Political Theatre category archive

Josh Marshall identifies a new psychological pathology to be submitted for inclusion in the DSM:

TPM is officially announcing the birth of ‘long-form birtherism’. Just as it is widely attested in the sociological literature that messianic and apocalyptic cults frequently become more intense in their belief, the same pattern will now create so-called ‘Long-form birthers’. Normative religious scholars are objecting that a more proper analogy might be to the various sects of Shi’a Islam which believe in different Imams as the final legitimate Imam in the succession of Ali.

Frankly, I think the President’s releasing the “long form” birth certificate was a silly idea.

In usenet lingo, the White House is feeding the trolls. Just makes them hungrier.

These birther trolls already have all the proof they need of Mr. Obama’s illegitimacy in office. In their eyes

Prez ain’t white.
That ain’t right.

It is that simple.

Clarence Page sees through the Donald’s act:

Frankly, I still predict that Trump will not actually run. As soon as the current season of “The Apprentice” ends, along with Trump’s need to publicize it, I expect him to bow out. I don’t think he wants to reveal his income tax returns or be accountable to his public in any of the other ways that real candidates are required to be.

That’s why Trump steers attention away from himself, even to the point of raising questions about Obama’s college grades. “I heard he was a terrible student, terrible,” Trump said in an interview with the Associated Press. “How does a bad student go to Columbia and then to Harvard? I’m thinking about it, I’m certainly looking into it. Let him show his records.”

Of course, it is Trump who is sounding like a broken record. Sitting high and dry just like that water-barrel clown, it didn’t take the Donald long to figure out that no candidate goes unnoticed who panders to the Obamaphobes.

Follow the link to see why I chose the title for this post.

Not that I’m against civility, but, as Josh Marshall points at TPM, facts matter as much as, if not more than tone of voice.

An excerpt:

. . . far better to have an engaged debate on the merits of how the policy actually works, by people engaged with the actual details, than a blase posture of everybody should be nice and not engage in politics when something demonstrably dramatic/revolutionary and arguably deeply damaging is being debated.

Via Atrios.

Via The Richmonder.

Via Bob Cesca.

Via the Richmonder.

Dick Polman sticks his tongue deep inside his cheek and demonstrates full birther, refusing to allow facts to distract him.

Read it. It’s a hoot.

Offered without comment.

A passenger screener at Philadelphia International Airport is facing charges that he distributed more than 100 images of child pornography via Facebook, records show.

Federal agents also allege that Transportation Safety Administration Officer Thomas Gordon Jr. of Philadelphia, who routinely searched airline passengers, uploaded explicit pictures of young girls to an Internet site on which he also posted a photograph of himself in his TSA uniform.

As my two or three regular readers know, I did not think that getting into Libya was a good thing from the git-go.

Never, when the United States has involved itself in the strictly internal affairs of another country, however vile those internal affairs may have been, has it ended well for anyone involved. Now . . .

Armed US Predator drones are to carry out missions over Libya, Defence Secretary Robert Gates has said.

Mr Gates said their use had been authorised by President Barack Obama and would give “precision capability” to the military operation.

There’s nothing precision about them.

I know a soldier whose job included calling in drone and air strikes in Afghanistan.

He didn’t like to talk about it. He didn’t even like to think about it.

He was close enough to his job to understand the consequences of a mistake; he agonized about it every day.

To the suits in Washington and other capitals, it’s a board game.

Soldiers and civilians are markers on the board. What’s a few markers more or less?

Meanwhile, in the Asia Times, Tom Engelhart, in an article written before this announcement was droned to the press, is not optimistic. A nugget:

Facing the challenges of a world at the edge – from Japan to the Greater Middle East, from a shaky global economic system to weather that has become anything but entertainment – the United States looks increasingly incapable of coping. It no longer invests in its young, or plans effectively for the future, or sets off on new paths. It literally can’t do. And this is not just a domestic crisis, but part of imperial decline.

We just don’t treat it as such, tending instead to deal with the foreign and domestic as essentially separate spheres, when the connections between them are so obvious. If you doubt this, just pull into your nearest gas station and fill up the tank. Of course, who doesn’t know that this country, once such a generator of wealth, is now living with unemployment figures not seen since the Great Depression, as well as unheard of levels of debt, that it’s hooked on foreign energy (and like most addicts has next to no capacity for planning how to get off that drug), or that it’s living through the worst period of income inequality in modern history? And who doesn’t know that a crew of financial fabulists, corporate honchos, lobbyists, and politicians have been fattening themselves off the faltering body politic?

Via Some Guy with a Website (link fixed).

Via Hanlon.

Sentences starting with “I am not a racist” are usually a pretty sure fire indication.

Watch the video at the link, if you can.

I lasted about two and half minutes before I couldn’t take it any more.

Via Balloon Juice.

Mitt the Flip makes a blip.

“It’s like being a highly respected and valued sociopath.”

Via Delaware Liberal.

Via Shaun Mullen, who comments in another post.

Field comments on birthers:

Not since the birth of a certain little guy in a town called Bethlehem has so much been made of where a child was born.

Peter Bergman thinks that President Obama has given Republicans enough rope for them to hang themselves.

Me, I’m not so sure. I’ve learned never to discount the power of crazy.

DelawareLiberal reports.

What else explains their attack on womens’ health. From the San Jose Mercury-News:

The Republican Party’s vendetta against Planned Parenthood is not about abortion. It is an attack on poor women.

(snip)

Planned Parenthood Mar Monte runs 32 health care centers in California, including eight in Santa Clara County and several others around the Bay Area, plus two in northern Nevada. It saw 243,531 patients in 2010, 89 percent of whom qualified for Medi-Cal. That means their income was less than $22,350 for a family of four.

Shaun Mullen addressed this belief in ickiness of women very nicely in a post last week. A nugget:

How else to account for the latest GOP-perpetrated outrage: A Democratic-led effort in Indiana to add a rider exempting women who are raped or victims of incest from a bill that would make most abortions illegal after 20 weeks got this response from Republicans: The exemption is “a giant loophole” because, as one self righteous male legislator declared, women “could simply say they’ve been raped.”

Let that concept sink in for a moment: These haters actually believe that a woman will falsely say that she was raped in a dark alley or knocked up by an uncle in order to get a free abortion. The perversity of this notion is . . . well, pornographic.