Political Theatre category archive

Via Bob Cesca’s Awesome Blog.

Scott Maxwell:

Did you see where a former porn star is running for the School Board in Palm Beach County? Hmmm. The more you think about it, there are a lot of similarities between porn stars and politicians. Both prostitute themselves for money. Both love to perform for the cameras. And both fake it a lot.

One difference: Porn stars do it on the table, not under it.

Learn more about the planning sessions here.

At Asia Times, Spengler considers why American adventurism in the Middle East was doomed. I can’t say that I agree with all his “they should have done this instead” retrospections; I do think the article contains many accurate observations about what went wrong and why. It is worth a read. Here’s a bit from the introduction:

The United States has misunderstood everyone in the world outside its borders and mismanaged everything. It has done so with a bipartisan consensus so broad and deep that it has no opposition except simple-minded isolationism. America gets unwanted results — most recently in Iraq – because it wants the wrong things in the first place. And there seems to be no way to persuade Americans otherwise. The crumbling of the Iraqi state will provide yet another pretext for mutual recriminations among political parties. The trouble is that both parties wanted the wrong thing to begin with.

Both sides don’t do it. Until the punditocracy addresses this honestly and the polity becomes aware, we will continue to be waist deep in the Big Muddy.

Via Zandar.

Via Delaware Liberal, where cassandra_m quotes this bit:

Carol Leifer: “Vote, and get a free bobblehead!”

Richard Clarke: “We do!”

I am too far away from 7th district to know whether Lee Camp is correct, but I know enough about Cantor’s cant to know that claims that he was not wingnut enough are a load of hooey.

Eric Cantor could give lessons in wingnut.

Vivian Paige, pre-eminent local politics blogger, thinks that the punditocracy and the blogosphere are missing the reason that Eric Cantor lost his primary. She writes in my local rag that it was not immigration nor ideological impurity (though the effects that Thoreau predicts may well come to pass because, as someone once said, “reality is what people think”), but rather something much simpler: Cantor’s own inept politicking.

A nugget:

Cantor lost because he forgot one of the cardinal rules of a successful campaign: All politics is local.

(snip)

There are a few complaints of poor constituent services, but the biggest complaint was that Cantor was never around. This was especially the case in some areas that were added to the district after the 2011 redistricting. While the underfunded Brat put in shoe leather, Cantor mailed it in, running his campaign mostly from the Nation’s Capitol, using his fundraising advantage to run ads and send mail.

Read the rest. It is worth your while.

Shaun Mullen tries to figure out why the media continue to be fascinated with and give credence to a person whom my mother would have aptly characterized as “the biggest nothing.” It’s another example of something I mentioned the other day: the “Entertainment-Tonightization” of our political reporting.

A nugget:

There are few, if any, better examples of a resume without a person than Palin, whose sheer vapidity and penchant for making over-the-top declarations; indeed, saying the wrong thing time and again, nevertheless makes her such a magnet for people who are convinced, as she is, that America has gone crazy. (We actually kind of agree here, although for different reasons.)

Read the rest. And weep.

Unfortunately, the fellow who bested him in the primary is even loonier.

Wendell Potter wonders whether the establishment press attended the same Senate hearing as he. A nugget:

If you read the accounts of the hearing in The Washington Post, USA Today, Politico or CBS News — the only news outlets I could find that provided any coverage — you would not have read anything about the $3 billion consumers have saved as a result of the MLR provision or how the law has benefited the Fernandez family.

The focus of all those stories was a brief exchange toward the end of the hearing between Committee Chair Jay Rockefeller, a West Virginia Democrat, and GOP Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin about whether the color of President Obama’s skin might explain why some people are opposed to the law.

In politics news, as in entertainment reporting, it’s all about celeb gossip. In politics news, though, real events, data, and statistics matter, but the gossip is what reporters give us.

Today’s Virginia Republican Party, aided by a turncoat Democrat, could give corruption lessons to Jimmy Hoffa.

Hate-full twits.

Wingnuttery is a vile and loathsome thing.

Via Bob Cesca’s Awesome Blog.

According to James Howard Kunstler, it’s not just a Sherlock Holmes story; it’s life in these United States (as politicians are wont to say) today. A nugget:

That is, first of all, a place of far less influence on everybody else, in a new era of desperate struggle to remain modern. That fading modern world is the house that America built, the great post World War II McMansion stuffed with dubious luxuries in a Las Vegas of the collective mind. History’s bank has foreclosed on it, and all the nations and people of the world have been told to make new arrangements for daily life. The U.S. wants everybody to stay put and act as if nothing has changed.

Do read the rest, especially the to-do list at the end. Frankly, there’s not an item on it that I can take exception to.