviction beyond any reasonable doubt." 

We might with only slight tongue-in-cheek ask, where is Robert Welch now that we need him? There may no longer be an international Soviet conspiracy, but there certainly is an international Russian conspiracy, and Comrade Trump behaves like he is up to his ears in it. 

What's scary is the way that news programs gave air time to Trump's carefully parsed walk-back, as if it were just ordinary news and not the latest chapter in the American disaster that was Comrade Trump's European tour. By contrast, Steven Colbert let it rip the way it needed to rip, and we might consider the following question: If the American republic and its democratic norms are to survive, will it be due to the efforts of the late night comedians? 

Might there some day be a Nobel Peace Prize shared between Colbert and Seth Meyers? 

By the way, the claim that Comrade Trump meant to say "wouldn't" when he absent mindedly said "would" is kind of pathetic. It may be that Trump and his closest advisers didn't initially expect the kind of response that came following his quasi-treason in Helsinki. But when the blowup occurred, they must have tortured their brains trying to find some way -- any way at all -- to concoct deniability, however implausible it would be. Think of a room full of the world's worst comedians desperately trying to come up with something funny, and you probably have got the gist of it. 

My favorite response to the comrade's self-destruction came in the form of one of those internet jokes. In this case, it was a photo of Hillary speaking, and typed in below her were the words, "F'n told you so." 

OK, I slightly expurgated the text, but you get the idea. 

The other amusing riff was a photo captioned, "Proof that Hillary Clinton met with a Russian agent." 

And there was the picture of Clinton and Trump debating.

(Bob Gelfand writes on science, culture, and politics for CityWatch. He can be reached at [email protected])

-cw