Political Theatre category archive

Peter van Buren, author of We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People, tells of his experiences being intimidated investigate by the State Deparment’s Bureau of Diplomatic Security.

On the same day that more than 250,000 unredacted State Department cables hemorrhaged out onto the Internet, I was interrogated for the first time in my 23-year State Department career by State’s Bureau of Diplomatic Security (DS) and told I was under investigation for allegedly disclosing classified information. The evidence of my crime? A posting on my blog from the previous month that included a link to a WikiLeaks document already available elsewhere on the Internet.

As we sat in a small, gray, windowless room, resplendent with a two-way mirror, multiple ceiling-mounted cameras, and iron rungs on the table to which handcuffs could be attached, the two DS agents stated that the inclusion of that link amounted to disclosing classified material. In other words, a link to a document posted by who-knows-who on a public website available at this moment to anyone in the world was the legal equivalent of me stealing a Top Secret report, hiding it under my coat, and passing it to a Chinese spy in a dark alley.

Attempts to classify documents that are already public would seem somewhere between laughable and stupid, except that those attempts are backed by the life-crushing police power of the state.

Read the whole thing.

Via Contradict Me.

Shaun Mullen wonders how it got this way:

I am still having a difficult time getting my head around this, but it appears that today’s Republican Party is adamantly against abortions for the unborn, adamantly against health care for the newborn if their mother chooses not to have an abortion and lacks insurance, adamantly for letting an adult with serious health issues die if they lack insurance, and adamantly for executing people even under the flimsiest of evidence.

Have I got that right? Yes I do, but the question arises as to how the GOP got itself tied in such seemingly contradictory knots.

That’s easy: Obeisance to ideological purity no matter the circumstances, an unwillingness to listen to the views of others and a win-at-all-costs mentality as the GOP continues to devolve from a traditional political party to something resembling a religion.

Via Contradict Me.

Read Anne Laurie on Making a Stink in Public. A nugget:

The current GOP obsession with keeping the government from functioning uses Making A Stink in Public as its most powerful tactic, but if you listen to the Koch-bankrolled lobbyists, the Murdoch-bought media, and their wholly-owned (mostly) GOP legislators, it’s that Black guy in the White House who’s… Making A Stink in Public. Who gave him the right—the power—to stand up in public and argue against them?

The latest straw poll winner in the GOP is Herman Cain. From John Baur in my ex-local rag:

WATCHING Republicans stagger through their candidate-selection process is like watching kids at a birthday party play Pin the Tail on the Donkey.

They’re blindfolded, so you never know where the pin gets stuck.

How else to explain Saturday’s surprise win of pizza king Herman Cain in Florida’s straw poll?

The event itself was meaningless was a meaningless fundraiser in which voting came with a fee and few persons participated, but it reminded me of Dick Polman’s column on teabag litmus tests last week:

Perry certainly passes the right-wing litmus test on a huge range of issues – global warming is a fraud, Social Security is a con, regulation is bad – but conservatives are looking for someone who will toe The Line 100 percent of the time. And Perry soured his Florida debate listeners when he stood up for the ’01 Texas law that provides in-state college tuition rates to some children of illegal immigrants. For purists, the law that Perry signed is a no-no. Worse yet was the way he defended the law:

“If you say that we should not educate children who have come into our state for no other reason than they’ve been brought there by no fault of their own, I don’t think you have a heart. We need to be educating these children, because (otherwise) they will become a drag on our society.”

Two problems for Perry: (1) The tea-partying Floridians want to kick out the illegals, not educate them; as one straw-poller told Politico last night, “If they’re illegal, they need to get the hell out of America.” And (2), the kick-’em-out folks resented being told that they are heartless.

Litmus paper, in case you may have forgotten because of the adoption of that term by political reporters, is used for quick and dirty pH tests.

Litmus tests reveal that the Repubican base is acidly corrosive.

They claim it’s a satire of affirmative action:

A Facebook post announcing plans by a UC Berkeley Republican group to sell baked goods priced according to race, gender and ethnicity – “White/Caucasian” pastries for $2 and “Black/African American” pastries for 75 cents, for example – has drawn outrage on campus.

This sort of stuff is funny only through the lens of racism.

Otherwise, otherwise.

A snippet from Dick Polman’s comment on Thursday’s Republican debate provides supporting evidence (emphasis added)

There’s no point in devoting acres of space to the latest Republican debate, given the paucity of new material last night. It was akin to watching a predictable pulp-action summer movie, and by the third reel one’s eyes have long since glazed.

It was also predictable that the Republican debate audience would act out in some repulsive fashion, and so it did, this time booing a gay soldier who had volunteered to put his life on the line for his country. The gay soldier appeared on video – which was fortunate for the cowardly homophobes, because this way they could safely bark their bigotry without having to confront the soldier, and his thick biceps, live and in person.

