Scum: The American president is tedious in the extreme. At the NATO summit in Ankara, he has returned to his name-calling ways, this time lambasting Britain but above all socialist-run Spain for failing to help him in his war against Iran, rekindled with a new volley of White House insults. He labeled the Iranian leadership as “scum,” a word an American president has never used publicly to describe the rulers of another nation, and called its negotiators “liars,” “sick people,” and part of a “cancer” in need of excising, which Iran ironically rebuked by saying the president was behaving as he had with FIFA, changing rules to suit himself. During the Revolutionary period, John Adams, among the signers of the “Declaration of Independence,” worried openly if the new nation in the offing, its wealthy elite still comprising slaveholders, could live up to the virtues spelled out in its founding documents. He frankly doubted it, perhaps fearing the eventual ascent of a haughty leader who would refer to his adversaries as scum and cancerous without first pausing to look at himself in the mirror.