Political Theatre category archive

Shaun Mullen looks back on this week in crazy.

PoliticalProf.

Sasha Abramsky sees something familiar and yet jarringly dissimilar in the Trumpling. She suggests that it is similar to punk rock, morphed into punk rot.

Yet punk was a revolt from below, a class-conscious, if nihilist, rage against the machine. It was, noted John Lydon – aka Johnny Rotten – in a 2016 interview with Lower Class Magazine, about overturning age-old class and wealth hierarchies. “One percent run the world,” Lydon continued in that interview. “One lousy percent run everything! Surely that has to change.”

Trump’s, by contrast, is faux-nihilism from above, the spectacle masking the plutocratic content. It is a grotesque rage of the haves against the have-nots, the moguls against the prols.

Much more at the link.

Blocked for committing facts.

One of the characteristics of Special Counsel’s Mueller’s investigation has been the absence of leaks. The team, all experienced investigators, knows how to keep its collective mouth shut. (That’s why you haven’t seen much about the investigation here; I don’t care much for speculation and there’s been little in the way of facts about what’s going on behind the Mueller curtain.)

So who was responsible for yesterday’s leak of topics that that team wishes to address with Donald Trump?

At Above the Law, Elie Mystal makes a coherent argument that Donald Trump’s lawyers are engineered the leak. Here’s a bit of his reasoning:

My theory is that if this is deposition prep that Trump’s lawyers leaked it to the press to make Trump FOCUS. As we know, Trump doesn’t read and he doesn’t study. He gets nearly all of his information from television. Leaking these questions is both a way to warn Trump that he is not at all ready to sit down and talk to Mueller (something he allegedly still wants to do) and has the benefit of at least getting Trump to see these questions that he’s probably never looked at even though Dowd’s document has probably been floating around the White House for months. The lawyers are trying to manage their client through the media, and that’s why these questions are out.

Aside:

I admit this is speculation, despite what I said above, but I’ve read enough of Mystal’s writing to respect his reasoning.

Thom muses on the furor over the White House press corps dinner and offers his opinion as to what Michelle Wolf said that most angered the media minions.

If the embed doesn’t work, click this link. I do not know what’s going on with the embeds–it may just be one of my machines, but too cautious is better than not cautious enough.

Investigatory frolics.

Aside:

Frankly, I sympathize with the frolicker, but I believe that he forgot, as many do, that the internet is a public place, and one should comport oneself accordingly.

PoliticalProf explains why the White House press corps was shocked–shocked! I say–that someone dared commit humor at their little insider party.

Robert Redford has penned a scathing indictment of Scott Pruitt’s malfeasance. A nugget:

These seemingly daily revelations (of self-dealing and corruption–ed.) dominate the headlines. But Pruitt’s failings in ethics and judgment are only part of a much larger problem: Pruitt has failed at the core responsibility of his job.

He’s not protecting the environment. Pruitt has become a one-man public-health risk to the air we breathe, the water we drink and the food we eat. From day one, he has worked to gut the EPA and hamstring its ability to protect the environment and public health. He works on behalf of the fossil-fuel industry and other industrial polluters, not the American people. That’s the greatest scandal – and the reason, first and foremost, he’s got to go.