Political Theatre category archive

At the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, MIT professor John Tirman wonders why dead civilians in far-away places with strange sounding names become nonentities in American wars. He identifies several factors, which I have extracted below.

Why the American silence on our wars’ main victims?

• A large role is played by what cultural historian Richard Slotkin calls our “frontier myth”–by which righteous violence is used to subdue or annihilate the savages of whatever land we’re trying to conquer
• The frontier myth is also steeped in racism, which is deeply embedded in American culture’s derogatory depictions of the enemy. Such belittling makes it all the easier to put foreigners at risk of violence.
• More than 30 years ago, social psychologists developed the “just world” theory, which argues that humans naturally assume that the world should be orderly and rational. When our “just world” is disrupted, we tend to explain it away as an aberration.

Follow the link for background on his reasoning and a fuller explanation of each one.

Rick Perry, independent son of the West, continues his attempts to have the evul fedrul guvmint pull his chestnuts out of the fire. Having had his case thrown out of court once, he’s returning to the fedrul trough:

On Friday, U.S. District Court Judge John Gibney ruled that Perry, Newt Gingrich and other candidates who failed to make the cut waited too long to pursue their legal challenges, which were brought as ballot printing was getting underway and the mailing of absentee ballots was about to commence.

However, Gibney said Perry and the other candidates would like (sic; probably meant “likely”–ed.) have prevailed on their claim that a Virginia requirement that ballot petition circulators be Virginia residents violates the Constitution.

In a motion filed at 7 A.M. Sunday with the Richmond-based U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit, Perry’s legal team argues that it would have been too speculative for them to file suit before Perry failed to make the 10,000 signature threshold last month. Perry asks that his name be place on the March 6 ballot or, at a minimum, that the printing of ballots be suspended until his lawsuit can be resolved.

It appears that, in Texas, the grapes are not only bigger, they are also more sour.

Afterthought:

I doubt the Virginia voting laws represent any kind of ideal. Remember that the place is currently run by Republicans, who are hostile to voting, and has a history, as do other Jim Crow states, of restricting suffrage.

Nevertheless, I must delight in watching Wild Wild Westman running to the Feds for help.

Via Balloon Juice.

Meghan Daum sees parallels between the Haredim of Israel, who have lately been in the news for tormenting school girls for not meeting their dress code, and Little Ricky. She muses about why the punditocracy continues to take Little Ricky seriously, then ascribes it to the mythic power in Republican circles of our own ultra-orthodox Christian sects.

Why does Santorum persist with his rhetoric? Well, in fairness, he’s a conservative (and an intensely literal-minded) Catholic, and he seems to believe most of it personally, even if hardly anyone else does. But zealots in Israel believe it’s OK to spit at schoolgirls, even if hardly anyone else does. In both cases, the problem is what happens to democratic principles when such personal beliefs intersect public policy.

In the U.S., we too often grant the noisiest, most threatening zealots too much power to set the agenda. We’re complicit in creating the illusion that religious fundamentalism is so rabid and so monolithic that we must appease it in order to keep it from turning against us.

Sincerity is not ipso facto a virtue, though some would have it so.

A sincere whack job is still a whack job.

The Mitt Romney Blues.

Listen here.

Shaun Mullen considers the task facing journalists, at least the ones willing to commit actual journalism:

If I was still directing campaign coverage, which as an editor I did in too many presidential elections to count, I would call one of my stand-up meetings (they go much quicker when people aren’t sitting) and announce that:

“It’s time to find out what Mitt Romney would do as president.”

The reaction would be a room full of pained faces because Romney has been on every side of every issue of consequence since his failed 2008 run and he least of all knows what he would do as president.

On the Media analyzes the media’s fascination with Mitt Romney’s dog carrier, From the website:

In 1983, Mitt Romney took his family on a road trip from Boston to Canada, with the family dog Seamus strapped to the roof of the car. Almost 5 years ago, the Seamus story made it into a Boston Globe story, and to this day, the anecdote of Seamus the dog continues to haunt Romney. Bob speaks to Boston Globe Magazine writer Neil Swidey, the person to first dig up the Seamus story.

