Political Theatre category archive

Shaun Mullen prepares for the inferno infernal with a snack of milquetoast and a Graham cracker.

Rachel comments on the carousel of confessions.

In the first portion of the video, she reads a portion of the transcript of the proceedings. If you listen to nothing else, listen to that for insight on what actually happens in court.

Via Juanita Jean.

Bob Cesca interviews Dr. Nancy MacLean, professor of history at Duke University. In the conversation, they do a deep dive into the Koch Brothers’ ideology and, in particular, Charles Koch’s long-term effort to remake the United States into a place where John C. Calhoun would be happy.*

Pop it into your podplayer and listen to it the first time you get a chance. You’ll be [ gl | s ]ad you did.

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*That reference will be made clear by the time you are 10 minutes in

Bobby Azarian asserts that one technique that keeps Trump supporters and the right-wing in their bubble is gaslighting; he also suggests that they are willingly receptive to being gaslighted. The piece is worth a quick read.

Here’s a snippet from his piece.

Gaslighting is a tactic commonly used by sociopaths and narcissists, so perhaps such behavior should be expected from Trump, who has been described as having narcissistic personality disorder and symptoms of sociopathy from a number of clinicians and research psychologists.

From the apparent lack of resistance or questioning from Trump supporters, the president’s gaslighting is clearly working, and he knows it. So what can be done to inoculate against this potent psychological maneuver? Well, first off, one must become aware of gaslighting in order to recognize the manipulation. Once you know it exists, it becomes easier to hold on to your reality when you feel confident in what you hold to be true.

Jay Bookman marvels at the right-wing fixation on conspiracies to rationalize why their ideas have not conquered the discourse and their candidates are doing poorly.

Aside:

Persons will go to great lengths to avoid admitting, even to themselves, that they are just plain flat-out wrong.

Via Job’s Anger.

(Broken link fixed.)

You can’t make this stuff up.

Thom and Greg Palast discuss Palast’s suing Kris Kobach over the Republican gut-out-the-vote effort, as well as Donald Trump’s NAFTA nonsense.

Mike Littvin dissects Donald Trump and his half-staff antics. Here’s how he starts:

Donald Trump blinked. It’s not the first time, nor will it be the last.

He blinked because he’s a bully, and bullies, we were told as kids, are actually cowards – a theory, by the way, that in my experience hasn’t always held true. But in this case, it works perfectly.

And he blinked because — and this may be a bit of a revelation — he apparently actually understands the concept of human decency even if he routinely rejects the concept of practicing it.

Follow the link for the rest. You’ll be glad you did.

. . . is the conviction that there is no such thing as the common good.

Via Job’s Anger.

Kyle Whitmire finds value in the so-called and grossly misnomered “deep state.” A nugget:

When bright and ambitious new elected leaders show up at city hall, or the county courthouse or Capitol Hill, this bloated beast (the bureaucracy–ed.) makes a comfortable place for those naive neophytes and tolerates their theatrics, at least until they start giving orders.

That’s when the intractable bureaucrats dig in.

But there’s an upside to this collective recalcitrance, too.

When the lunatics show up, with their department heads, cabinet leaders and other assorted sycophants — that’s when bureaucracy saves us from ourselves. When our political parties turn into religious cults, the bureaucracy doesn’t care. It just keeps doing what it’s always done.

Fakebook frolics.

Of course, part of the problem is that far too many persons suspend their brains when they should be suspending their computers.