Political Theatre category archive

Jeremy Sherman, blogging at Psychology Today, tries to understand Herman Cain:

What do you get when you cross a fragile emotional desire-driven creature with an ability to reason and speak. You get humans, creatures who when unfettered by conscience serve up whatever reasons and speech are most likely to sooth their emotions and get them what they desire, creatures that can pull out their ass any sanctimonious moral argument why they should get what they want, creatures that can rationalize their way out of any corner and never admit to their many double standards. You get creatures fully committed to attribution error, creatures that blame everyone else for their failures by standards they won’t apply to himself. You get a Herman Cain . . . .

Dick Polman considers the potshots that the aspirants for the Republican presidential keep aiming at each other, in violation of Reagan’s “Eleventh Commandment”: “Thou shalt not speak ill of a fellow Republican.”

It’s a delicious collection of calumny.

A snippet:

. . . perhaps the most important is the ongoing shootout between old Romney and new Romney. When Ronald Reagan invoked his 11th Commandment, he probably never anticipated a scenario in which a frontrunner would essentially speak ill of his former self. Or former selves. While denying he needs to do any such thing.

More like this:

A Norfolk judge said a man, arrested for filming a protest even after police told him to stop, could not be convicted of disorderly conduct.

(snip)

“Law enforcement personnel need to understand that they do not operate secretly when performing their duties in public places,” ACLU of Virginia Dunn Fellow Thomas Okuda Fitzpatrick said. “They can and should be observed by all of us, and they can be filmed. We hope this case will send a message to police across the state that everyone has a First Amendment right to take pictures in public places-including pictures of the police.”

Details at the link.

Megan Kelly on Fox News:

The pepper the cops are using on the Occupiers is like a derivative of real pepper. It’s a food product essentially.

Via BartCop.

Mike Littwin considers the rise of the Gingrinch. A snippet:

Here’s how desperate conservatives are for a not-Romney, Gingrich, who burned out sometime in the late-’90s, is leading in polls despite having said — and hold on to your seats here — something semi-reasonable on illegal immigration.

That became headline news because to be a Republican moderate these days on immigration means you don’t want to turn the entire country into Alabama.

Gingrich said only what everyone knows — that we’re not going to round up 11 million to 12 million illegal immigrants and deport them. Therefore, there needs to be a path toward legalizing those with real roots here.

Follow the link for the rest. It’s worth the three minutes.

Dick Polman discusses the inability of the press to call out lies, trying to figure out why they won’t state the obvious.

A nugget (emphasis added):

You’re probably familiar with this (Romney–ed.) ad, which was aimed at the New Hampshire electorate. The marquee moment was a sound bite from Barack Obama – “If we keep talking about the economy, we’re going to lose” – which suggested that he’s seeking to distance himself from the recession on the eve of the ’12 festivities. But he wasn’t talking about his re-election campaign at all. The clip was actually from 2008 – and Obama was quoting a John McCain aide who had contended in an interview that McCain should distance himself from the George W. Bush recession.

In other words, Romney’s key clip was demonstrably false. But that’s not how it was generally reported.

A CNN tweet: “Democrats say new Romney ad distorts Obama’s words.” There it is, the doctrine of false equivalence/balance. Romney makes a charge, “Democrats say” something in rebuttal, and all charges are equal. This is what Wicker used to complain about. He said that, all too often, the press takes refuge in “statements delivered by official spokesmen,” without weighing the facts to determine whether one side is more credible than the other.

When I was a young ‘un, being “objective” meant trying to separate true from false.

Feeling the heat:

Facebook users who “share” or “like” content that insults the Thai monarchy are committing a crime, Minister of Information and Communication Technology Anudith Nakornthap said Tuesday.

(snip)

Insulting a monarch is a crime known as lese majeste, and Thailand’s laws against it are the most severe in the world. Even repeating the details of an alleged offense , such as on social media sites like Facebook , is illegal under the lese majeste law and the related Computer Crimes Act, “which says that spreading illegal content , either directly or indirectly , is a crime,” Anudith said.

Thom Hartmann discusses what being pepper-sprayed is like with 84-year old Dorli Rainey, who knows first hand.

New rule for twits: Don’t get your Brownback up or you might end up in the doghouse.

First, a little context: Emma Sullivan, an 18-year-old high school senior, wrote a disparaging tweet about Brownback, saying “he sucked in person,” and signed it with a #heblowsalot hash-tag.

Brownback’s office wasn’t too pleased with the tweet, and it eventually landed Sullivan in the principal’s office.

Sullivan was supposed to write a letter of apology — which she said would be insincere — but the school district has let her off the hook. Now Brownback is the one apologizing.

Follow the link for the statement, which Bob Cesca considers exceptional for its straightforwardness and lack of the mealy-mouthed “if anyone was offended” wording so common today.

At the Guardian, Clive Stafford Smith demolishes the myth, promulgated by the U. S. military and the CIA, that there is anything “surgical” about remote control death from the sky. A snippet:

The BIJ (Bureau of Investigative Journalim–ed.) reporting begins to fill in the actual numbers. It’s a bleak view: more people killed than previously thought, including an estimated 160 children overall. This study should help to create a greater sense of reality around what is going on in these remote regions of Pakistan. This is precisely what has been lacking in the one-sided reporting of the issue – and it doesn’t take an intelligence analyst to realise that vague and one-sided is just the way the CIA wants to keep it.

Read the whole thing, then decide whether the apt response is to weep or to scream.

Mitt Romney is distinguised by the belief that he should be president because, well, he should be president because, well, he should be president because, well (click, whirrrr).

Video via Raw Story.

Audio tape of all Fox News pundits, past and future:

Image via Sampler, repository of the unusual; some images NSFW.

It is notable when Newt the Gingrinch sounds more reasonable than Mitt “Well, What Do You Want Me To Say?” Romney.

At Philly dot com, John Timpane considers the “meme-mification” of the pepper spraying of protestors at the University of California at Davis, examining theories about why images and pastiches of that indicident spread so rapidly.

A nugget:

Andrew Mendelson, chair of the department of journalism at Temple University, points to Pike’s nonchalance: “The body language he shows in spraying, transposed into these pictures, works really well as a visual representation of the shared frustrations among the Occupy community at the way they’re being treated by mainstream media and the police.”

“That image was just too striking not to stick with people,” Wolford says.

Nonchalant cruelty towards the defenseless does tend to catch the eye, as Xeni Jardin points out at the Guardian:

Pike’s dissonantly casual body language in the context of violence brings to mind the photos from Abu Ghraib; Lynndie England smiling and giving the camera a thumbs-up in front of tortured prisoners. And, in a fit of macabre recursion, some of the casually pepper-spraying cop meme images reference those very photos from Abu Ghraib. Lynndie and Pike, two “bad apples” taking the fall for systemic problems with the institutions each represent.

Addendum:

[chortle]

We laugh because otherwise we cry.

Via Bob Cesca’s Awesome Blog.

Philly dot com says:

The failure of the congressional supercommittee to trim the federal deficit is the latest example of Obama’s inability to make a deal with Republicans.

Last time I looked, President Obama was not in the negotiation room.

More accurate would be

The failure of the congressional supercommittee to trim the federal deficit is the latest example of Republican intransigence refusal to compromise with Democrats.