Political Theatre category archive
A Toxic Environment 0
Warning: Language
“So Much Winning . . . .” 0
Josh Marshall announces the winners of The 2017 Golden Dukes awards.
The Six Styles of Trump 0
Continuing in a numerical vein, I commend Steve Yetiv’s enumeration of six perspectives on Donald Trump to your attention. Here’s a couple:
Loopy Trump: This perspective offers a different story. It is about Trump’s mentality. It asks us to see Trump as both insecure and overconfident (“I know more about ISIS than the generals do”), narcissistic (“I alone can fix it”), hyper-sensitive (tit-for-tat Twitter fights), sometimes crazy, and prone to ego-driven fiascos. His tweets and actions are more impetuous and infantile than strategic, suggesting that he may drag America down. . . .
Follow the link. Collect the complete set.
The Five Legs of a Trumpled Stool 0
Bobby Azarian analyzes the news and suggests five psychological traits that characterize Donald Trump’s core supporters.
Note that these are technical terms and may not necessarily mean what they would in normal parlance. For example, “relative deprivation” does not mean that some is deprived; rather, it means that he or she thinks he or she is deprived relative to some other group (say, for example, black folks or millennials, whatever they are).
Here’s the thumbnail; follow the link for a discussion of each one.
- 1. Authoritarian Personality Syndrome
- 2. Social dominance orientation
- 3. Prejudice
- 4. Intergroup contact
- 5. Relative deprivation
No Laughing Matter 0
At Psychology Today Blogs, Scott Weems argues that Donald Trump can’t tell a joke. (Of course, he can’t take a joke, either, but that is an entirely other matter.)
The Greatest Snow Job on Earth! 0
At The Hartford Courant, Jennifer Tucker assesses the similarities and differences between P. T. Barnum and Donald Trump. Here’s two differences (emphasis added):
Even more notably, Barnum cited truth-telling as a necessary condition for success in business: “Let your pledged word be sacred,” he wrote, since “Nothing is more valuable to a man in business than the name of always doing as he agrees.”
Follow the link for the similarities.
The Court Is in Sessions, “Useless Eaters” Dept. 0
This is a pile of vile.
Political Fallout 0
I have a brown leather vest that I truly like to wear in lieu of a jacket on mild days.
Now, thanks to “Judge” Roy Moore, I am ashamed to be seen in it.
The Singularity 0
Robert Reich argues that Donald Trump is like no other president. A snippet:
I beg to differ.
America has had its share of crooks (Warren G. Harding, Richard Nixon), bigots (Andrew Jackson, James Buchanan) and incompetents (Andrew Johnson, George W. Bush). But never before Donald Trump have we had a president who combined all of these nefarious qualities.
“The Conscience of a Conservative” 0
At AL.com, Clete Wetli argues that that phrase is an oxymoron. Here’s a bit; follow the link for the whole piece.
It is no accident that it has become the safe harbor for white supremacists and religious zealots.