☃️ Treason Greetings !!! ☃️

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Jimmy Fallon just utilized his AMAZING Springsteen impersonation to give us all our new favorite Christmas anthem:

"Robert Mueller is Comin' to Town"! This is GOLD!

 

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TONIGHT: Treason's Greetings from the Late Show!

Stephen's feeling especially merry thanks to the news of Michael Flynn's guilty plea. #LSSC

 

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The creep of The Nutcracker

Now that the holidays are upon us and the productions of The Nutcracker balletare coming hard and fast, it's time to ask that age old question: What the hell is going on with Godfather Drosselmeyer?

The Nutcracker has always been a story about a young girl's journey into adulthood and sexual maturity, and as Drosselmeyer creeps around the stage this year, . . . in the wake of Harvey Weinstein and Roy Moore, he reminds us that the journey has always been fraught.


If you haven't seen The Nutcracker in a while or have only absorbed bits of it through commercials playing Tchaikovsky's "Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy" on infinite loop, the story goes like this: It's Christmas Eve at the Stahlbaum home, and daughter Clara makes herself useful preparing for a party, while her younger brother Fritz, who nowadays would clearly Z

"A hundred times," Hoffman writes, "she thought of telling what had happened, to her mother, or to Luise, or at least to Fritz; but she asked herself, 'Will any of them believe me?'" Finally she withdraws into herself, which only warrants further criticism: "nstead of playing as she used to do, she would sit still and silent, her thoughts far away, till everybody faulted her for being a little dreamer."

It was a similar form of manipulation that caused the actress and director Asia Argento to describe her encounters with Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein as "a scary fairy tale" and "a nightmare" in the story that initially exposed decades of Weinstein's abuse. Weinstein so thoroughly warped her perspectives of herself and their encounters, said Argento, that he began to "sound like he was my friend and he really appreciated me." One of failed Republican Senate candidate Roy Moore's accusers claimed he pushed her out of the car, saying: "You are a child. I am the district attorney of Etowah County. If you tell anyone about this, no one will believe you." He was almost certainly right.

In these cases, as in so many others that have come to light in recent weeks, we find similar differentials of power, age, and authority, leading women to keep quiet about what happened to them or even to adopt their abuser's account. As another of Weinstein's victims noted, "I just put it in a part of my brain and closed the door." Drosselmeyer may not be a sexual predator, but he exactly follows the sexual predator's script.

This matters because souvenir nutcrackers and swords are not the only things our children take home at the end of the show. For Clara as for The Nutcracker's young audiences, the journey to the Land of Sweets and back offers a magical glimpse of adulthood even as it raises suspicions about that vision. How much of it is Clara's? How much does Drosselmeyer produce by manipulating his machines or shaping Clara's imagination of herself? Drosselmeyer should disturb us not because he is aberrant, but because he enacts in sugar-plum form the strategies that men have long used to manage and control female sexuality.

Rather than a reason to run for the exits, however, I'd suggest that this could be one of The Nutcracker's redeeming qualities. Art has a remarkable power to make the familiar strange and allow us to see it anew — an effect Bertolt Brecht called verfremdung, or "alienation." Hoffman's nutcracker tale is strange, yet familiar, in exactly this way, especially as Clara internalizes the disbelief she encounters when she tries to tell her story.

A Nutcracker production that forced us to reckon with Drosselmeyer's true power would also allow us to consider what it would mean for Clara, or many Claras, to take it back. While Drosselmeyer is a master of gears and springs, after all, his real hold over Clara comes from understanding that everyone, including herself, will trust his account of her experience more than her own.

That's a hard nut, but it is ready to be cracked.

http://theweek.com/articles/742908/creep-nutcracker

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The impeachment carol

 

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Patrick Chappatte Copyright 2017 Cagle Cartoons

 

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Milt Priggee, Copyright 2017 Cagle Cartoons Copyright 2017 Cagle Cartoons

 

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R. J. Matson Copyright 2017 Cagle Cartoons

 

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Marian Kamensky Copyright 2017 Cagle Cartoons

 

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Mike Luckovich Copyright 2017 Creators Syndicate

 

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I wish you a Mueller Christmas
I wish you a Mueller Christmas
I wish you a Mueller Christmas
An indictments next year!‍♀️

 

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Chan Lowe Copyright 2018 Tribune Content Agency

 

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Treason bells ring, are you listening.

In the court, subpoenas glistening.

A beautiful sight,
impeachment tonight.
Walking in a Mueller Wonderland.

Gone away, is the villain.
The wave of Justice is appealing.
We face unafraid the debt he will pay,
walking in a Mueller Wonderland

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Chris Britt Copyright 2018 Creators Syndicate

 

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