StephenKMackSD's Blog

Headline: How the Mideast Conflict Is Blowing Up the Region, the Democratic Party and Every Synagogue in America

Here are the first two paragraphs, of Mr. Friedman’s hysterically framed comment, on the Zionist Faschist State’s blitzkrieg against the Palestinians:

Lord knows, I sympathize with President Biden’s desire to avoid getting dragged into mediating the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But the 11 days of fighting between Israel and Hamas made something crystal clear to me: Unless we preserve at least the potential of a two-state solution, the one-state reality that would emerge in its place won’t just blow up Israel, the West Bank and Gaza; it could very well blow up the Democratic Party and every Jewish organization and synagogue in America.

Yes, that’s what I learned last week.

Note the ‘the 11 days of fighting‘! As Friedman frames the Israeli blitzkrieg! But the prediction of a ‘blow up’ that reaches the very cogs of The American Empire: the Democratic Party, ,every Jewish Organization and synagogue in America. Hysteria mongering ,to give it it’s rightful name! It’s as if Friedman asks the reader to accept the political fiction that he not a loyal partisan of Zionism! Or that the Settler Movement has not rendered ‘The Two State Solution’ a dead letter.

None the less Friedman treats the ‘Two State Fiction’ as viable. And describes the potential battles between ‘Centrist Democrats, in sum Neo-Liberals, and the Progressives, certainly not the Elizabeth Warren wing of the party? More like the Bernie Sanders wing?

Next comes the bruising battles in the synagogues of America, that ends in ‘And anti-Semitism will flourish under the guise of anti-Zionism.’ In sum, BDS is by definition Anti-Semitism!

As the past two weeks demonstrated, every Jewish organization and synagogue in America will be heatedly divided over this question: Are you willing to defend a one-state Israel that is not even pretending to be a democracy anymore, a one-state Israel whose leaders prefer to rely on the uncritical support of evangelicals than the critical support of Jews?

Finally, Jewish and non-Jewish students on every college campus also will be forced to wrestle with this question or run as far away as possible from the debate. More and more will abandon Israel. You can already see it happening. And anti-Semitism will flourish under the guise of anti-Zionism.

Should it surprise the reader, that Friedman writes a History Made to Measure, based upon some actual information, of two weeks duration? Carefully embroidered with the speculation of a Zionist Partisan, about the toxic motives of the BDS organization. Is sum, BDS is, in the reductivism of Mr. Friedman, Anti-Semitic prima facie. The reader is then presented by the prescriptive Friedman, in just 620 more words!

Old Socialist

The first two paragraphs of Mr. Ganesh’s exercise in History Made to Measure utterly disappoints: where are those arresting aperçus, that at times make his essays resonate with an intensity, that directs the readers attention away from its political content. The reader is swayed by mere stylistic embellishment. Not so in this essay, that is not just a undeveloped Polaroid of FDR’s New Deal, but of a possible ‘Jazz Age meanness’ , and an actual Hollywood prudery.

Even the greatest democratic leader of the past century chose his battles. As Franklin Roosevelt shaped a New Deal in economics, he preserved much of the old deal in culture. The cause of civil rights was deferred for another generation. Tight immigration laws were retained, even as Europe’s huddled masses petitioned for entry. If there was a post-Jazz Age meanness in the air, it did not confine itself to Washington. Hollywood, the other capital, began to enforce its code against risqué themes.

It is hard to account for the blend of material reform and cultural retrenchment in those years. But one theory suggests itself. There is only so much change a society will bear at one time. If the rules of economic life are in flux, people crave stability and even regression in other areas. Seen from this angle, the strife of the 1960s might be read as the spasms of a nation attempting too much change on too many fronts in too little time.

The proffered choice between cultural and economic radicalism is self serving. Mr. Ganesh cites ‘evidence’ for his claim, roughly described by this collection. Note that ‘French philosophes took a postmodern turn in the 1960s’ are not just the precursors, but, indeed, gestators of American Identity Politics. The Rainbow Coalition was born of Post-Modernism?

Violent crimes have been going up in US cities… At the same time, the country’s southern border has been the site of anguish and disarray for much of the year. …a third source of cultural insecurity … there is the inchoate set of issues that come under the neologism of the day, “woke”, with all its implications for the first amendment right to free speech. Even taken together, these social rumbles hardly constitute a revolution. … Identity politics has been gestating inside the western left since French philosophes took a postmodern turn in the 1960s.

There is a blurring of the lines of argument, he presents his economic/cultural :

Americans are being asked to absorb a break in economic doctrine at the same time as the social context changes.

Mr. Ganesh continues to construct his essay about the politically unpalatable ‘too much radicalism’. Not, of course, mentioning the utter collapse of the Neo-Liberal Swindle’s in 2008, whose point of fracture began with the Clinton/Summers/Biden final straw of Gramm-Leach-Bliley ?

Even a quote from Gustave Flaubert can’t save Mr. Ganesh’s essay from its weak duel radicalisms premise, via his self-serving History Made To Measure.

Gustave Flaubert’s rule that a person can only take so much radicalism (“be regular and orderly in your life”, said the writer, “so that you may be violent and original in your work”) applies as much to the body politic. Had Biden won one of those landslides, such as 1932 or 1980, when the public audibly demands a new course, he might have the license for all-round change.

https://www.ft.com/content/74cb6ac2-69f4-443c-8483-262ec3560f65

The Landslides of 1932 and 1980: FDR, transformative reform, in response to the Depression vs. Reagan, political/cultural reaction against the Civil Rights Era. It’s compelling, that Mr. Ganesh can’t quite exercise the political imagination, to consider that this is Joe Biden’s last act: what he offers is a pastiche of reform/radicalism. The reader need only consider that Biden’s Radicalism, as argued by Mr. Ganesh, will not include Medicare For All, a $15.00 minimum wage, Debt Forgiveness, a Corporate Tax rate of 90%, an end to Foreign Wars, and a slash of 50% to the Pentagon budget, or Police Reform at a Federal level. These imperatives would define an actual political radicalism in America!

