Political Theatre category archive

Wade Gilley has had enough.

I can’t say that I agree with him wholeheartedly, but I share his thoughts about the paid-by-the-puff opinionaters on my telly vision.

Despite what you read on the internet, it is not true that, if you raise the heat slowly, a frog will allow you to boil it to death. When it gets uncomfortable, the frog will flee.

Nevertheless, Shaun Mullen could not resist toadying up to that moldy metaphor.

Shaun Mullen has the latest.

Using recent news stories about Elizabeth Warren as a springboard, Tony Norman accuses the press of malpractice for using “likeability,” rather than competence, knowledge, and ability (just to pick a few) to judge candidates for political office. Here’s an excerpt:

Weighing in on Ms. Warren’s so-called “likability” was the same kind of media malpractice that helped saddle us with the Trump presidency. Despite knowing little-to-nothing about government, Mr. Trump was routinely considered “likable” and Mrs. Clinton “unlikable” in 2016, which in itself should be grounds to retire the question forever.

PoliticalProf notes that some are asking by Donald Trump’s speech tonight will be on television, when President Obama’s speech about immigration was. He offers a reason:

But the answer is obvious. Donald Trump makes the media money.

This is actually the key point about Trump’s second-act life – roughly everything from the moment his Atlantic City casino collapsed in bankruptcy. From that moment on, Donald Trump has mostly been a tool, a product marketed by others to make themselves money.

Trump wasn’t the boss on The Apprentice. Mark Burnett was. Trump doesn’t build anything. He licenses his name for others to use when they’re building a thing.

More at the link.

Lenard Pitts, Jr., explains.

The Las Vegas Sun editorial board goes on a stroll.

It is twilight in America.

Dick Polman is not sanguine. A snippet (emphasis added):

Theodore Roosevelt, who died 100 years ago yesterday, famously declared that dissent was a citizen’s duty: “To announce that there must be no criticism of the president, or that we are to stand by the president right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public…It is unpatriotic not to oppose him to the exact extent that, by inefficiency or otherwise, he fails in his duty to stand by the country.”

Thank you, Teddy. Because today we have a massive failure, by inefficiency or otherwise. Today we have a perilous government shutdown that crystallizes everything about Donald Trump that everyone with an ounce of cognitive intellect warned about three years ago. I feel compelled, as a patriot, to point out that what we are now witnessing is an unprecedentedly toxic mix of narcissism and ignorance. Goaded by right-wing media cranks to conflate the phony wall issue into a national crisis, he is stripping 800,000 people of their paychecks and threatening much broader economic damage.

Using the Wall Street Journal’s recent scathing editorial as a springboard, Will Bunch considers the Donald’s Trumpeting of Russian propaganda regarding Russia’s invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. After expressing surprise that Donald Trump was paying attention to international relations at the time, Bunch goes on to add context:

But now here’s where it gets much, much weirder — and much more disturbing. Because it turns out there is one prominent set of voices who — just in the last few months — started making the argument that the USSR was right to send those troops into Afghanistan, an action that even Russian higher-ups have conceded even before the USSR’s 1991 collapse was a horrible mistake, politically and morally.

That would be Vladimir Putin and his allies in the Russian government.

Follow the link for the rest.