Political Theatre category archive
There’s No Pocrisy Like Hypocrisy 0
(Links straightened out)
Brendan makes a phone call and calls out a Republican for boasting about getting pandemic funds pulled from the stimulus package and now trying to run away from her actions.
National Service 0
Dick Polman considers the wingnut response to the Edward M. Kennedy Serve America Act. Follow the link and check out the comments. Many of them are from Mars.
Not even this law gets a pass from the paranoid right.
The late Richard Hofstadter, one of our great political thinkers, wrote 45 years ago that our political discourse is often marred by what he called “the paranoid style,” typically employed by “dispossessed” people who feel marginalized by events, and who therefore traffic in “heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasies.” Case in point, the reaction to this national service initiative.
For weeks this spring, there was hysteria about Obama’s purported plans to “enslave” young people with compulsory national service. In some right-wing quarters, the measure was nicknamed the “National Enslavement Bill.” But, as Hofstadter might have put it, this was merely one of the fantasies, concocted and nurtured from long-discarded House language. When the bill was initially introduced in the House, it had a suggestion about studying “whether a workable, fair, and reasonable mandatory service requirement for all able young people could be developed.” But that suggestion was stripped out long before the House passed the bill, and it never surfaced in the Senate at all.
Meanwhile, the paranoids have never quite made up their minds whether the service initiative is fascist or communist, so they’ve invoked both. There has been blogosphere buzz about brownshits and “forced labor,” and it has been pointed out that the color scheme on the AmeriCorps home page (red, black, and white) is the same color scheme as the infamous Nazi flag. But we also have Minnesota congresswoman Michelle Bachmann (she was bound to turn up) contending that the law is basically designed to brainwash the kids, by establishing what she calls “re-education camps for young people” – thus borrowing the terminology most closely associated with Vietnamese communists.
And these nuts were in charge of the country for the eight years.
The Torture Memos 0
StevenD theorizes why they were released. It is a thoughtful consideration of the political issues and implications. (The Booman adds his thoughts here.)
Nevertheless, StevenD left out one crucial reason for the memos’ release: The ACLU was going to win its suit demanding the release of the memos. The administration had to fish or cut bait as regards the court case.
It cut bait.
Support the ACLU here.
Aren’t His 15 Minutes Up by Now? 0
Joe the (Not a) Plumber, the gift that keeps on giving.
The Voter Fraud Fraud 1
Republicans in Florida are at it again. They realize their hope for electoral success is to keep people from voting as much as possible (emphasis added).
The legislation would also impose onerous and unnecessary rules on voter registration drives, including a requirement that registration forms must be turned in within 48 hours. Grass-roots voter registration drives play an important role in getting poor and minority voters registered. If this legislation passes, however, many groups may stop registering voters rather than risk jail sentences or fines.
(snip)
Another provision would require election officials to purge voting rolls more frequently, a sore point in Florida, where an improper purge of the rolls before the 2000 election removed many eligible voters.
QOTD 0
Gail Collins on Texas:
And how, by the way, can you stand at a rally waving the American flag while yelling “Secede”?
Via the Great Orange Satan.
The Devolution of Republicanism 0
In some ways, the atmosphere among yesterday’s Teapot Gnomes reminded me of ’60s radical groups. They were generally in good spirits, courteous, and happy to be surrounded by three or four hundred of their fellow travelers.
Now, I was never a 60’s radical, but I knew persons who fancied themselves as such. I wasn’t even particularly liberal, except on questions of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties (I have detailed my path to that position elsewhere in these pages). If I am much more liberal today than I was even eight years ago, it’s from watching Republicanism come close to destroying my country through greed and unjust war.
(I was also quite opposed to the Viet Namese War, but those who know their history know that that was not a “liberal” position, despite the efforts of the wingnuts to refashion it as one. A moderate Republican (Eisenhower) laid the groundwork for it, two liberal Democrats (Kennedy and Johnson) expanded it, and a cynical manipulator (Nixon) was ultimately forced to recognize that it was “lost,” though it could never have been won, not from when the American war started with the collapse of French colonialism in Viet Nam in 1954.)
Even then, I knew that the idea that American workers and peasants might unite to overthrow the state was so far on the other side of Fantasy Land was to put stupid to shame.
For one thing, no American will admit to being a peasant, even if, by any rational definition, he is–even if, were he to meet his double in some foreign land, he would describe that double as a “peasant.” And the workers (known as “hardhats” in the slang of the day) distrusted and disliked anything labelled “radical,” even if, in truth, it may not have been radical in any sense.
I also knew who had the guns. And, despite gun nut wankery, a bunch of rag-tags in A&N store camos with basements full of canned goods won’t do much against an Abrams.
But those “radical” groups would meet quite happily, be in good spirits, enjoy the camaraderie, spread their fliers and hold their little demonstrations, while managing to convince themselves that they were going to Change the World. In the end, they changed nothing. What positive stuff came out of that era came from and through the mainsteam of American politics.
Dylan Loewe in the Guardian:
On closer inspection, however, there is little good news for Republicans, tea party or not.
The Republican party has retracted so dramatically in the last two years that the only base it has left to mobilise is a group of voters with vastly different viewpoints than the rest of the country. According to the latest opinion polls, 71% of the country trusts the president on the economy. Half the country believes their taxes are just right where they are. And 95% of Americans just got a tax cut, which started showing up in their payslips this month. But at the same time, the right is dumping tea bags on tarps, demanding an end to high taxes, surrounded by people demanding Obama’s birth certificate, surrounded by people who have misspelled “End Socialism” on their t-shirts. This is the kind of marginalisation that is the product of Republican organising efforts. And it helps underscore why the party is in so much trouble.
One can only hope.
Also posted at the Great Orange Satan.
The Technological Divide 0
Nothing is still nothing. “Socially networked” nothing is nothing announced to the cyberworld.
Via Mithras.
Mad Hattering 2
This sounds like a hoot. I think I might grab my camera and my Obama pin and go.
“If You Haven’t Done Anything Wrong, You Have Nothing To Worry about” 0
What Brendan said.
Oh, yeah, watch the Glenn Beck clip at the end.
Now, I think the persons are who all gaga over this jump too soon.
I believe that the Obama administration is still trying to sort out the cow patty they inherited from a whole administration of morans–morans who will never see Spain. Nevertheless, I disagree with the administration’s actions and wish they would just come clean on behalf of the people of the United States of America.
On the Media considers the issue:
Follow this link to visit the website and read the transcript.
Addendum:
Andrew Sullivan has a thought.