Political Theatre category archive

Original intent.

What Atrios said.

Plus, also.

Via C&L.

Via Job’s Anger.

Words fail me.

Job’s Anger travels the world rounding up editorial cartoons about Donald Trump.

Bad Tux excoriates the “on the one hand on the other hand” punditocracy’s efforts to paint Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders as somehow equivalent or, at least, opposite sides of the same coin of disaffection.

So, a centrist blogger tried to say that Donald Trump is pretty much just the Republican version of Bernie Sanders, an outsider who is running on the fact that the game is rigged.

Uhm, no.

Follow the link to see why Bad Tux said that.

Note that not just “centrist bloggers” have been ploughing that furrow.

Whatever the panelists think of Trump and Republicanism in general, they seem to agree that Paul Ryan is in a less than desirable position.

Via C&L.

Rachel Maddow reflects on what’s new about the Trumpling of the Republican Party.

Via Kos.

Leonid Bershidkey argues that Presidential politics has become a night at the improv.

Driftglass:

Trump is God’s way of saying, “Liberals were right all along.”

Ed, at Gin and Tacos, citing the work of Philip Converse, posits five (not the usual two: left and right) types of voters. A nugget:

The final group is where things get ugly. Converse labeled them NIC: No Issue Content. These people have a party they identify with but cannot explain what it stands for. They have opinion, but opinions with “no shred of policy significance whatever.” They like individual candidates based on their personal attributes and they have no substantive understanding of any policy issue, so the ideas they appear to support can appear quite random and perplexing to the observer in aggregate.

Re-read that last sentence. Does that sound familiar?

The most incredible thing about the Trump campaign from an academic/political science perspective is that we have the rare opportunity to observe a major party campaign with no ideological content whatsoever.

Read it.

Targeted frolics.

Today, my local rag’s editorial consists entirely of quotations from Donald Trump.

It is a parade of poisonous puerile petulance.

Dick Polman foresees the next round of “On the One Hand, On the Other Hand”:

On NBC News the other night, anchorman Lester Holt reported that Donald Trump was pivoting to a more presidential image. In the measured tones that we commonly associate with “objectivity,” Holt said: “Trump’s comments appear to signal a more moderate shift…”

When I heard that, I sighed to myself, “Right on schedule. The normalization of Trump has begun.”

(snip)

That one candidate, regardess of how anyone might feel about her policies, has the demonstrable experience and qualifications to run the world’s preeminent superpower; and that the other candidate, by dint of his temperament, his zero public service experience, and his racism, xenophobia, and misogyny, is manifestly unfit.

Everything in that paragraph is factually incontestable. But most of the reporters, hewing to traditional standards, will pretend otherwise. They will be compelled to find “balance” – or, as we more accurately call it these days, “false equivalence.” And as evidenced by the episodes I quoted earlier, they’re already doing it. Their implicit mission is to place both candidates on the same plane. Their ’16 mission, in the brilliant words of one analyst, is “to make it Coca-Cola versus Pepsi, instead of Coca-Cola versus sewer water.”

Follow the link for more.

Afterthought:

Well, that answers the question at the end of the previous post.