Mitt Watch: What Sandy Tells Us About The Candidate And His Party

Oct 31st, 2012

UPDATE 4pm CST 11/1/12: In this piece, I made mention of Gov. Christie's very public praise of the President's management of the disaster response. The GOP has begun to savage him for it. That didn't take long.

Hurricane Sandy and its aftermath are perfectly legitimate political issues. That anyone would argue otherwise is ridiculous.

Chait puts it best:

"What you are going to see over the next week is an overt effort by Democrats to politicize the issue of disaster response. They're right to do it. Conservatives are already complaining about this, but the attempt to wall disaster response off from politics in the aftermath of a disaster is an attempt to insulate Republicans from the consequences of their policies."

The GOP has directly targeted our national disaster response mechanisms, having gone so far as to threaten a total government shutdown last year while seeking a nearly forty percent cut to first responders. The outright elimination of FEMA has become a central position among the party's leadership.

Newt Watch - Not EVERY Location Is A "Photo-Op"

Jan 12th, 2012

Beating all previous entries for a potential "Holy Shit, What The Fuck Was Newt Gingrich Thinking," award, comes this stunner via Vanity Fair. This is a professional photograph, posed and shot intentionally and provided to the magazine via Gingrich Productions. I am not trying to use this as bait on any supposed grounds of anti-Semitism.

I don't believe that is what is at play, here.

However, I am wondering if this might not be evidence of a purer sociopathology than I had previously suspected given his obvious narcissism. Think about it... would you smile for your official photographer in front of the gates of World War Two's most notorious DEATH CAMP?!

The Fine Art Of Propaganda

Jan 3rd, 2011

Peter Maass writes in The New Yorker about one of the great photo-ops during the early days of the Iraq War and it's manipulation by American media outlets: 

"The toppling of Saddam’s statue turned out to be emblematic of primarily one thing: the fact that American troops had taken the center of Baghdad. That was significant, but everything else the toppling was said to represent during repeated replays on television—victory for America, the end of the war, joy throughout Iraq—was a disservice to the truth."