Political Theatre category archive

Via BartCop.

As Chauncey Devega demonstrates, a lot:

The story is the thing. As an experiment in perception and framing, I have removed any overt signals to either the race of Trayvon Martin or George Zimmerman. Moreover, I have renamed Trayvon Martin “Dale Hill.” To my eyes and ears this is a very “white” name. I thought about playing around with the genders of Martin and Zimmeran–but parsimony and efficiency ruled out such a counter-factual.

Follow the link for the demonstation. It’s worth your while.

The Commander proposes warning labels for Fox News.

Via BartBlog.

Via Bob Cesca’s Awesome Blog.

Ed Quillen investigates the never-ending stories, pointing out that, when the war is won, the battles continue. A snippet:

For instance, American lakes, rivers and skies are cleaner now than at any time I can remember. That’s a great accomplishment for the environmental movement. But does anybody savor this victory?

No. I get scores of impassioned pleas about saving old-growth forests, preventing potential pipeline leaks, protecting endangered species and reducing atmospheric carbon dioxide. An apocalypse looms unless I send money. And I’m sure that things will keep getting worse, for no matter how much money they get, they’ll always need more.

But right-thinkers are just as likely to avoid victory. To them, the republic is always under attack by sinister forces. When I was in college, marriage was rather unpopular among liberal sorts and often criticized as a form of oppression. And back then, hardly anybody, especially a liberal, wanted to join the military.

But when gay and lesbian groups began agitating for equal rights to marriage and military service, did the right-thinkers celebrate? Have they shouted “Hallelujah, praise the Lord. Even America’s homosexuals have seen the light”? Of course not.

More examples at the link.

Field considers the morphing myths of race and considers the question:

But…but…but…if we do that (stop categorizing persons by skin color–ed.), how will some of us be able to claim to be superior to other people without ever doing anything?

Read it.

Thom and Lizz Winstead consider the creepy right-wing fascination with lady parts, along with some other issues.

Via Bob Cesca’s Awesome Blog.

Via Delaware Liberal.

No doubt Pat Buchanan and his fellow travelers and sycophants will have something portentous to say about this:

For the first time, racial and ethnic minorities make up more than half the children born in the U.S., capping decades of heady immigration growth that is now slowing.

No doubt it will be a typically constructive and even-handed comment.

Also, pigs, wings.

In other news, Jay Bookman anticipates the fuss.

Leonard Pitts, Jr., points out the fallacy of the “both sides do it” claims. A nugget:

It was not Democrats who held the economy hostage in a manufactured debt ceiling crisis that caused the nation’s credit rating to be lowered for the first time in history.

It was not Democrats who voted down their own deficit reduction resolution, apparently because they didn’t want the president to share credit.

It was not a Democratic leader who declared defeating the president his top legislative priority.

No, it was Republicans who did all that. And it is not Democrats who have seen a steady trickle of condemnation and defection by their own appalled members.

PoliticalProf summarizes the history America’s bigotry against immigrants.

A nugget:

• The Puritans hated Quakers and other non-Puritans when such people started coming to America. In time, however, they all became “WASPs”—White Anglo-Saxon Protestants. Or what some people call “Americans.” (Not Politicalprof.)
• WASPs hated Catholics when they — mainly Irish — started in immigrate in large numbers in the 1840s. (Think potato famine.) WASPs started the Know Nothing Party to stop Catholic immigration into America. Now, of course, lots of our presidents have some Irish heritage … including, as it happens, Barack Obama. (And me, were I to become President!)

Hate keeps re-inventing itself in most marvelous ways.

Law enforcement as S&M fantasy come to life–and its fans.

The Booman savages the pundits who claim that me need a new “centrist” party. (Someone, I think Atrios, once defined “centrism” as a position that agrees with that of the pundit advocating it).

A nugget:

The problem with our politics is not that our government isn’t run by some middle of the road consensus between Ben Nelson and Olympia Snowe or Joe Lieberman and John McCain or Lincoln Chafee and Arlen Specter. Our problem is that we have one party that wants to govern but isn’t allowed to, and another party that thinks Newt Gingrich, Michele Bachmann, Herman Cain, and Rick Perry have something meaningful to say. If you honestly think that the Democratic Party is too beholden to the left, you know nothing about politics, here or globally. And if you think the Republican Party, as it exists right now, is capable of responsible governance, then you’re the type of fool who buys swampland off the internet or answers those emails from Nigerian princes.

Scott Herhold recalls getting caught up in bullying a classmate when he was in high school and how, as the years passed, the incident weighed more and more heavily on his mind.

He’s not having any of Mitt the Snip’s professed amnesia over his short-lived career as a barber:

The Republican front-runner has apologized for prep school pranks, but his campaign says he has no memory of the incident involving the gay student, who was kicked out of Cranbrook not long afterward for smoking a cigarette.

From experience, I can guarantee you Romney’s professed lack of memory is a lie (tellingly, the denial came through a campaign spokesman, not from the candidate himself).

Afterthought:

If the Flipper is, indeed, not lying, his ability to dismiss the memory of assaulting a fellow student because he didn’t like the student’s looks is disturbing in and of itself.

As much as I contemn Libertarians for being misty-eyed romantics who delude themselves as to the real-world implications of their beliefs or, more accurately for most “Libertarians,” as Republicans who are ashamed to admit it, this is a good cause.

The ACLU Voting Rights Project and the ACLU of Virginia filed a federal lawsuit on behalf of the Libertarian Party of Virginia, challenging the Virginia law that imposes a state residency requirement on people who circulate ballot petitions.

They deserve a full and fair right to get kicked down the hall at the polls.

A. P. Ticker comments on the campaign to loot “privatize” public education. He’s talking about Philly, but it’s going on everywhere.

Read more here.

Reg Henry, writing at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, gets to the heart of the wingnut fantasy world. (Like most fantasy worlds, this one never existed outside of imagination, but never mind).

A nugget:

Most of my email correspondence comes from feisty old guys apparently driven to agitation by the last rush of testosterone. They have invented an alternative reality for themselves in which liberals are not fellow Americans but the enemy — collectivist-minded, welfare-loving, freedom-hating non-producers who must be despised in the name of all that is good and holy (and old). Never mind that this is all crazy.

In recent years, conservatives have not just been yelling for the train of history to stop right here, but to go back down the track to the station known as 1788, not stopping at the stations for the 19th or 20th centuries where vital lessons could be learned about how a nation grew to maturity as the greatest power and influence in the world.

No, we can only be free if we return to the Garden of (American) Eden, the republic as the Founding Fathers envisaged it when they ratified the Constitution.

Mind you, this is not the Constitution as others understand it, but the one that conforms to the conservative dreamscape of an America of independent farmers and musket-toters in which you don’t need the government to give your vehicle (a horse) an emissions inspection sticker.