Newspaper Reader, and other possible guises!
Mar 16, 2026
Editor: Reader here is a collection on my comments on Mr. Luce’s comments over time!
https://www.ft.com/content/f69b4b68-55d0-11e7-9fed-c19e2700005f
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Political Reporter riffs on a theme from Edward Luce
Posted on February 27, 2017 by stephenkmacksd
Can the reader of his latest essay wonder, has Mr. Luce discovered the 99%? If so, it qualifies as a belated victory for the Scruffy Hippiedom of Occupy Wall Street! So much for my lapse into the hyperbolic. Mr. Luce carefully lays out the likely next steps in the Trump/Bannon project of Economic Nationalism: this notion reeks of the most unsavory historical connotations.
Over the weekend the New Democrats have chosen the respectable Neo-Liberal Tom Perez to lead the Party. For some very informative background on the contest between Perez and Ellison see this Intercept report:
DNC Chair Candidate Tom Perez’s Bank-Friendly Record Could Kneecap the Democratic Party
Why would I mention this election in regards to the Trump advocacy of an Economic Nationalist Agenda? Mr. Perez is the candidate of the Clinton/Brazil/Wassermann-Schultz, not forgetting Leon Panetta , faction of the New Democrats: a perpetuation of the ‘Old Guard’. The political corollary of the Pelosi/ Schumer congressional leadership.
How can the New Democrats hope to even mount an opposition to the Trump /Bannon political project, when they are still beholden to the utterly corrupt Clinton/Brazil/Wassermann-Schultz leadership? Who have willfully discarded the New Deal mantle of reform, in favor of being New Democrats, which is in fact a cosmetically enhanced Reaganism.
If the election of Perez tells the reader anything, it is that the New Democrats will be defeated in 2018, and if they persist in their addiction to the Clinton Neo-Liberalism, a defeat in 2020 is also very likely.
The formation of the ‘Resistance’, that has its root in the Clinton Apologists endless propagandizing, in the hope of Impeaching Trump, seems very unlikely with both Houses of Congress controlled by Republicans. The desperation of those apologists is such that Rachel Maddow condemned Jill Stein for her silence on the Russian Question:
Even given the Russian/Trump connection, and a pending congressional investigation, led by Republicans. Trump seems to be playing into the hands of the ‘resisters’ by his banning of the New York Times,CNN and Politico from White House briefings.Trump, the Peronist, doesn’t even rely on other political actors in creating exploitable political chaos, he creates it himself by banning reporters, and posting on twitter.
Yet the New Democrats refuse to confront the fact that the Neo-Liberal Age is over, in the 9th year of the watershed of the Economic Calamity of 2008. Reform or die, that is the stark choice that the New Democrats refuse to acknowledge. Could their adamant refusal to confront reality be the predictor of the rise of the Greens?
Political Reporter
https://www.ft.com/content/7dec9a66-faa2-11e6-9516-2d969e0d3b65
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https://www.ft.com/content/e63646c4-1962-11e7-a53d-df09f373be87
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Posted on March 21, 2019 by stephenkmacksd
Headline: Magical thinking crosses party lines in America
Sub-headline: The left may prefer white magic to Donald Trump’s black, but everyone is dabbling
Mr. Luce wastes no time calling to account the New Democrats for their lackadaisical attitude toward Trump. Yet this elides from the political picture the responsibility of both Parties and Pundits, like Luce, in their long-term advocacy for the Neo-Liberal Swindle, and its aftermath from the 2008 Crash to the dismal political present present.Trump is a product of this political/economic catastrophe.
Yet in this thicket of Political Metaphysics, that lapses into Occult jabber, that is unintentionally comic, Luce fails to ask the salient question: where is the money coming from to support this crowded field of candidates?
The New Democrats, fully under the thumb of the Clinton coterie, not to speak of AIPAC, don’t have an inexhaustible supply of money to waste on these candidates. But to create the fiction of choice might that money be spent upon such candidates, as the in-or-too of lending that fiction plausibility? Also keep in mind the willful destruction of campaign finance reform orchestrated by Citizens United and Justice Roberts, champion of stare decisis ?