Mike Littwin:

The reviews are in. And it’s now pretty much official: Rick Perry is, in fact, the Texas governor for those who think George W. Bush was too cerebral. (I don’t remember whose joke that is — it’s not mine, but I do like it.)

More at the link.

You really don’t need Jon Stewart to parody politicians. They parody themselves.

But Stewart does it so well.

Via Bob Cesca.

Amy Goodman thinks she has found his heirs:

Speaking of the Tea Party, Texas Gov. Rick Perry has caused a continuous fracas in the Republican presidential debates with his declaration that the U.S.’s revered Social Security system is a “Ponzi scheme.” Charles Ponzi was the con artist who swindled thousands in 1920 with a fraudulent promise for high returns on investments. A typical Ponzi scheme involves taking money from investors, then paying them off with money taken from new investors, rather than paying them from actual earnings.

Social Security is actually solvent, with a trust fund of more than $2.6 trillion. The real Ponzi scheme threatening the U.S. public is the voracious greed of Wall Street banks.

I interviewed one of the “Occupy Wall Street” protest organizers. David Graeber teaches at Goldsmiths, University of London, and has authored several books, most recently “Debt: The First 5,000 Years.” Graeber points out that, in the midst of the financial crash of 2008, enormous debts between banks were renegotiated. Yet only a fraction of troubled mortgages have gotten the same treatment.

Jennifer Abel reads to us from the ACLU database of complaints about TSA cops copping feels, and then points out that:

The explanation is simple: TSA policy is to focus on genitalia at the expense of the security checks they should be doing. Last week, the House subcommittee on homeland security said the TSA was to blame in the death of a teenage stowaway who hid in the wheel-well of a parked airplane. (If a thoughtless teenager can do it, a terrorist with a bomb can, too.) TSA also fired or suspended 28 baggage screeners in Honolulu who weren’t screening checked bags for explosives. Checking the cargo hold’s contents, checking the plane itself – all take a back seat to checking what’s in our underwear, because only the latter lets the TSA live up to the motto that was posted in its training center shortly after its founding: “Dominate. Intimidate. Control.”

For a surfeit of skeevy screening stories, follow the link.

I’m glad my road warrior days appear to be over.

Stephen Colbert discusses original sin and Rick Santorum.

No, they are two different discussions in the same segment, but the link seems appropriate.

Via Mano Singham.

A nice catch of tea bag logic by Mano Singham (emphasis added):

The concrete sound barriers erected along the highways to shield nearby residents from noise were crumbling long before the advertised 20-year life expectancy was reached, presumably because inferior concrete had been used. Repairing them will cost the Ohio transportation department more than $1 million per mile, money that is hard to come by these days when governments are being squeezed by the demand for tax cuts.

What struck me was the comment of one resident who said, “It looks terrible. I know they don’t have the money, and I don’t want my taxes to go up to fix it. But they need to do something.”

And I want a Lamborghini.

Richard Wolff, writing at the Guardian, considers Republican claims that expecting those who can most afford shoulder some of the cost of governance is somehow “class war.” That’s another misdirection play designed to distract the discourse from economic fact.

Here’s a nugget:

Neither logic nor evidence supports either claim. The charge of class war is particularly obtuse. Consider simply these two facts. First, at the end of the second world war, for every dollar Washington raised in taxes on individuals, it raised $1.50 in taxes on business profits. Today, that ratio is very different: for every dollar Washington gets in taxes on individuals, it takes 25 cents in taxes on business. In short, the last half century has seen a massive shift of the burden of federal taxation off business and onto individuals.

Dick Polman comments. A snippet:

How tiresomely predictable. While President Obama was readying his tax-the-rich deficit-reduction plan for a Monday rollout, the GOP were already howling on the Sunday shows about the dreaded CW. In the words of budget maven and aspiring Medicare-killer Paul Ryan, “Class warfare will simply divide this country more.” He was duly echoed by Republican brethren like Sen. Lindsey Graham, who remarked, “When you pick one area of the economy and you say, ‘we’re going to tax those (rich) people because most people are not those people, that’s class warfare.”

This has been the GOP’s conditioned response to tax-burden issues since around 1992, when party wordsmiths began to own the phrase via frequent repetition. What’s amazing, of course, is that the Republicans have been allowed to get away with it – given the fact that the GOP’s rich clientele has been incrementally getting richer at the expense of everyone else. If there has indeed been “class warfare” in this country during the past three decades, the rich have already won. They have already staged their victory parade, brandishing a surrender document signed by most of their fellow citizens.

At least, not in Wingnut World:

David Lewis, a 26 year old Tea Party activist believes the man he is mounting a primary challenge against, Speaker of the House Rep. John Boehner (R-OH), is a “socialist.”

In Wingnut World, “Socialist” is just another empty dirty word, something bad to say about one’s opponent.

It has nothing to do with the state’s ownership of the means of production.

Empty words appeal to empty heads.

Afterthought:

Indeed, in Wingnut World, “socialism” appears to have become a synonym of “compassion,” something else to eschewed in that universe.