Political Theatre category archive

Jay Bookman wonders why the message of the market doesn’t resonate with the Republican Party:

But Mitt Romney, for all his faults, is not the problem. His campaign team is not the problem. . . .

The problem is not the salesman. The problem is the product that he is attempting to peddle.

Remember, if they lose again this year, the Republican presidential candidate will have won a plurality of votes just once in the last six cycles, dating all the way back to 1992. That sole victory was itself an historic anomaly, with George W. Bush riding the patriotic post-9/11 wave to a very narrow two-point margin over John Kerry in 2004. The market is trying to tell them something.

Two words explain the falling value of the GOP’s stock: Southern. Strategy.

They are running out of bigots.

Afterthought:

Not long ago, I saw a vehicle with one of those “Don’t Re-Nig” bumper stickers. “Okay,” I said to myself, “a racist.”

The racist part did not surprise me. The advertising-the-racism did, mildly. Generally, even racists try to hide it in public these days, and the bumper sticker is somewhat more overt than the more common act of plastering the vehicle with the stars and bars.

Recently, a reader of Leonard Pitts, Jr., also saw one of those bumper stickers and wrote Mr. Pitts about it. Pitts addressed it in his column. A snippet:

When he was asked about that bumper sticker, Billy Smith of Ludowici, Ga., who manufactured it with his wife Paula told a reporter: “We didn’t mean it in a racist way.” The driver of that car would likely have said the same.

But they do not lie for our benefit. They lie to conscience — and to self.

At Asia Times, Stephen Zune wonders why Americans are surprised when Muslim extremists rise take American wingnut bait. He argues that anyone who pays attention should not be.

. . . It seems bizarre that right-wing pundits would be so desperate to use the recent anti-American protests in the Middle East – in most cases numbering only a few hundred people and (except for a peaceful Hezbollah-organized rally in Lebanon) in no cases numbering more than two or three thousand – as somehow indicative of why the United States should oppose greater democracy in the Middle East.

(snip)

What incited many of the protests was an outrageously offensive anti-Islamic movie produced by Christian extremists in California, but there is a lot more to the protests than this triggering event.

For years, the Christian right and Islamic right have sought to provoke extremism and hatred as part of an effort to seemingly validate the stereotypes of the other.

Via the Booman.

Queen Anntoinette and her court.

See David Corn’s answer:

In other news, Connie Schultz has a wonder:

I ask you also to consider what it must have felt like to be a server in that room. Imagine what it must have felt like to be those hourly wage earners listening to a presidential candidate depict them as lazy. Now multiply them by millions.

Elections are won and lost; candidates come and go. But Americans across the country, like those servers, will continue to put up with the Romneys of the world, because they have to. His attack is personal to them, as it should be to any of us who come from the working class.

Shorter Deep Geek:

If your vote didn’t matter, the Republicans wouldn’t be working so hard to keep you from the polls.

Via First Draft.

Via Bob Cesca.

Devastating.

Via TPM.

Mitt the Flip goes Pee Wee Herman.

To answer the little girl’s question, because hate sells.

Via Contradict Me.

If there is indeed a place for Twitter, it’s delivering one-liners like this:

Hey girl, let’s make our own secret tape! You hold the camera while I make fun of poor people.

— Paul Ryan Gosling (@PaulRyanGosling) September 18, 2012

At Psychology Today blogs, Steven Reiss tries to understand why Mitt Flips so many gaffes and missteps. He finds a possible answer in the obscure concept of “self-hugging,” the assumption that one’s own values are the best, not just for oneself, but for everyone else.

A nugget from the post:

When he is self-hugging, Romney tells people how wealthy he is to impress them. He is slow to realize when he is with people who don’t value status as highly as he does. It is human nature to expect others to be impressed by assertions of our values. Of course, Romney has learned to control his natural tendencies, and act humble at times. But under stress people go back to who they really are. Mitt Romney is a person who values status; that is, he wants to be respected based on social standing.

Romney’s other value is himself. When he self-hugs what I call the need for acceptance, he projects overconfidence. Self-hugging a very weak need for acceptance makes people blind when others see them as overconfident. He tells us, “I’ll fix the economy ,” and is blind to his need to explain how.

Read the rest. It’s not pretty.

Neither is Dick Destiny’s analysis of Mitt the Flip’s appeal.

It libels Thurston Howell III.

Details at the link.