While after some maladroit stage management , a specialty of Mrs. Clinton and her minions , she will enter as the compromise candidate that offers the best chance to win in 2020. The only real problem with this sketch of a possible scenario is that Sen. Sanders, and his coterie, represent a real danger to this possible coronation of Hillary. So the imperative of attacking Sanders must begin as soon as possible, in sum, The Bernie Bros must be resuscitated and or re-imagined for this campaign.
In his haste to write his column, Mr. Luce misses an opportunity to think and imagine what might be plausible in an actual American Politics. In favor of a failed, not to speak of a maladroit Hegelian pastiche: Luce should stop reading the Straussian fabulist Fukuyama!
Political Observer
https://www.ft.com/content/cc30e206-4a6c-11e9-8b7f-d49067e0f50d
Polemic is a discourse of conflict, whose effect depends on a delicate balance between the requirements of truth and the enticements of anger, the duty to argue and the zest to inflame. Its rhetoric allows, even enforces, a certain figurative licence. Like epitaphs in Johnson’s adage, it is not under oath.
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edward.luce@ft.com on The Republican’s patriarchal bubble. Political Observer comments
Posted on September 20, 2018 by stephenkmacksd
Headline: Brett Kavanaugh and the Republicans’ patriarchal bubble
Sub-headline: Party’s fight to approve Supreme Court nominee risks further alienation of female voters
Quite surprised that Mr. Luce has read the 1970 Feminist classic ‘Patriarchal Attitudes: Women in Society’ by Eva Figes. I still have my paperback copy that I bought at the Compton College bookstore in the early years of that decade.
As with his earlier essay Mr. Luce continues to frame his comments on Kavanaugh and the Republicans in an eternal political present, with the briefest nod to Kavanaugh’s reactionary political history. Anti-Patriarchy is the rhetorical ‘actor’ that is at the root of the Kavanaugh opposition, as argued by Luce. Trump’s growing unpopularity with women voters is another convenient framing employed by Mr. Luce. Yet the record of the almost wholesale Dixiecrat Migration, from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party, after the passage of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act provides part of the answer to the ‘why’ of that racism, misogyny, homophobia and a generalized xenophobia that now dominate the Republican Party. Nixon’s ‘Southern Strategy’ and Reagan’s notorious Neshoba County Fair speech, that opened his 1980 run for the presidency are just two examples of this. The Party of Lincoln has been supplanted, by a Republican Party, that willfully cast aside Lincoln, in favor of its newest member’s racism and misogyny, that defined the Dixiecrat’s identity politics, and in due course the seductive mirage of Free Market Economics.
Political Observer
https://www.ft.com/content/17c43268-bcab-11e8-8274-55b72926558f
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Edward Luce on the ‘Mueller Report’. Political Observer comments
Posted on March 25, 2019 by stephenkmacksd
The sub-headline begins the inauspicious essay from Mr. Luce, in a Shakespearean allusion. The headline writers relied on their elite educations to provide the necessary garnish to Luce’s unalloyed hero worship of former FBI director Mueller.
Trump will feel dangerously vindicated — when you strike at a king be sure to kill him
A sample of Luce’s Hero Worship, a latter day Carlyle:
Spare a thought for Robert Mueller. He wrapped up an exhaustive investigation within two years of being asked to do so — easily beating his predecessors. Moreover, he stuck resolutely to his brief. Unlike Kenneth Starr, who expanded his probe into the Clintons’ failed real estate deal in Arkansas to include sex in the White House with an intern, Mr Mueller avoided fishing expeditions. He ran an operation with zero leaks. By any measure he embodied integrity and diligence in a town sorely deficient in both. Yet he managed to disappoint both wings of US politics.
In the Age of Trump Mr. Mueller is the yardstick by which all other political actors are measured. This is political desperation wedded to a deadline: vulgar melodrama ,the stuff of the small black and white screen of 1952:
Mr Mueller is indeed “America’s straightest arrow”.
Never fear the Party Line of Putin as The New Stalin makes its appearance with a warning that Russian Interference in American Elections future is a stark reality that needs to be faced!
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By the same token, an outsized role was conferred on Vladimir Putin as the evil genius who robbed Hillary Clinton of the presidency. There were large dollops of evidence supporting both views.