Follow the link to listen.

Aside:

Frankly, I think the story has staying power because the idea of strapping a dog in a carrier to the top of a car is so outre that most persons would not have thought of it, let alone considered it seriously.

One of the commenters at the website (the comments are mostly–and surprisingly–sane) has this to say:

I wonder if the host of this segment is a Romney fan and/or has never had a dog he liked very much.

He spoke about the dog carrier as if it was a custom built carrier for car rooftops and that this misunderstanding is the root of the story’s staying power. . . .

Try doing some research (like a Google shopping search) and you’ll find that there is NO SUCH THING AS A “ROOFTOP DOG CARRIER!”
Never was.

Leonard Pitts, Jr., commenting on Little Ricky’s reception from college students in New Hampshire.

You will recall that they booed his homophobic homilies.

There is a historical pattern to the bigotry of social conservatives. They use terms of moral Armageddon against the freedoms sought by some despised or condescended-to other, whether it be a woman wanting to work outside the home, a Jew seeking to join a country club, or an African American trying to get home on a city bus. Then the freedoms are won, and people – even socially conservative ones – realize the world kept spinning after all. Armageddon did not come. Only change.

Take two minutes out of your day and listen to the numbers shrink from “hundreds of thousands” to “thousands.”

(Warning: Short commercial at beginning.)

Via TPM.

According to these folks. I think the quiz might have skewed things a little (but not much).

Note that they are not using the same definition of “libertarianism” as do the Paulistas. From the results page (emphasis added):

The usual understanding of anarchism as a left wing ideology does not take into account the neo-liberal “anarchism” championed by the likes of Ayn Rand, Milton Friedman and America’s Libertarian Party, which couples social Darwinian right-wing economics with liberal positions on most social issues. Often their libertarian impulses stop short of opposition to strong law and order positions, and are more economic in substance (ie no taxes) so they are not as extremely libertarian as they are extremely right wing.

My guess would be that my high score on the “libertarian” scale came because of my strong views on civil liberties and privacy. Furthermore, I sometimes selected seemingly contradictory answers from one question to another, because a question said “most important value,” rather than “important value.” The word “most” could change my answer from “agree” to “disagree.”

I can’t link to my results page. As near as I can tell, the results page is dynamic, based on one’s answers to the quiz, so, to see their explication, you’ll have to take their quiz.

Via PoliticalProf.

Via C&L.

David Shuster analyzes Mitt the Flip’s required disclosure forms and divines why the Flipster won’t release his tax returns.

Attack of the Newts.

Even considering the source, it’s worth watching.

Via Andrew Sullivan.

Addendum:

Shaun Mullen has excerpts. If you don’t want to watch the video, hop over and read them.

Jimmy Kimmel explains how gay marriage will lead to the end of humanity.

Via Andrew Sullivan.

Last night, a couple of us started wondering about Ron Paul’s fan base among the twenty-somethings. (The other person in that conversation is of that generation.)

We wondered at their inability to see the big picture of his destructive radicalism, which is founded in the states rights credo that has served as a smokescreen for exploiting minorities, women, and the poor throughout the sweep of U. S. history.

(The cynical suggest that they hear “legalize drugs,” at which point their brains cease to function. I doubt it’s quite so simple. I think it more likely that, upon hearing the Galtian credo, “Every man for himself, and the devil take the hindmost!” they fail to realize that many of them will end up amongst the taken.)

Bob Cesca, whom I cite here often because he is a realist (he knows that, to attain the ideal, you must start by attaining the doable), just posted an excellent piece on Paul and the Paulistas. A nugget:

But a million Elvis fans can’t be wrong. Or can they? In other words, Ron Paul supporters are easily some of the most exuberant, die-hard, overzealous political activists around, and you’ll probably get a hearty sampling of that zealotry in the comments below this post. Nevertheless, the perpetual question about a movement like this is: how can so many people be so completely delusional?

Follow the link for his answer to that question.

Via BartCop.

At the Guardian, Lizz Winstead explores the Republican candidates’ skeevy preoccupation with the sex lives of others simply by quoting them.

Hoo, boy.