Lobenthal.com

How else would I have heard in 1973 that magnificent performance by 46-year-old African American soprano Leontyne Price singing at the Metropolitan Opera the role of teen-aged Cio Cio San, Japanese heroine of Italian Giaccomo Puccini’s  Madama Butterfly?

Don’t you see Donald J. Trump in the jeune premier repertory?  You know, bounding into the drawing room in white flannels?

That’s just about as absurd as the Trump l’oiel that the corporate media is trying to market to us about his viability as a presidential candidate.

They sold us the myth of GW Bush as truth-teller and Al Gore as fabulist.

They sold us the Iraq War.

They vigorously promoted Trump’s 2016 run and Hilary’s emails.

Now a Trump reprise.

It has got to stop.

and, for one thing, cover up her brawny arms, which she bares at every possible opportunity and apparently thinks we need to see whatever the season, occasion, or temperature. Her total lack of taste registers as a visual analogue to her insanity.

The idea that MTG would dare lecture anyone about how to dress is sheer MAGA: an attack on every kind of propriety, an onslaught of hypocricy and audacity leveled at actuality. They want to drag America down to their level.

Will the corporate media report what happened?

The idea that Haley is any kind of a moderate is just absurd.

Apparently, they were getting under his orange skin, so, of course, the Biden campaign stopped airing them. 

Wouldn’t want to hurt the feelings of the treasonous, doddering ex-president, would we?

noticed that Trump speaks in a high-pitched, near-falsetto much of the time, one of the most frequently employed  in the panoply of special vocal effects that he employs.

Is that how he projects “strength” to the country?

The New York Times did everything it could to get Trump elected in 2016 and I guess this time around they’re going to run the same playbook. Mark Sumner at Daily Kos diagrams how their game is being played, while Charles Pierce in Esquire responds to the astounding piece of wish fulfillment that they published yesterday, wherein the reporter attempted to present MAGA pathology as objective fact– pretending that Trump’s appearance and affect was somehow more youthful [?] and confidence-inspiring [?] than Biden’s. “Where was Rebecca O’Brien Davis’ [sic] s brain when she was typing this?” Pierce writes. “And where were the editors to give this avalanche of nonsense the editing that it deserved?”

The sad fact is, Trump looks like an embalmed fairground attraction. His cult following enjoys that, because 1) they have been indoctrinated to respond to politics as spectacle and entertainment, and his bizarre, macabre appearance fits right in with the sideshow, and 2) all the art forms that idealize human behavior have been marginalized, and the corporate entertainment product we’re left with puts a premium on freakiness, and 3)Trump’s dystopic appearance feeds into his cult’s subliminal contempt for him, creating a kind of sympathy-vote appeal.

And there are undoubtedly reasons no 4, no. 5. et. al. none of which are explored by the Times.

The headline to O’Brien’s piece is something about why age is proving less a liability for Trump than Biden. The obvious reason is that the Times and its corporate media affiliates are determined to make Biden’s age, and not Trump’s, a campaign thing.

Why has AG Garland enabled, rather than rooting out, the Trumpian fifth column in the DOJ?

But, corporate media, let’s obsess about what Trump operative Robert Hur had to say about Biden’s memory.