Political Theatre category archive

Jay Bookman reveals his formula for predicting the Presidential election.

I cannot do justice to it with a summary or excerpt. Just read it.

Warning: Mild Language.

Via Delaware Liberal.

The Commander Guy reads wingnut blogs so we don’t have to.

Romney achieves consensus: He was a lousy less-than-effective governor.

The odious Southern Strategy, illustrated:

Image via Bob Cesca.

Warning: Some tasteless imagery.

The WMD section begins at the two minute mark.

The BooMan sums up the realignment of the Republican Party. The assessment is harsh. It is also accurate.

It is Nixon’s odious Southern strategy come to fruition.

Pretty much every intolerant asshole in the country has moved to the Republican Party, if they weren’t already there. The only exceptions are a few holier-than-thou progressives who can’t enjoy one moment of life if even one person is going hungry.

With that lone exception, all the prudes and bigots and tsk-tskers and money-grubbers and polluters and religious freaks and misogynists and fraudsters and warmongers have aligned with the conservative movement.

Yankee Republicanism is dead. All we have is the reactionary right aligned with a bunch a greedheads. You won’t find an inch of daylight between Pat Robertson and Mitt Romney or Mitt Romney and Paul Wolfowitz or Grover Norquist and Mitt Romney. We have the worst of all worlds.

I would not have said “aligned with the conservative movement.”

In these modern times, “prudes and bigots and tsk-tskers and money-grubbers and polluters and religious freaks and misogynists and fraudsters and warmongers” are the conservative movement.

The Southern strategy has consumed its creators.

Chuck for explains that Mitt the Flip’s moment of honesty will have little impact in Wingnut World, since, for its inhabitants, the 47% is those other guys.

He does not mince words.

It increasingly appears that the Republican Party is going to lose the presidential election and, indeed, may take down its Congressional candidates as collateral damage.

If that happens, Republican insiders will certainly argue that they lost because Mitt the Flip was not conservative enough. The Republican answer to every political failure seems to be that it was because they were not conservative enough. It generally is not an accurate answer, but it’s the only one they’ve got.

At the Guardian, Gary Younge points out that, actually, it’s not the person. It is the party. A nugget:

The trouble was that almost all the Republican contenders during the primary were either extremely colourful or, as candidates at least, stank. There was Newt Gingrich, who wanted to build permanent bases on the moon and, according to his ex-wife, demanded an open three-way relationship with the mistress who is now his current wife; Ricky Perry, who could not remember his own talking points; and Herman Cain, who was accused by several women of sexual harassment and proudly stated that he did not know the name of the president of “Ubeki-beki-beki-beki-stan-stan”. Each, for a while, was a frontrunner.

So when people wonder how Mitt Romney became the party’s standard-bearer they need to first remember just how low the standards were. To make sense within the Republican party was, almost by definition, to appear nonsensical outside it. More credible candidates took a look at what you’d have to say and do to compete and decided to sit the election out.

It is today’s QOTD writ large.

You just can’t get too much Richie Rich.

Oh, wait. Richie Rich was kind and likable.

This isn’t him.

Joking aside, I know that I and others are beating this to death.

I believe this is wholly justified. For the first time, after years of watching flips, we are getting a glimpse of a flipless Mitt, and, as Steven M. pointed out the other day, it ain’t pretty. A snippet from Steven M.’s post:

Romney has no ideological convictions, but — as I’ve said many times — he has a deep reserve of free-floating anger. In this he’s like Nixon, except that Nixon resented certain fixed groups (economic elites, blacks, Jews), while Romney seems to despise … well, anyone who gets in his way.

Video via AmericaBlog.

Via Democratic Underground.

Jay Bookman wonders why the message of the market doesn’t resonate with the Republican Party:

But Mitt Romney, for all his faults, is not the problem. His campaign team is not the problem. . . .

The problem is not the salesman. The problem is the product that he is attempting to peddle.

Remember, if they lose again this year, the Republican presidential candidate will have won a plurality of votes just once in the last six cycles, dating all the way back to 1992. That sole victory was itself an historic anomaly, with George W. Bush riding the patriotic post-9/11 wave to a very narrow two-point margin over John Kerry in 2004. The market is trying to tell them something.

Two words explain the falling value of the GOP’s stock: Southern. Strategy.

They are running out of bigots.

Afterthought:

Not long ago, I saw a vehicle with one of those “Don’t Re-Nig” bumper stickers. “Okay,” I said to myself, “a racist.”

The racist part did not surprise me. The advertising-the-racism did, mildly. Generally, even racists try to hide it in public these days, and the bumper sticker is somewhat more overt than the more common act of plastering the vehicle with the stars and bars.

Recently, a reader of Leonard Pitts, Jr., also saw one of those bumper stickers and wrote Mr. Pitts about it. Pitts addressed it in his column. A snippet:

When he was asked about that bumper sticker, Billy Smith of Ludowici, Ga., who manufactured it with his wife Paula told a reporter: “We didn’t mean it in a racist way.” The driver of that car would likely have said the same.

But they do not lie for our benefit. They lie to conscience — and to self.

At Asia Times, Stephen Zune wonders why Americans are surprised when Muslim extremists rise take American wingnut bait. He argues that anyone who pays attention should not be.

. . . It seems bizarre that right-wing pundits would be so desperate to use the recent anti-American protests in the Middle East – in most cases numbering only a few hundred people and (except for a peaceful Hezbollah-organized rally in Lebanon) in no cases numbering more than two or three thousand – as somehow indicative of why the United States should oppose greater democracy in the Middle East.

(snip)

What incited many of the protests was an outrageously offensive anti-Islamic movie produced by Christian extremists in California, but there is a lot more to the protests than this triggering event.

For years, the Christian right and Islamic right have sought to provoke extremism and hatred as part of an effort to seemingly validate the stereotypes of the other.

Via the Booman.

Queen Anntoinette and her court.

See David Corn’s answer:

In other news, Connie Schultz has a wonder:

I ask you also to consider what it must have felt like to be a server in that room. Imagine what it must have felt like to be those hourly wage earners listening to a presidential candidate depict them as lazy. Now multiply them by millions.

Elections are won and lost; candidates come and go. But Americans across the country, like those servers, will continue to put up with the Romneys of the world, because they have to. His attack is personal to them, as it should be to any of us who come from the working class.

Shorter Deep Geek:

If your vote didn’t matter, the Republicans wouldn’t be working so hard to keep you from the polls.