Political Theatre category archive

Contradict Me looks at colorful contradictions.

Via PoliticalProf.

Read The Nation’s expose of campaign myths.

. . . the first and most important step is to define the problem accurately.

Via Bob Cesca’s Awesome Blog.

Having an incompetent attorneys is like having no attorney.

Indeed, it may be worse. There is an appearance of fairness.

Robyn Blumner tries to follow the money and finds the trail disappears into the Bermuda Taxangle:

Whether technically legal or not, the idea of using international tax havens to skirt U.S. tax obligations is not only a rich man’s game, it speaks to one’s character. Romney’s flirtation with countries of looser financial morals suggests that the candidate who doesn’t drink or have a wandering eye may have a weakness after all.

Darryl Lease, writing in the local rag, discusses the Republican Party’s dedication to making sure sick people go bankrupt because of crushing medical bills voting against the tyranny of the Affordable Care Act.

He does the arithmetic and points out that House Republicans have voted to repeal it almost once a week.

Now, you’ll probably hear some folks question the wisdom of spending so much time trying to repeal the Affordable Care Act when, clearly, it’s not going to happen until after the November elections, if then.

Those folks just don’t get this whole tyranny thing. We’re talking about legislation passed in 2009 by the House and Senate, signed by the president and upheld as constitutional by the Supreme Court. You call that democracy? Smells like tyranny to me.

According to CBS News, the House has spent at least 80 hours, or two full work weeks, on the repeal effort. It costs taxpayers about $24 million a week to operate the House, according to the Congressional Research Service.

So that would mean these 33 votes have cost us about $50 million. Money well spent, I’d say.

Read the rest. Really. It is delightful.

Via BartBlog.

In a typically long, tighly-reasonsed post, Chauncey Devega suggests a strategic rationale for Randian rhetoric. Here are a couple of nuggets, but, really, read the whole thing:

To this point, the Tea Party GOP has successful deployed Ayn Rand conservatism, with its language of “surplus/unproductive” people and “job creating” citizens, to hoodwink the white authoritarian inclined populist classes into supporting policies which are against their immediate political and economic self-interest(s).

Attitudes about the State, “big government,” and taxes are closely tied to racial animus and hostility. These are dog whistles and code words for white conservatives which enable them to talk about “lazy” black and brown people. Without exception, these appeals are rarely, if ever, centered on how the white middle class is subsidized by the submerged state.

(major snippage)

Since the 1960s, the face of poverty in America has been African American. As such, “black” poverty and “black” degeneracy will be repeated themes in Romney’s Ayn Rand-like campaign language of “productive citizens,” “job creators,” and “lazy” “parasites.”

Via DelawareLiberalw

Via PoliticalProf.

Obviously not.

Otherwise, he could not have brought forth this stream of farcical drivel with a straight face.

Dick Destiny sees parallels between the rationale today’s multifront Great and Glorious Patriotic Wars and the groupthink that gaves us Viet Nam (and Laos, and Cambodia).

And we know how well that turned out.

But al Qaeda has been substituted for communism and the endless battleground has become the failed states of the Middle East, Asia and Africa.

In these places, the war can never end because all insurgencies and very little wars between bad people are viewed through a dark lens created on 9/11, one that colors the world much as the old Cold Warriors saw communism, a monolithic threat that can only be smashed by the immediate application of military power before it poses a threat to the homeland.

Read the rest. Then see your doctor for some Prozac.

Excerpt:

A few examples, back in October 2010, Major Garrett of “The National Journal” sat down with McConnell to talk about what Republicans would do if they took back Congress in the fall. McConnell didn`t Garrett he wanted compromise or a new tone or a renewed spirit of cooperation and partnership or any of the warm and fluffy things you tend to hear politicians say.

No, he told Garrett, quote, “The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.” Ouch.

So partisan, sure, but honest. If that would have been all you knew about the Republican Party, you could have predicted the last two years in Congress almost perfectly.

Those who would speak truth to power (and, more to the point, truth about the powerful) are frequently called “agitators” by those with the power.

The truth often causes persons to get agitated. That’s why the powerful don’t like it.