Political Theatre category archive

Shaun Mullen explains the con:

In 2010, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie singlehandedly killed a planned $8.7 billion commuter train tunnel under the Hudson River that virtually everyone else believed would ensure the future health of the New York region’s economy. Christie argued that it was just too damned expensive for the frugal times in which he governed, an argument that held little water then and has now sprung a ginormous leak.

This is because it turns out that Christie planned all along to use New Jersey’s share of tunnel construction dough to bail out the state’s highway and bridge system, which under his “leadership” had been driven deeply into debt.

Follow the link for more about this and other issues. You will be glad you did.

Writing at Japan Times, Andrey Borodaevskiy sees a disturbing undercurrent to the Russian people’s support for Vladimir Putin’s Ukrainian policy: cult of Putin personality.

I don’t know enough to agree or disagree, but I think it is worth a read, not only for what he has to say, but also because our own media has a disturbing case of parochial tunnel vision as regards events in the rest of the world.

Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev could not have hoped for this kind of uniformity of public opinion and ardent loyalty that we observe in Russia now. Why? Because there was no personality cult of “Mr. General Secretary” on the scale the modern boss has built up for himself through the clever combination of stimuli and intimidation.

Personality cult does not come from the grass roots. It is cultivated from above, more often than not inspired by the person who is the object of the cult, as was the case with Josef Stalin — the biggest “seducer of the masses” of all (except perhaps for Chinese leader Mao Zedong, who also was an Oriental-style ruler, not a product of Western civilization).

In a nutshell, personality cult is a euphemism for dictatorship.

Will Bunch thinks the tea party is done. A nugget:

Look, at its core, the base of the Tea Party is the same 20 percent or so of political dead-enders who’ve been around for decades –they were the John Birch Society in the early 1960s, hardhats pummeling hippies in the streets of Manhattan in 1970, the Moral Majority in the 1980s, and so on. Then the Tea Party magically sprung (sic) forth in the winter of 2009, just days after the Jackie Robinson of American politics, Barack Obama (although his batting average is a bit lower) officially integrated the Oval Office.

But while I do think that racial politics — especially the fear that whites will soon be a minority in America — is in the DNA of the Tea Party, I also think something deeper was at play, especially in the halcyon days of 2009 and 2010. The rank and file of the Tea Party was being used, by two-bit entertainers like Glenn Beck and politically by the likes of the Koch Brothers and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce

Teabaggery was a fraud and a scam from the git-go, a made-up Astroturf movement that has turned on its creators by wresting control of the Republican electorate from the Wall Street crowd. It was, as Bunch points out, nothing new; it was the same old crowd of bigots, conspiracy theorists, and right-wing whackjobs that have been the wingnuttiest foot soldiers of the far right extremists for years.

One thing is certain.

They’ll be back. They’ll have a new name and new costumes, but they’ll be back, because haters gotta hate. It gives their sorry empty lives meaning.

And they will still be morans.

Republican Family Values in action.

The Party of Lincoln becomes the party of Jefferson Davis.

To secede or not to secede.

That will be the question for Wisconsin Republicans at next month’s convention.

Earlier this month, the party’s Resolutions Committee voted in favor of a proposal that says the state party “supports legislation that upholds Wisconsin’s right, under extreme circumstances, to secede.

Via C&L, where John Amato points out

. . . as I’ve said before many times, when they (the Republican Party–ed.) unleashed the wingnut Kraken to counter Obama’s election in 2008, they released a form of insanity that isn’t going to go away easily.

As I recall, Lincoln considered secession to be treason. The Republican Party’s embrace of racism now clearly borders on treason.

Dick Polman remembers the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, particularly how Everett Dirksen, Republican Senator from Illinois, made it possible by leading Republican Senators to support the bill.

He points out that it wouldn’t have happened today.

If such a civil rights bill were ever floated in today’s political environment, there is not even the remotest fantastical possibility that today’s Republicans would rise to the occasion. Republicans in the mold of Everett Dirksen are long dead, or they’ve been methodically expunged. Today’s ideologically pure Republicans don’t cross the aisle in a burst of moral rectitude to champion civil rights; instead they repair to their bunker, working to curb the right to vote.

Do please read the rest.

Victor David Hanson is wrong.

Free speech does not mean guaranteed audience, especially for those who speak nonsense and falsehood.

Via C&L.

Via C&L.

Coming soon to a theatre near you!

. . . is not just a cliche. It’s a Republican strategy to attract women voters.

Via C&L.

Galt! Who goes there!

Via Balloon Juice.