Political Theatre category archive

The President of Ireland rips a teabag.

Via Delaware Liberal.

Excerpt:

I’m not gonna get lectured by Mitt Romney or anyone on the Romney campaign about the tone of this campaign.

This is a guy who’s flown all over the country saying he’s not sure whether the president believes in America. Right? We’re auctioning off dinners with the brither in chief, right wing nut job Donald Trump who still questions whether or not the president was born in the United States of the America.

Via Bob Cesca’s Awesome BLog.

Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel twit.

Philly dot com, after extensive investigation, has uncovered addition tenets of Republican science, to supplement the belief that a woman can’t get pregnant from rape unless she secretly enjoyed it. A snippet; follow the link for the rest:

• Female hormones turn off barbecues and cause steering wheels to spin out of control.
• Heart disease is what happens when a man’s body punishes him for eating like a girl.
• If a woman has big breasts, that means she likes you.

Via Bob Cesca’s Awesome Blog.

Via BartCop.

Via C&L.

The week in #RomneyShambles. It’s 20 minutes of worth it.

Via The Richmonder.param name=”FlashVars” value=”launch=48709273

PoliticalProf:

And by the way: complaining that the current Congress is the “worst Congress ever” because they didn’t pass any laws is like complaining that LeBron James is a bad basketball player because he has a lousy batting average. When you don’t want to pass laws (as the Republicans in the House don’t), you think of not passing laws as success, not failure.

Ed Kilgore explores the appeal of Ayn Rand to teenage boys.

Not only that: but the average nerdy adolescent boy hasn’t really had to do much of anything to test his theoretically vast potential in the marketplace of life: you know, things like falling in (non-heroic) love, performing a difficult job, dealing with entirely irrational and unindividuated economic forces like recessions, or for that matter “checking your premises” via debates with intellectual equals or superiors who come up with arguments that Rand and her “Collective” didn’t already savage in the totalitarian atmosphere of her smoky Manhattan salon. I suppose most people whose Objectivism survived high school probably stumbled upon having children–you know, those irrational critters whose almost complete absence in Rand’s novels is one of their most remarkable features. Indeed, it is perhaps the denial of childhood that probably makes Rand’s stuff so totally seductive to adolescents poised between that helpless state and the yet-to-be-achieved independent adulthood.

I suspect he is over-thinking this.

The appeal is simpler: glorifying selfishness as the ultimate value is quite enough to attract this demographic.

Fortunately, most teenage boys grow up and grow out of glorifying selfishness. Unfortunately, too many of the ones that don’t grow out of it do make it onto Republican tickets.

Speaking of objectification, I recall hearing a biographer of Ayn Rand intervideo on the talking box (no, I can’t remember who–it was two years ago). She said that, when she was in college, she learned early that boys who were wrapped up in Ayn Rand’s theories were not good dates.

A bit breathless, but generally on target.

Reg Henry considers the dynamics of Paul Ryan’s being selected for the Republican vice presidential nomination. A snippet:

As general whooping sounds across the nation confirm, he has chosen Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan, a darling of the right, as his running mate. He had little choice, due to the unavailability of other candidates who might please red-meat voters, such as Genghis Khan or Vlad the Impaler.

(snip)

As you can see, I think Mitt Romney has boldly answered his critics who were suspicious that he might be secretly reasonable, compassionate and sane despite all his tough talk during the campaign.

Read the rest.

I seldom read Maureen Dowd. She does snark well, but too often behind the snark there is emptiness. I have enough emptiness of my own, thank you.

But in a column in today’s local rag (not linked because they often do not put syndicated columns on their website), I think she’s on to something of substance.

I remarked to someone the other day that the underlying unifying quality to the policies of the contemporary Republican Party seems to be a delight in cruelty.

It’s Republican family values.

• Dying and can’t afford medicine? Suffer, baby!
• Unemployed and foreclosed by on a robo-signing bankster? Suffer, baby!
• Job shipped to China for a point on the stock market? Suffer, baby!
• Raped and pregnant by your uncle? Suffer, baby!
• Living in your car starving under a bridge? Suffer, baby!

A snippet from the column:

I’d been wondering how long it would take Republicans to realize that Paul Ryan is their guy.

He’s the cutest package that cruelty ever came in. He has a winning air of sad cheerfulness. He’s affable, clean cut and really cut, with the Irish altar-boy widow’s peak and droopy, winsome blue eyes and unashamed sentimentality.

Who better to rain misery upon the heads of millions of Americans?

He’s Scrooge disguised as a Pickwick, an ideologue disguised as a wonk. Not since Ronald Reagan tried to cut the budget by categorizing ketchup and relish as vegetables has the G.O.P. managed to find such an attractive vessel to mask harsh policies with a smiling face.

Warning: Even worse taste than usual, but the bit about Randian Paul Ryan is worth it.