Political Theatre category archive

This week, much of Left Blogistan has taken unholy glee in Mitt the Flip’s short career as a barber. Here is an example.

PoliticalProf thinks that focusing on the details of what happened over four decades ago misses the point. He thinks that the intervening four decades carry a lesson of their own:

Which brings me to what I think is the important thing in the Mitt Romney story: I don’t sense the same evolution in him. He dumped a gay adviser not because the guy was a poor adviser, but because the guy’s homosexuality was a political issue. He has told college students not to expect help paying off loans and has noted that the extremely poor in America aren’t to be worried about because they have a social safety net. His stands on contraception and privacy have alienated him from women … and he seems utterly baffled as to why, claiming that his wife is his adviser on women’s issues and that she says all women are concerned by is jobs, not birth control. He jokes with NASCAR fans about knowing team owners, not fans and drivers.

In other words, I don’t sense that Mitt Romney has made much effort in his life to understand or even empathize with people who aren’t like him.

In a characteristically long and detailed post well-supported with citations, Chauncey Devega also sees and considers an empathy deficit. A nugget:

The policies of the Republican Party are demonstrative of a deep deficit in empathy. The poor are surplus people who are “unproductive,” a “drain” on American society, and who leech off of the rich and “normal” Americans. The social safety net should be destroyed as “entitlements” like Social Security and unemployment insurance, encourage laziness and sloth. Support for hungry children, public education, the unemployed, and the poor should be cut to ensure tax cuts for the rich.

(snip)

Mitt Romney, prep school bully of the weak and vulnerable, corporate raider bully who takes pleasure in terminating employees, nominee of a political party of bullies and “real Americans,” and he who wants to be President of the United States, has made it abundantly clear that empathy is not a public virtue to be cultivated or encouraged.

Read both posts in full. Though conceived and published separately, they complement each other most eerily.

It is really all for show.

In my local rag, Darryl Lease has fun with Michelle Bachmann’s short-lived fling with Swiss citizenship:

As you might expect from the intellectual leader of the tea party movement, Bachmann wasn’t entirely clear about how or why she pursued citizenship in a notoriously socialist country.

The Swiss have universal health care, for crying out loud.

And they’re worse than the French about fighting wars. (I’ve long argued we should rename Swiss cheese “Freedom cheese.” Ditto chocolate.)

Read the rest. It’s quite good fun.

Wait for it.

Of course, if you can’t make homelessness go away, the next best thing seems to be to make the homeless just go away. Out of sight out of mind and all that . . . .

Will Durst explains how the Republican nomination race has been like a game of Angry Birds:

The two activities share several basic characteristics: both are infuriatingly frustrating, defy physics and logic as we know them and can instantly turn into terminally addictive pastimes that many experts consider to be a leading cause to loss of both sanity and productivity in America today.

The object of Angry Birds is to use a slingshot to fling various flightless birds at flimsy houses built by egg-thieving green pigs. The object of the 2012 Republican primary race is, well, pretty much the same thing: to toss accusations and blame at the White House in order to steal independents from the Democrats. All while emitting unintelligible screeches, squeals and shrieks.

Via BartBlog.

What was old is new again.

There’s always the fear in white America that their grip on economic . . . power is slipping.

Warning: NSFW.

Afterthought:

I never expected to post stuff like this. I also never expected the Republican Party to develop a fetish for vicariously sticking things up women.

Via The Richmonder.

At Asia Times, Pepe Escobar channels a drone’s visit to its shrink. Oh! the agony!

A nugget:

Dr Puant: But there must be a problem, otherwise you wouldn’t be here.

Drone patient: That’s right, Doc. And that concerns all those miscreants saying we’re sort of, like, illegal killers. C’mon, we are model workers! We never complain. We never sleep. We don’t engage in commie protests. These people don’t seem to have listened to my mentor Mr Brennan [White House counter-terrorism advisor John Brennan].

Noz has a somewhat different perspective on Mitt the Flip:

romney’s chronic etch-a-sketch moments are generally portrayed as opportunistic. but the more i think about it, the more i think it’s just cowardly. the latest example:

“It’s not that the campaign cared whether Ric Grenell was gay,” one Republican adviser said. “They believed this was a nonissue. But they didn’t want to confront the religious right.”

romney will be the GOP nominee. the religious right is not going to vote for obama. standing up to the religious right might even help him to win over independents, the people who will actually decide the general election. and yet mitten is so scared of making christian conservatives mad that he’s willing to toss overboard an advisor whose expertise he values.

In fairness (Noz is nothing if not fair), he goes on to point out that political cowardice is not limited by party lines.

The Republican preoccupation with sex is downright creepy.

The Republican subservience to the politics of hate has been on display this week as Mitt the Flip flipped off a newly hired aide for being gay.

Dick Polman calls the Flipper out:

It’s clear that the bigots in “the base” don’t know any better. And it’s clear that Romney doesn’t know any better; he has few fixed convictions and he quavers like a hunk of jelly. But what about Grenell? What possessed him to believe that he could be a foreign policy spokesman for a party that continues to aid and abet such toxic intolerance? That long tenure at the United Nations blinded him to the realities of the contemporary GOP. Now he knows.

Meanwhile, Leonard Pitts, Jr., citing this speech, skewers the notion that Jesus missed his word and actually meant to say, “Loathe they neighbor”:

Vines’ speech is a masterwork of scriptural exegesis and a marvel of patient logic, slicing and dicing with surgical precision the claim that homophobia is God ordained. So effective is the video that after viewing it, Sandra Delemares a Christian blogger from the United Kingdom who had, for years, spoken in staunch opposition to same sex marriage, wrote that it “revolutionised” her thinking.

Vines points out, for instance, that the frequently quoted condemnation (homosexuality is an “abomination”) from the Old Testament lawbook of Leviticus has no application to Christians, who are bound by the teachings of the New Testament. He explains that St. Paul’s admonitions about the “effeminate” and “abusers of themselves with mankind” stem from modern mis-translations of ancient Greek terminology.

. . . and Eric Zorn muses on the Flipper’s subservience to bigotry, predicting he will have more opportunities to show his independence from the hate:

The good news for Romney, however, is that as this campaign season rolls on, the cranks and haters now grudgingly lining up behind him will offer plenty more opportunities for Sister Souljah moments.

Zorn left out this bit: pigs, wings.

Drones go to college.

Why do I keep remembering the scene in The Matrix in which the drones dumped Neo’s body out of its pod?