Political Theatre category archive

Head of Prince William County Board of Supervisors pushing racial profiling for Virginia

Tom Levenson on walking and chewing gum at the same time.

Via BartBlog.

Martin Kettle captures the essential vaudeville of Republican posturing: it’s about the theatre, not about the policy. A nugget (emphasis added):

But the bulk of the explanation for the embattled mood lies with the American right’s increasingly implacable warrior Marxism. That’s Marxism tendence Groucho, as one 1968 Parisian poster had it. Groucho’s “Whatever it is – I’m against it” could be today’s Republican party anthem. Perhaps surprisingly, the ourselves-alone conservatism of the Gingrich and Bush-era Republican party has barely faltered, in spite of the 2008 election, and is now accelerating once more. But the urgings of the Tea Party challenge are re-energising the increasing partisanship that, as Ronald Brownstein and others documented, defined the politics of the past two decades. Last week, the latest example among many came when every single Republican in the Senate voted to strip the federal Environmental Protection Agency of authority to regulate greenhouse gases.

Balloon Juice on the Cult (see the previous post).

Jamelle Bouie explains that, unfortunately for the cultists, a president is not a prophet. A nugget:

During the Bush years, Matt Yglesias coined the phrase “Green Lantern theory of Geopolitics” to mock conservatives who believed that willpower was the only limitation in international relations. For those of you who didn’t read comic books growing up, the Green Lantern is a superhero whose ring grants him near limitless power, limited only by the power of his imagination. There are a lot of otherwise-smart liberals who believe that the president is a member of the Green Lantern corps, and that the only thing keeping his agenda from passage is force of will.

For what it’s worth, I think a few things are at play in this warped liberal view of the president (and really, it’s not just liberals, most Americans see the president as some sort of Dune-esque God Emperor): first, there’s simply no popular recognition that the president is a weak constitutional actor. Campaigns are long on presidential promises and short on the recognition that the president is really limited in what he or she can do. And once in office, the president is the most visible person in government, which leads people to assign the most agency to him, even when it’s unwarranted. Moreover, movies and television habitually present the president as the one person who controls everything in government. In most movies, when the president barks orders, they instantly become law. It’s no wonder that most people have an outsized view of presidential authority; most of their exposure comes from 24 and large, ornate presidential addresses.

Florida is trying to shut down U. S. Navy Veterans, which calls itself a charity. (U. S. Navy Veterans is a private organization in no way affiliated with the United States Navy, or, apparently, anyone other than Bobby Thompson, its founder, whose whereabouts seem to be currently unknown.)

The outfit is notable for officers who cannot be found, mailing addresses that turn out to be mail drops, few verifiable charitable donations, and large campaign contributions. It attracted attention in Virginia for receiving an exemption from normal state oversight after making large campaign contributions to Governor McDonnell’s and Attorney General Cuccinelli’s campaigns in 2009. Shortly afterwards, the St. Petersburg Times blew the whisle on them.

From the Roanoke Times:

Before questions were raised about his group by the St. Petersburg Times, Thompson gave $67,500 to the campaigns of six Virginia politicians. Most said they will give the money to charity after learning about the questions surrounding the group. The one exception is Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, who received $55,500 from Thompson. That contribution was Cuccinelli’s second largest from an individual donor.

In reports to the Internal Revenue Service, the U.S. Navy Vets national headquarters said it spent $2.6 million in 2008 in support of veterans and national defense causes. But only 10 specific recipients were listed, for a total of about $27,000.

Most of the organizations confirmed they received contributions from the U.S. Navy Vets group — with the exception of Paralyzed Veterans of America, which said it had no records of $3,000 in donations.

In Virginia, with its concentration of military bases and defense contractors; large communities of real veterans and their friends, families, and co-workers; and strongly martial tradition–memories of wars from before the Revolution onward and memorial battlefields throughout the state–invoking the word “veteran” can be almost like anointment with holy water.

The attention given the campaign contributions is, frankly, a side issue, though getting worked up about campaign contributions after some scandal breaks is always diverting–it implies impropriety and impropriety is titillating. (Sometimes the impropriety is real; the titillation is always real.)

More importantly, executives and legislators must exercise skepticism in considering requests special treatment.

If someone fears the plain light of day, it is likely because he’s trying to keep us in the dark.

Not Larry Sabato reports.