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Likewise, Mr Mueller proved the Russians interfered in the 2016 election — as they have tried to do in other democracies. That threat still exists. Mr Trump publicly requested Russia’s help and Russia obliged.It could happen again. Washington has done almost nothing to strengthen its electoral infrastructure since 2016.
Compare the Hero Worship of Mueller by Luce, with David Bromwich’s Hero Worship of Comey in The London Review of Books of August 9, 2018:
Comey’s memoir has now surpassed the combined sales of Michael Wolff’s portrait of the Trump White House, Fire and Fury, and Hillary Clintons’s election elegy What Happened. The book, written in an idiom identical to the one he uses in interviews and press briefings, is clearly the work of an un-ghosted author, and it contains passages most unusual for an official memoir:
There is a place I have visited on the coast of North Carolina where two barrier islands come close together. In the narrow passageway between them, the waters of the Atlantic Ocean meet the waters of the huge and shallow sound that lies behind the islands. There is turbulence in that place and waves appear to break even though no land is visible. I imagine that the leaders of the Department of Justice stand at that spot, between the turbulent waters of the political world and the placid waters of the apolitical sound. Their job is to respond to the political imperatives of the president and the voters who elected him, while also protecting the apolitical work of the thousands of agents, prosecutors, and staff who make up the bulk of the institution. So long as the leaders understand the turbulence, they can find their footing. If they stumble, the ocean water overruns the sound and the department has become just another political organ. Its independent role in American life has been lost and the guardians of justice have drowned.
This depth of formal piety cannot be faked; the passage shows the burden (as Comey sees it) of maintaining constitutional and legal restraints on Donald Trump.
https://www.lrb.co.uk/2018/08/09/david-bromwich/american-breakdown
The record of the FBI is one of criminality and mendacity pioneered by the execrable J. Edgar Hoover, that was continued by his successors Mueller and Comey: the FBI Crime Lab scandal just one of the many demonstrated coverups and incompetencies wedded to the lies of the FBI. The desperation experienced by The Midwives of Trump, like Luce and Bromwich, in the Age of Trump, that they helped to birth is thought never to be entertained.
Also Mr. Luce giving credence to the ‘Russian Interference’ lie is that it provides political cover for the Clinton/Clapper/Brennan coterie, and their political allies like MSNBC, Maddow, Schiff and a host of fellow travelers, as the in-order-too of fomenting a New Cold War, based on a self-serving series of political lies. Bret Stephens enunciates the New Party Line:
This sounds like Obama saying that we need is ‘to put the past behind us’, that was his rationalization for not prosecuting the Wall Street Thieves who funded his campaign. Or Gerald Ford’s pardoning of Nixon, to spare the country the ordeal of a protracted exercise of Constitutionally mandated Rule of Law: The Empire must never seem to falter!
Political Observer
https://www.ft.com/content/6c5e80e6-4e80-11e9-b401-8d9ef1626294
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Edward Luce’s toxic political romance with Henry Kissinger.
Posted on November 4, 2021 by stephenkmacksd
Political Reporter comments.
What regular readers of Mr. Luce can forget his interview with ‘The Great Man’?
Headline: Henry Kissinger: ‘We are in a very, very grave period’
Sub-headline: The grand consigliere of American diplomacy talks about Putin, the new world order — and the meaning of Trump
https://www.ft.com/content/926a66b0-8b49-11e8-bf9e-8771d5404543
The New Cold War has been a fact for almost ten years, or even longer in its nascent stages: enthusiastically advocated by this newspaper and its hirelings!
In the political present ‘The Great Man’ now becomes the voice of reason instead of ‘the grand consigliere’.
Just select a paragraph, of Mr. Luce’s essay, for the current cast of heroes and villains:
Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president, said that whoever led in artificial intelligence would dominate the world. Kissinger, who, with Eric Schmidt, former chief executive of Google, is co-author of a new book, The Age of AI, says we have not yet begun to grasp the impact it is having on future warfare and geopolitical stability. The FT recently reported that China had tested a hypersonic missile, which could enable it to evade US missile defence systems. The Pentagon this week estimated that China planned to quadruple its nuclear arsenal by 2030. Nicolas Chaillan, the former head of AI at the Pentagon, told the FT he had resigned because he could not stand to watch China overtaking the US. “It is already over,” he said.
