Reading the Lincoln Project Manifesto in The New York Times is instructive, of more than this collection of carefully framed political cliches, by political technocrats, who make it their business to write evocative and high-sounding rhetoric for use in campaigns: ‘A Thousand Points of Light’ ,’Compassionate Conservatism’. Such is the power of these Kitsch Meisters . The  first three paragraphs are collective effort to sound the right notes.

Patriotism and the survival of our nation in the face of the crimes, corruption and corrosive nature of Donald Trump are a higher calling than mere politics. As Americans, we must stem the damage he and his followers are doing to the rule of law, the Constitution and the American character.

That’s why we are announcing the Lincoln Project, an effort to highlight our country’s story and values, and its people’s sacrifices and obligations. This effort transcends partisanship and is dedicated to nothing less than preservation of the principles that so many have fought for, on battlefields far from home and within their own communities.

This effort asks all Americans of all places, creeds and ways of life to join in the seminal task of our generation: restoring to this nation leadership and governance that respects the rule of law, recognizes the dignity of all people and defends the Constitution and American values at home and abroad.

…

It prepares the reader for this pronouncement by John Weaver in this Financial Times news report:

“We are like the French resistance. We are blowing up the supply lines,” said John Weaver, a veteran Republican political consultant and one of the co-founders of the group, which is named after President Abraham Lincoln. 

Like most History Made to Measure it is hyperbolic and self-congratulatory.  The former political advisers, place their wager on the power of propaganda, uttered in the present, about a re-constructed past, that has been laundered for easier consumption by readers in this political moment. Not a very sophisticated exercise in the politics of convenience. But it is awash in Fourth of July speechifying in all its insufferability. Lincoln might be the featured player here, if it weren’t for this coterie’s amour-propre.   

What is left of this political equation but  to frame my argument in more contemporaneous terms?  This reader can only wonder at the inaction of the members of  this Bush coterie, when The Tea Party took over the Republican Party? They were the immediate precursors on Trump and Trumpism. A vexing question: where were these Lincoln understudies to oppose that irrationalism ? that now present themselves as the representatives of  an Enlightened Republican Party!

What might the reader think of their support for a cognitively deficient candidate like Joe Biden, who has trouble constructing a comprehensible simple sentence -what can be expected of him in a debate? 

Look to the Lincoln Project as the spokes persons for the present ‘Political Center’ in America: the alliance between the Neo-Liberals and the Neo-Conservatives, who have been the active agents in their own political eclipse. Who now fret and strut on the political stage, as if they were the protagonists in a Shakespearean history play, rather than a television melodrama, in the black and white world of another America.

Political Observer

https://www.ft.com/content/9d64b55a-0cbe-4e27-b546-6a4cf7c9345b

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July 06, 2020

P.S. Not to forget, this team of Public Relations specialists, and the vile Neo-Con David Frum, were the advocates/apologists for the Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq! That continue to this day. Such is the toxic legacy of the Bush Dynasty, that now seeks to white-wash these crimes, by its courageous stand against the Trump Political Irrationalism, that they helped to birth.