Current Events, X

I've repeatedly blathered away on this blog that part of the reason we are approaching the end of democracy & the start of authoritarianism is that as we watch our slow march along to it we think we're watching a movie, but until the Charlie Kirk murder today I'd never really thought that the actors in this movie thought they were in a movie too - not in a "all political people are bullshit actors" way, but in a "they assume there's no REAL consequences" way.

I don’t want anyone dying but this is what happens when you play in that game of fueling incitement while demanding an absolute devotion to guns; just like the UnitedHealthcare guy, it’s fun being an asshole when it’s all Swedish bikini teams & yachts but guess what you’re not in a fucking movie, you’re dealing with real people.- XMASTIME

And so what do we know about Trump during his Venezuela invasion? Well gee, wouldn't you just know it:

When he called into “Fox & Friends” on Saturday morning, Trump gave his own work an unsurprising rave review, enthusing that he “watched it like a television show”.

If there’s anything the president loves more than creating a spectacle, it’s getting to cheer it on as a spectator.

In his statement to House Republicans on Tuesday, the president sounded like a critic offering blurbs for a movie poster, speaking in sentence fragments (“You know, people are saying it’s — it goes down with one of the most incred —”), setting the scene with a flourish (“The electricity for almost the entire country was boom, turned off”) and employing a dehumanizing shorthand to keep the focus on him. (“Nobody was killed. And on the other side, a lot of people were killed.”

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