Political Theatre category archive

In an effort to improve its “messaging,” the Republican National Committee goes for the obvious solution: Fewer messages.

Dick Polman comments:

The Republican National Committee thinks the cure to the party’s ills (five popular vote defeats in the last six elections) is to ensure that viewers see the candidates far less often, and that the candidates be exposed far less often to potentially adversarial questions. Accordingly, RNC members decreed last Friday that the ’16 candidates shall participate only in debates sanctioned by the RNC. The ’12 candidates debated each other 20 times; the aim is to cut that number in half.

In other words, they are putting the pig back in the poke.

More at the link.

Marco Rubio has decided that he’s presidential timber. The Rude One spots the indicators.

And how can you tell he’s ready? Because Marco Rubio talked about complex issues like a brain-damaged Twitchy commenter. “I think a president has to have a clear vision of where the country needs to go and clear ideas about how to get it there,” he told ABC combover Jonathan Karl.

Follow the link for in-depth rudeness.

Afterthought:

Of course Rubio’s ready to be president. As Republicans do not actually believe in governance, no qualifications are needed, now, are they?

Daniel Ruth marvels that ignorance has become a career path.

This (climate change denial–ed.) isn’t entirely a new phenomenon. Since the first John Birchers proudly wore their Franklin Roosevelt Is a Bolshevik hair shirts, addled skeptics have questioned scientific evidence — from believing fluoride destroys our bodies, to insisting vaccinations cause autism, to the notion global warming is a left-wing fad. But these folks were largely consigned to the lunatic fringe of moon howlers.

Today, they get syndication deals.

Tracy Rubin, who probably knows more about the Middle East than any other reporter, finds the scam in the scamdal:

Here’s the real Benghazi scandal: Republicans have turned the deaths of four brave Americans into a campaign tool to galvanize their base.

Eight congressional investigations, along with an independent review board, have laid out the facts about the 2012 attack on the U.S. consulate. There have been 13 public hearings, the release of 25,000 pages of documents, and 50 briefings on the security failures that led to the deaths of Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans. None offered a shred of evidence that White House political considerations led to their deaths.

Yet last week, as we head into campaign season, House Republicans voted to waste more taxpayer money on a new special Select Committee on Benghazi.

Read the rest.

Truth and governance matter not to the Republican Party. Power and theatre are their only concerns.

If that means that they dance on the graves of patriots, they dance on the graves of patriots.

Shaun Mullen wonders what Republicans will have to show the electorate in 2016.

Republicans have plenty going for them — their own television news network (Fox) and their own court (The Supremes), as well as a depressing number of people who will drink whatever reality-absent Kool Aid the party pours down their throats.

The party’s big problem in 2016 is that it doesn’t have another Romney. This is because the potential presidential candidates most likely to be appealing to the mainstream are Jeb Bush, who has a surname problem (this despite what some folks naïvely view as Hillary’s own surname problem), and Chris Christie, who has a corruption problem (he is so dishonest that he reminds me of an old school big city Democratic power broker and so dumb that he has driven the wealthiest state in the union to the brink of bankruptcy). So, we can forget about either being anointed the GOP standard bearer.

If Shaun is correct and not having another Romney is their big problem, they are indeed in trouble.

Much more at the link.

Hoist on his own teatard.

It mystifies me, not just as a news junkie, but also as a human being and ex-married person, how anyone could seriously propose that any member of the Clinton family would be in favor of, let alone promote and delight in, reliving the Lewinsky story.

Our public discourse has become a colossus of salacious stupid moderated by the stupidly salacious.

Via Delaware Liberal.

Foxy twits.

Twitter is a colossal waste of electrons.

As Will Bunch points out, some bodies seem to count more than others.

The default position of the resident curmudgeon at my local rag is that “other people can’t have nice things.” Rarely–only very occasionally–does she deviate.

Generally, though, when she tackles a public issue, the conclusion is forgone. Only the path to it is in question.

This time, it’s about children who want an education.

Ta-Nehisi Coates argues that we need a better class of racists.

The problem with Cliven Bundy isn’t that he is a racist but that he is an oafish racist. He invokes the crudest stereotypes, like cotton picking. This makes white people feel bad. The elegant racist knows how to injure non-white people while never summoning the specter of white guilt. Elegant racism requires plausible deniability, as when Reagan just happened to stumble into the Neshoba County fair and mention state’s rights. Oafish racism leaves no escape hatch, as when Trent Lott praised Strom Thurmond’s singularly segregationist candidacy.

Elegant racism is invisible, supple, and enduring. It disguises itself in the national vocabulary, avoids epithets and didacticism. Grace is the singular marker of elegant racism. One should never underestimate the touch needed to, say, injure the voting rights of black people without ever saying their names. Elegant racism lives at the border of white shame. Elegant racism was the poll tax. Elegant racism is voter-ID laws.

Tony Norman notices something.

Because modern racists lack the courage of their convictions, racism has retreated into the shadows where it only emerges in the form of faux pas. Like so many things in American life, racism has been dumbed down and sissified, but it is still very much with us.

There was a time when racism was this nation’s greatest export. As Richard Pryor once said, immigrants would come to this country and not know a word of English except the “n-word,” which usually made them feel like full-fledged Americans the first time they used it. They at least had black folks to look down on after leaving the old country.

These days, the conservative majority of the U.S. Supreme Court insist that racism is no longer a factor in American life. Sure, that’s incredibly ignorant and racist — but it’s the sneaky kind of racism that’s in vogue today. The justices know better, but they’re interpreting law in these mean and congenitally stupid times.

Even Photoshopped images of the first family as monkeys, or rows of watermelon patches on the White House lawn, are considered more tasteless than racist by the conservative apparatchiks who pass them around in email chain letters. After all, everyone knows racism is dead . . . .

Remember this: When bigots complain about “political correctness,” what they mean is that they can no longer wave their bigot flags without someone calling them out.

Warning: Language.

Bruce Ackerman fears that the arc of moral justice cited by Martin Luther King, Jr., in one of his most famous quotations, is in retreat.

. . . the arc of justice is now once again in sharp decline, during America’s Second Gilded Age.

The Supreme Court is playing a leading role in this act of betrayal. Just as the 19th century court struck down the Civil Rights Act of 1875, which would have banned discrimination in public accommodations and transportation, the Roberts court has struck down key provisions of the modern Voting Rights Act. What is more, it keeps chipping away at other basic principles established during the civil rights era, as in last week’s decision on affirmative action in university admissions. If these dynamics continue, the annual celebration of Martin Luther King Day will turn into a tragic recital of his lost legacy.

The San Jose Mercury-News reports that house flipping is making a comeback, no doubt because it worked out so well the last time.