Political Theatre category archive

Jeb “Oh God Please Not Another” Bush shows his independence.

Via Bob Cesca’s Awesome Blog.

On the chopping block in North Carolina.

One more time: Republicanism is counter-factual, so Republicans fear encountering facts.

Shaun Mullen reviews the show. A snippet:

The Republicans’ own big takeaway from their 2014 election victories was that they would now show Americans what governing was all about. Ta da! This boast was rather strange since the party has performed a sort of demented Kabuki theater in lieu of governing — whether jointly with President Obama, Democrats or by their lonesome — over the last six-plus years in making the case that it still was not capable of taking back the keys to the national car. So it comes as no surprise that despite now controlling both House and Senate, it has been more of the non-governing same — and perhaps even worse.

Read the rest. It’s worth it.

Steven M. notes that Ted Cruz doesn’t seem to be doing so well in the polls and tries figure out why, as he says, Cruz is “in Sarah Palin territory these days.”

Froma Harrop considers the intellectual contortions of Rand Paul’s stance(s) on vaccination. A snippet:

A real libertarian wanting his party’s presidential nomination has only two choices:

• Come clean and acknowledge the cost side of your beliefs. If you think parents have the right not to vaccinate their children, agree that more Americans might come down with preventable diseases as a result. Provocative, perhaps, but honest.
• If you don’t want that controversy tied around your neck, say that you have changed your mind on vaccinations and now hold that they should be required. Not totally honest but at least coherent.

Put into practice, libertarianism can make a mess. If parents have the right to endanger others by not getting their children immunized, why can’t individuals decide whether they’re too drunk to drive?

The core belief of Libertarianism is summed up in the phrase, “because I want to, dammit.”

The Roanoke Times has found it in Richmond. Here’s a bit from their editorial yesterday.

Immovable faith in conservative dogma seems to have blinded the House Republican majority to the reality that, without government subsidy, as many as 400,000 adult Virginians will go without primary health care, much less coverage for hospitalizations – and not for want of honest labor. . . .

So how is this like the Roman Inquisition?

House Republicans bring to mind the Congregation of the Roman Inquisition, which in 1633 silenced Galileo about his observations that supported Copernicus’s theory of the previous century: Earth, rotating on its axis every 24 hours, was orbiting the sun. Earth was not the center around which all of the universe spun.

Via Job’s Anger.

Werner Herzog’s Bear tries to figure out what “socially liberal, fiscally conservative” means and thinks he’s hit on something. Here’s a bit:

They are okay with legalized marijuana, abortion rights, and gay rights, mostly because that does not cost them a thing. At the same time, they are not at all interested in income inequality, institutional racism, lack of health care access, and any other social injustice that would require wealth redistribution to rectify. The ghettoes do not concern them, nor does the fact that students who live in poorer areas have a much lower quality of education than their own children bother them. In fact, they secretly like it that way.

More at the link.

Gary Younge:

When they won the Senate as well as the House, they were supposed to work together to produce Republican legislation that Obama would be forced to veto, definitively exposing the real source of the gridlock. In fact, they are simply imploding under the weight of their own obstinacy. They’ve run out of people to blame for not compromising with them. So now they’re blaming each other.

“The Republicans are like Fido when he finally catches the car,” the Democratic senator Charles Schumer told the New York Times. “Now they don’t have any clue about what to do. They are realising that being in the majority is both less fun and more difficult than they thought.”

Read the rest.

. . . from a letter-writer to my local rag.

This should be fun:

Retired surgeon Ben Carson on Sunday said he could form a committee to explore a bid for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination this month and make a formal announcement in May.

So he is maybe possibly thinking about throwing his hat in the ring.

On the bright side, he would be a better candidate than Donald Trump. So far as I know, he hasn’t gone bankrupt four times, at least not monetarily. “Intellectually” is another matter.

I’ve seen a number of articles and blog posts claiming that Brian Williams’s fantasies of being embattled in Iraq don’t matter because, as the reasoning usually seems to go, “Who cares?” I disagree.

I gave up on television news three decades ago, when broadcast news morphed from being a “service” to being a “profit center.” I long before had realized I could read four times as much information in half an hour as I could passively have poured into me from television (and without the commercials). Nevertheless, Williams’s perfidy, intentional or not, matters greatly.

At Psychology Today Blogs, Denise Cummins discusses this; here’s a bit:

The media is the “fourth estate.” It has tremendous power to influence policy and hence history. And for that reason, news anchors can’t just be pretty faces, charismatic celebrities, or entertainers. They have to be people of integrity who are held to high standards. We need to know that what we are being told is the truth. And that means that news anchors must remain dispassionate, disinterested, and truthful reporters.

We already have one major “news” network dedicated to spreading propaganda and falsehood to poison public discourse. We need trustworthy–not error-free, which is an impossible goal, but given in good faith–reportage so as to make informed decisions.

Otherwise, the country will go to hell even faster than it already is.

Not even bothering to go through the motions.

Via Job’s Anger.

In the usual bad taste . . . .

Clarence Page watches the hucksters and bumpkins march by.