Some years ago, while waiting for a connection in Las Vegas, I started chatting with another fellow who was looking out the same window of the waiting area watching the planes move around.

We discovered that we were both from the same area and introduced ourselves. I recognized his name and said, “I voted for you! Twice!”

He had succeeded a county executive whose term in office was notable for petty influence-peddling and incompetence and had served the two terms allowed him. I thanked him for his part in cleaning up the mess.

He said to me (this is from memory, but it’s pretty close),

I had one rule. I never met with a developer unless the country attorney or the head of the country zoning board was with me.

Think about it.

When something goes wrong in local government, it almost always involves real estate. . . .

I know nothing about the facts of this proposal except what’s in the newspaper story at the link, but recalling that conversation makes think about the first line of the 59th Street Bridge Song.

From TPM:

It’s no accident or coincidence that Republicans in Washington are trying to shield Senate candidates Rand Paul and Sharron Angle from the national, and even local, press.

Remember the GOP establishment didn’t want these far-right, insurgent candidates in the first place, and now Republicans fear that in the year of the tea party, Paul and Angle could become the face of the party for the midterm elections. That could present an image to voters that screams radical more than it does electable.

According to the story, Paul is now asking reporters to submit questions in writing, and Angle is being “staffed up and prepared” before meeting Republicans, I guess the way that Sarah Palin was prepped for her interview wit Katie Couric.

Via Hanlon’s Razor.

Excerpt:

Tomorrow, I will meet with the chairman of BP and inform him that he is to set aside whatever resources are required to compensate the workers and business owners who have been harmed as a result of his company’s recklessness. And this fund will not be controlled by BP. In order to ensure that all legitimate claims are paid out in a fair and timely manner, the account must and will be administered by an independent third party.

We shall see how cooperative Buccaneer Petroleum turns out to be. I have little faith that they deal in good faith.

If Buccaneer Petroleum dealt in good faith, this would not have happened.

Whatever other lessons can be drawn from this, the first one is that the free hand of the market is actually the dead hand of the market. It deals death.

Corporate rapine is not the answer, no matter what the question.

Dick Destiny on the uses and misuses of “Manhattan Project.”

Andrew Sullivan on neocons: All theory, no reality.

This rather echoes what I said about Libertarians regarding allegiance to theory over facts.

As much as I am irritated over Sullivan’s worryworting over deficits, his tendency to get distracted by “entitlement” spending when the bloat is in military spending, and his obsession with Sarah Palin’s progeny, I commonly find his analyses of political movements (at least those of which he is not part) to be quite acute.

Armchair Generalist on Jeremy Hilary Boob PhD, White House Version.

Fareed Zakaria reminds us–and the press–that, despite the example of George Bush, being president is not about playing dress-up in big kid clothes. (The video didn’t like me and refused to embed properly. Follow the link to see the complete remarks.)

Have we all gone crazy? I don’t mean you, I mean us, the media. In dealing with a serious problem involving technical breakdown, engineering malfunctions, environmental fallout and regulatory mishaps, the media has decided to hone in on one issue above all others: Presidential emotion. The overriding need of the hour, we have decided, is not a clean-up plan, not a regulatory overhaul, not a new energy policy, but the image of the president visibly enraged.

Yelling and screaming does not solve problems. It exacerbates them.

Now that most persons have access to most of the news most of the time, they serve no purpose.

They know that. So they flounder about like a drowning man trying to make up a purpose, and succeed only in making up marshmallow fluff.

Steve Benen on Time Magazine.

Here.

I sort of vaguely remember her from presidential press conferences when I was a young ‘un.

Never was really impressed with her; neither her nor my advancing age lessened my lack of impression.

The few times I worked up the nerve actually to watch a presidential press conference (John Kennedy held them regularly and I usually watched–I was too young to know to turn them off–he, at least, knew how to tell a joke), I found her no less annoying than any other self-fluffing Washington White House reporter, even when she was justly tweaking King George the Wurst.

But she was cyber-lynched over a few off-hand remarks by the Nation-of-Israel-Can-Do-No-Wrong bunch.

Frankly, there is no nation that can do no wrong and few nations that do mostly right.

It’s called human nature and, most of the time, if one thinks critically about it, humans are annoying, if not downright depressing. Fortunately, most of us are able to suspend critical thought for day-to-day life. It is a necessary defense against insanity.

James Wolcott does the post-mortem.