Political Theatre category archive

Eric Alterman on the shibboleth of “some people say” and the cult of balance:

Herman Cain has “suspended” his campaign, while continuing to say, “Look, I’m the victim here.”

Josh Marshall explains that “suspending” a campaign has a legal meaning: the money train can keep chugging.

You’ll note that Herman Cain didn’t drop out of the presidential campaign. He “suspended” his campaign. And that’s not just a spinny weasel word. It has significant campaign finance implications. For one, it means he can continue to raise money.

DougJ at Balloon Juice cuts to the quick on the current and altogether fabricated kerfuffle about whether or not the Democratic Party is “abandoning the white working class,” pointing out the difference between “effect” and “cause” (emphasis added):

I don’t know if people vote lived experience or what they see on their teevees, but he’s (David Brookes, quoted earlier in the post–ed.) actually right that the working class votes against incumbent presidents when the economy is bad. And it’s bad right now, especially for the middle-to-lower-middle-class. One of the reasons black and brown working class people will vote Democrat anyway is that the Republican party openly hates black and brown people. Also too one of the reasons the white working class votes Republican, no matter the economy, is that the Republican party openly hates black and brown people.

The Republican Party’s odious Southern Strategy continues apace.

Follow the link for DougJ’s take-down of David Brooks’s contribution to the discourse.

At Psychology Today, Bella DePaulo reveals the lies that liars tell themselves to excuse their lies.

The article is essential to understanding Republican talking points.

Via Radio Free Oz.

Read the story of the One Percent at BartBlog:

• Part One.
• Part Two

.

More here.

Marc Pitzke of Der Spiegel looks at the Republican aspirants for the presidential nomination and is not amused.

No mainstream American pundit would dare be so frank.

A snippet:

They lie. They cheat. They exaggerate. They bluster. They say one idiotic, ignorant, outrageous thing after another. They’ve shown such stark lack of knowledge — political, economic, geographic, historical — that they make George W. Bush look like Einstein and even cause their fellow Republicans to cringe.

Tough times demand tough and smart minds. But all these dopes have to offer are ramblings that insult the intelligence of all Americans — no matter if they are Democrats, Republicans or neither of the above. Yet just like any freakshow, this one would be unthinkable without a stage (in this case, the media, strangling itself with all its misunderstood “political correctness” and “objectivity”) and an audience (the party base, which this year seems to have suffered a political lobotomy).

And so the farce continues. The more mind-boggling its incarnations, the happier the US media are to cheer first one clown and then the next, elevating and then eliminating “frontrunners” in reliable news cycles of about 45 days.

Who needs anti-American propaganda (remember “anti-American propaganda”?) with these folks in the news?

Jeremy Sherman, blogging at Psychology Today, tries to understand Herman Cain:

What do you get when you cross a fragile emotional desire-driven creature with an ability to reason and speak. You get humans, creatures who when unfettered by conscience serve up whatever reasons and speech are most likely to sooth their emotions and get them what they desire, creatures that can pull out their ass any sanctimonious moral argument why they should get what they want, creatures that can rationalize their way out of any corner and never admit to their many double standards. You get creatures fully committed to attribution error, creatures that blame everyone else for their failures by standards they won’t apply to himself. You get a Herman Cain . . . .

Dick Polman considers the potshots that the aspirants for the Republican presidential keep aiming at each other, in violation of Reagan’s “Eleventh Commandment”: “Thou shalt not speak ill of a fellow Republican.”

It’s a delicious collection of calumny.

A snippet:

. . . perhaps the most important is the ongoing shootout between old Romney and new Romney. When Ronald Reagan invoked his 11th Commandment, he probably never anticipated a scenario in which a frontrunner would essentially speak ill of his former self. Or former selves. While denying he needs to do any such thing.

More like this:

A Norfolk judge said a man, arrested for filming a protest even after police told him to stop, could not be convicted of disorderly conduct.

(snip)

“Law enforcement personnel need to understand that they do not operate secretly when performing their duties in public places,” ACLU of Virginia Dunn Fellow Thomas Okuda Fitzpatrick said. “They can and should be observed by all of us, and they can be filmed. We hope this case will send a message to police across the state that everyone has a First Amendment right to take pictures in public places-including pictures of the police.”

Details at the link.

Megan Kelly on Fox News:

The pepper the cops are using on the Occupiers is like a derivative of real pepper. It’s a food product essentially.

Via BartCop.

Mike Littwin considers the rise of the Gingrinch. A snippet:

Here’s how desperate conservatives are for a not-Romney, Gingrich, who burned out sometime in the late-’90s, is leading in polls despite having said — and hold on to your seats here — something semi-reasonable on illegal immigration.

That became headline news because to be a Republican moderate these days on immigration means you don’t want to turn the entire country into Alabama.

Gingrich said only what everyone knows — that we’re not going to round up 11 million to 12 million illegal immigrants and deport them. Therefore, there needs to be a path toward legalizing those with real roots here.

Follow the link for the rest. It’s worth the three minutes.

Dick Polman discusses the inability of the press to call out lies, trying to figure out why they won’t state the obvious.

A nugget (emphasis added):

You’re probably familiar with this (Romney–ed.) ad, which was aimed at the New Hampshire electorate. The marquee moment was a sound bite from Barack Obama – “If we keep talking about the economy, we’re going to lose” – which suggested that he’s seeking to distance himself from the recession on the eve of the ’12 festivities. But he wasn’t talking about his re-election campaign at all. The clip was actually from 2008 – and Obama was quoting a John McCain aide who had contended in an interview that McCain should distance himself from the George W. Bush recession.

In other words, Romney’s key clip was demonstrably false. But that’s not how it was generally reported.

A CNN tweet: “Democrats say new Romney ad distorts Obama’s words.” There it is, the doctrine of false equivalence/balance. Romney makes a charge, “Democrats say” something in rebuttal, and all charges are equal. This is what Wicker used to complain about. He said that, all too often, the press takes refuge in “statements delivered by official spokesmen,” without weighing the facts to determine whether one side is more credible than the other.

When I was a young ‘un, being “objective” meant trying to separate true from false.

Feeling the heat:

Facebook users who “share” or “like” content that insults the Thai monarchy are committing a crime, Minister of Information and Communication Technology Anudith Nakornthap said Tuesday.

(snip)

Insulting a monarch is a crime known as lese majeste, and Thailand’s laws against it are the most severe in the world. Even repeating the details of an alleged offense , such as on social media sites like Facebook , is illegal under the lese majeste law and the related Computer Crimes Act, “which says that spreading illegal content , either directly or indirectly , is a crime,” Anudith said.