Political Theatre category archive
Wait for It 0
No doubt Pat Buchanan and his fellow travelers and sycophants will have something portentous to say about this:
No doubt it will be a typically constructive and even-handed comment.
Also, pigs, wings.
In other news, Jay Bookman anticipates the fuss.
On the One Hand, There Is No “on the Other Hand” 0
Leonard Pitts, Jr., points out the fallacy of the “both sides do it” claims. A nugget:
It was not Democrats who voted down their own deficit reduction resolution, apparently because they didn’t want the president to share credit.
It was not a Democratic leader who declared defeating the president his top legislative priority.
No, it was Republicans who did all that. And it is not Democrats who have seen a steady trickle of condemnation and defection by their own appalled members.
All That Is Old Is New Again 0
PoliticalProf summarizes the history America’s bigotry against immigrants.
A nugget:
- The Puritans hated Quakers and other non-Puritans when such people started coming to America. In time, however, they all became “WASPs”—White Anglo-Saxon Protestants. Or what some people call “Americans.” (Not Politicalprof.)
- WASPs hated Catholics when they — mainly Irish — started in immigrate in large numbers in the 1840s. (Think potato famine.) WASPs started the Know Nothing Party to stop Catholic immigration into America. Now, of course, lots of our presidents have some Irish heritage … including, as it happens, Barack Obama. (And me, were I to become President!)
Hate keeps re-inventing itself in most marvelous ways.
Driving while Brown 0
Law enforcement as S&M fantasy come to life–and its fans.
Hole in the Center 3
The Booman savages the pundits who claim that me need a new “centrist” party. (Someone, I think Atrios, once defined “centrism” as a position that agrees with that of the pundit advocating it).
A nugget:
Mitt the Flip Snip 0
Scott Herhold recalls getting caught up in bullying a classmate when he was in high school and how, as the years passed, the incident weighed more and more heavily on his mind.
He’s not having any of Mitt the Snip’s professed amnesia over his short-lived career as a barber:
From experience, I can guarantee you Romney’s professed lack of memory is a lie (tellingly, the denial came through a campaign spokesman, not from the candidate himself).
Afterthought:
If the Flipper is, indeed, not lying, his ability to dismiss the memory of assaulting a fellow student because he didn’t like the student’s looks is disturbing in and of itself.
Why We Need the ACLU 0
As much as I contemn Libertarians for being misty-eyed romantics who delude themselves as to the real-world implications of their beliefs or, more accurately for most “Libertarians,” as Republicans who are ashamed to admit it, this is a good cause.
They deserve a full and fair right to get kicked down the hall at the polls.
“Disaster Capitalism” 0
A. P. Ticker comments on the campaign to loot “privatize” public education. He’s talking about Philly, but it’s going on everywhere.
Read more here.
Conservative Xanadu 0
Reg Henry, writing at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, gets to the heart of the wingnut fantasy world. (Like most fantasy worlds, this one never existed outside of imagination, but never mind).
A nugget:
In recent years, conservatives have not just been yelling for the train of history to stop right here, but to go back down the track to the station known as 1788, not stopping at the stations for the 19th or 20th centuries where vital lessons could be learned about how a nation grew to maturity as the greatest power and influence in the world.
No, we can only be free if we return to the Garden of (American) Eden, the republic as the Founding Fathers envisaged it when they ratified the Constitution.
Mind you, this is not the Constitution as others understand it, but the one that conforms to the conservative dreamscape of an America of independent farmers and musket-toters in which you don’t need the government to give your vehicle (a horse) an emissions inspection sticker.
Mitt the Flip and the Bully Pulpit 2
This week, much of Left Blogistan has taken unholy glee in Mitt the Flip’s short career as a barber. Here is an example.
PoliticalProf thinks that focusing on the details of what happened over four decades ago misses the point. He thinks that the intervening four decades carry a lesson of their own:
In other words, I don’t sense that Mitt Romney has made much effort in his life to understand or even empathize with people who aren’t like him.
In a characteristically long and detailed post well-supported with citations, Chauncey Devega also sees and considers an empathy deficit. A nugget:
(snip)
Mitt Romney, prep school bully of the weak and vulnerable, corporate raider bully who takes pleasure in terminating employees, nominee of a political party of bullies and “real Americans,” and he who wants to be President of the United States, has made it abundantly clear that empathy is not a public virtue to be cultivated or encouraged.
Read both posts in full. Though conceived and published separately, they complement each other most eerily.
TSA Security Theatre 0
It is really all for show.
“Freedom Chocolate” 0
In my local rag, Darryl Lease has fun with Michelle Bachmann’s short-lived fling with Swiss citizenship:
The Swiss have universal health care, for crying out loud.
And they’re worse than the French about fighting wars. (I’ve long argued we should rename Swiss cheese “Freedom cheese.” Ditto chocolate.)
Read the rest. It’s quite good fun.
“Not Just for Breakfast Any More” 0
Wait for it.
“Just Make It Go Away” 0
Of course, if you can’t make homelessness go away, the next best thing seems to be to make the homeless just go away. Out of sight out of mind and all that . . . .
There’s an App for That 0
Will Durst explains how the Republican nomination race has been like a game of Angry Birds:
The object of Angry Birds is to use a slingshot to fling various flightless birds at flimsy houses built by egg-thieving green pigs. The object of the 2012 Republican primary race is, well, pretty much the same thing: to toss accusations and blame at the White House in order to steal independents from the Democrats. All while emitting unintelligible screeches, squeals and shrieks.