Note this Luce sentence – a retrospective apologetic for The Great Man’s’ murderous past.
Yet Kissinger’s analysis should be separated from moral evaluations of his cold war record.
The reader needs to steel herself for the final pronouncement, from Mr. Luce, on ‘The Great Man’:
At 98, he is among the few living figures to have played a leading role grappling with the last century’s existential threats. Each side eventually acquired an intimate knowledge about their nuclear capacities and doctrines that may be impossible to match on AI, he argues. There are no spy planes that could take pictures of China’s AI. There is no clear way of deterring attacks, or of knowing where they come from.
“With nuclear weapons it was possible to conceive of principles of deterrence in which there was some symmetry between the damage on each side,” he said. “If an unrestrained [US-China] arms race goes from nuclear to AI, the dangers of dramatic escalation would be very great.”
Political Reporter, and other guises, where they may apply!
On the Political Rehabilitation of Zbigniew Brzezinski, via FP and Edward Luce!
Posted on July 7, 2025 by stephenkmacksd
Political Observer comments.
Jul 02, 2025
What is telling is that FP was founded by Samuel P. Huntington of the ‘Clash of Civilizations’ and its racist twin ‘Who Are We?: The Challenges to America’s National Identity’ ! Luce was also a Speech writer to US Treasury Secretary, Lawrence Summers, 1999-2001. In sum Mr. Luce is a well connected political writer, and regular columnist for The Financial Times. He qualifies and one of Lippmann’s Technoctrat’s for hire, as a check against too much democracy!
Mr. Luce’s notorious interview with Kissinger, in the guise of The Great Man, is here:
Lunch with the FT: Henry Kissinger ‘We are in a very, very grave period’
Edward Luce | Financial Times
July 20, 2018
https://www.henryakissinger.com/interviews/lunch-ft-henry-kissinger/
On the Political Rehabilitation of Zbigniew Brzezinski, via FP and Edward Luce!
Posted on July 7, 2025 by stephenkmacksd
Political Observer comments.
Editor: In the bleek Age of Trump, Simon & Schuster provides Public Realations chatter:
An intimate and masterful biography of Zbigniew Brzezinski—President Carter’s national security advisor and one of America’s leading geopolitical thinkers—from one of the finest columnists and political writers at work today.
Zbigniew Brzezinski was a key architect of the Soviet Union’s demise, which ended the Cold War. A child of Warsaw—the heart of central Europe’s bloodlands—Brzezinski turned his fierce resentment at his homeland’s razing by Nazi Germany and the Red Army into a lifelong quest for liberty. Born the year that Joseph Stalin consolidated power, and dying a few months into Donald Trump’s first presidency, Brzezinski was shaped by and in turn shaped the global power struggles of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. As counsel to US presidents from John F. Kennedy to Barack Obama, and chief foreign policy figure of the late 1970s under Jimmy Carter, Brzezinski converted his acclaim as a Sovietologist into Washington power. With Henry Kissinger, his lifelong rival with whom he had a fraught on-off relationship, he personified the new breed of foreign-born scholar who thrived in America’s “Cold War University”—and who ousted Washington’s gentlemanly class of WASPs who had run US foreign policy for so long.
Brzezinski’s impact, aided by his unusual friendship with the Polish-born John Paul II, sprang from his knowledge of Moscow’s “Achilles heel”—the fact that its nationalities, such as the Ukrainians, and satellite states, including Poland, yearned to shake off Moscow’s grip. Neither a hawk nor a dove, Brzezinski was a biting critic of George W. Bush’s Iraq War and an early endorser of Obama. Because he went against the DC grain of joining factions, and was on occasion willing to drop Democrats for Republicans, Brzezinski is something of history’s orphan. His historic role has been greatly underweighted. In the almost cinematic arc of his life can be found the grand narrative of the American century and great power struggle that followed.
https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Zbig/Edward-Luce/9781982173647
Political Observer.
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