Political Theatre category archive

What was old is new again.

There’s always the fear in white America that their grip on economic . . . power is slipping.

Warning: NSFW.

Afterthought:

I never expected to post stuff like this. I also never expected the Republican Party to develop a fetish for vicariously sticking things up women.

Via The Richmonder.

At Asia Times, Pepe Escobar channels a drone’s visit to its shrink. Oh! the agony!

A nugget:

Dr Puant: But there must be a problem, otherwise you wouldn’t be here.

Drone patient: That’s right, Doc. And that concerns all those miscreants saying we’re sort of, like, illegal killers. C’mon, we are model workers! We never complain. We never sleep. We don’t engage in commie protests. These people don’t seem to have listened to my mentor Mr Brennan [White House counter-terrorism advisor John Brennan].

Noz has a somewhat different perspective on Mitt the Flip:

romney’s chronic etch-a-sketch moments are generally portrayed as opportunistic. but the more i think about it, the more i think it’s just cowardly. the latest example:

“It’s not that the campaign cared whether Ric Grenell was gay,” one Republican adviser said. “They believed this was a nonissue. But they didn’t want to confront the religious right.”

romney will be the GOP nominee. the religious right is not going to vote for obama. standing up to the religious right might even help him to win over independents, the people who will actually decide the general election. and yet mitten is so scared of making christian conservatives mad that he’s willing to toss overboard an advisor whose expertise he values.

In fairness (Noz is nothing if not fair), he goes on to point out that political cowardice is not limited by party lines.

The Republican preoccupation with sex is downright creepy.

The Republican subservience to the politics of hate has been on display this week as Mitt the Flip flipped off a newly hired aide for being gay.

Dick Polman calls the Flipper out:

It’s clear that the bigots in “the base” don’t know any better. And it’s clear that Romney doesn’t know any better; he has few fixed convictions and he quavers like a hunk of jelly. But what about Grenell? What possessed him to believe that he could be a foreign policy spokesman for a party that continues to aid and abet such toxic intolerance? That long tenure at the United Nations blinded him to the realities of the contemporary GOP. Now he knows.

Meanwhile, Leonard Pitts, Jr., citing this speech, skewers the notion that Jesus missed his word and actually meant to say, “Loathe they neighbor”:

Vines’ speech is a masterwork of scriptural exegesis and a marvel of patient logic, slicing and dicing with surgical precision the claim that homophobia is God ordained. So effective is the video that after viewing it, Sandra Delemares a Christian blogger from the United Kingdom who had, for years, spoken in staunch opposition to same sex marriage, wrote that it “revolutionised” her thinking.

Vines points out, for instance, that the frequently quoted condemnation (homosexuality is an “abomination”) from the Old Testament lawbook of Leviticus has no application to Christians, who are bound by the teachings of the New Testament. He explains that St. Paul’s admonitions about the “effeminate” and “abusers of themselves with mankind” stem from modern mis-translations of ancient Greek terminology.

. . . and Eric Zorn muses on the Flipper’s subservience to bigotry, predicting he will have more opportunities to show his independence from the hate:

The good news for Romney, however, is that as this campaign season rolls on, the cranks and haters now grudgingly lining up behind him will offer plenty more opportunities for Sister Souljah moments.

Zorn left out this bit: pigs, wings.

Drones go to college.

Why do I keep remembering the scene in The Matrix in which the drones dumped Neo’s body out of its pod?

Artist: Michael D’Antuono.

Via Contradict Me.

This is a little bit dated, but the core still rings true, he said, merrily mixing metaphors.

Fighting robots from the skies:

Chancey Devega observes (emphasis in the original)

Ironically, the very same conservatives who embrace and amplify Zimmerman’s Hispanic identity for the purposes of smearing Trayvon Martin, share a political worldview that is explicitly xenophobic and hostile to non-whites. This reality has been repeatedly demonstrated by Right-wing populist rhetoric such as “real America,” and “take our country back,” its adherents’ support of such conspiratorial fictions as birtherism, and their embrace of racial profiling, deportation of “illegal” aliens, as well as the elimination of Ethnic and Chicano studies programs in Texas and Arizona.

For the conservatives who have embraced George Zimmerman as a martyr and victim, his racial status is circumstantial, contingent, and wholly dependent on the political whims and needs of a given moment. Ultimately, if George Zimmerman was accused of hunting down and killing either a white teenage boy (or God forbid, a young white woman!) in exactly the same circumstances, his “Hispanic” identity would be turned into a liability and a sin, his honorary whiteness quickly and inexorably revoked.

Graphic via Contradict Me.

Via Raw Story.

. . . may still be justice.

FOR THE SECOND time this year, a group of accused Occupy Philly protesters walked out of court free and clear after a Philadelphia judge on Thursday dismissed all charges against them.

“I feel like this is a good day for the First Amendment and for the right of people to speak out against economic injustice,” Dustin Slaughter, 32, said after leaving the courtroom the Criminal Justice Center.

(snip)

The lone prosecution witness, police Capt. William Fisher, who was head of the Civil Affairs Unit at the time, described the ensuing 3 1/2-hour protest as “a mob scene” of 300 to 400 people exhibiting an “air of animosity.”

“Air of animosity” my anatomy.

They were arrested for being.

Unlock the magic now (warning: NSFW).

Making somebody more hungry . . . is not a way to end their poverty.