Old Socialist

Headline: Belarus kidnapping sets a dangerous global precedent

Sub-headline: Europe and the US must arrest the slide into international lawlessness

Where was Mr. Rachman when America invaded Afghanistan, decaled ‘War’: Blitzkrieg on Iraq: the demonstrably incompetent Paul Bremer disbanded the vital political infrastructures of the Iraqi military and Baath Party. Abu Ghraib, ‘CIA Black Sites’, ‘Guantanamo’, the bribery program of ‘The Surge’ etc., etc.?  Mr. Rachman lampoons, in his maladroit way, the cliché “rules-based international order” the ‘ready made’ that excuses/ frames The American Empire’s bloody, unapologetic Imperialism.

The villians in this political melodrama are predictable, a troika of bad actors in The New Cold War, identified as the patient reader, makes her way through this essay ,for want of a better term, ‘Bill of attainder’ , in sum Mr. Rachman’s acting as a one man legislator!

Nobody reasonable should accept the Belarusian (or Chinese or Russian) equation of peaceful dissent with terrorism. But America has encouraged the idea that powerful countries can reach out beyond their borders and grab people.

That this is succeed by this call to action? should not surprise!

The action taken by Belarus represents a flagrant escalation of this trend. But this dangerous moment also represents an opportunity to arrest the slide into international lawlessness.    

Almost Marx

https://www.ft.com/content/02c0004a-7dfa-46b9-80ef-a88e4ef35d9a

I read the first two chapters of ‘The Metaphysical Club’ that features Oliver Wendell Holmes. And because I had purchased ‘Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes: Law And The Inner Self’ from an Oxford University Press book sale: also because I found in Menand’s chapters, an heroic figure in Holmes, three time wounded in The Civil War, I read with interest Prof. White’s biography.
White’s book followed the bourgeoise party line on Holmes. He even wrote ‘Oliver Wendell Holmes: Sage of the Supreme Court’, more of the same bourgeoise hagiography. But ‘Buck v. Bell’ was a negative revelation. Women identified as ‘imbeciles’ that were institutionalised were sterilized. ‘Establishing the constitutionality of a law permitting the sterilization of of imbeciles … gave me pleasure’, a Holmes  quote from page 408 of White’s biography.
I followed that book with ‘Law Without Values: The Life, Work and Legacy of Justice Holmes’ by Albert W. Alschuler. Another negative revelation. This book managed to garner a good review from The Economist, titled ‘Flawed Hero’ of the February 24, 2001 edition of the magazine. I saved the page from the magazine, and use it as a bookmark, for Alschuler’s book.   

George Scialabba’s praise for the ‘masterpiece’ of ‘The Metaphysical Club’: from my limited reading of it’s Holmes chapters, was steeped in the unearned reverence for the toxic, not to speak of the cruel misogyny of Holmes. Should this give pause to the readers of Mr. Scialabba’s judgement, on a book lauded as a ‘masterpiece’, or any other book under his review? What about any book, by the same author, whose writings reflect the values of History and Biography Made To Measure?    

Would-Be Critic 

Free and Worldly

As former speech writer for Larry Summers, and his soon-to-be Boswell, Luce is to put it mildly, as obtuse as Larry, two utterly clueless white males! The headline writers of his newspaper use the notion of ‘urban crime wave‘, can this be more freighted with racial negativity, or does honesty demand the descriptor animus?

Further is his essay Luce add this to his essay :

Biden wants to pass a bill to dilute the “qualified immunity” that makes it so hard to prosecute offending officers, except in extreme cases such as that of Derek Chauvin, who was convicted last month of murdering George Floyd. Although it is extremely rare to convict a police officer, the bill is unlikely to get anywhere.

Here is Joe in 1993 on ‘predators’ 

The fiction is that Joe has ‘evolved’: this ‘a bill to dilute the “qualified immunity’ demonstrates that Joe’s racism, now enjoys sub rosa status.

As an example Mr. Luce ponders the question of rising crime in New York City, and its effect on the Mayoral contest, taking shape:

…

It is notable that the two New York mayoral candidates who are leading the pack — Andrew Yang and Eric Adams — have been clearest in condemning “defund the police”. Dianne Morales, the candidate who has embraced it most openly, is polling at just 5 per cent. According to Gallup, only a fifth of African-Americans want fewer police on the streets. The evidence supports them. Where police are more visible, crime usually falls.

…

https://www.ft.com/content/221c9a51-6899-4535-8663-451153805f10

As Mr. Luce ponders a possible negative future for Biden, in the political context of the New York City mayoral race, should the reader look for a return of ‘Broken Windows Policing’ of The Manhattan Institute, that became the failed ‘Stop and Frisk’? In a Post-Pandemic context, checking for proof of Vaccination will or could be the rationale for these ‘Stops’, or something tied to the issue of Public Safety? While a willful forgetting of Mayor Bloomberg’s political/jurisprudential machinations in this case still hold?

Almost Marx

Headline: US targets ‘stable, predictable’ ties with Russia

Sub-headline: Blinken and Lavrov hold first face-to-face talks of Biden presidency in Reykjavik

The untenable political fiction of ‘Russian Interference’ in the 2016 election, led Blinken and Joe to engage in dull-witted provocation against Russia. It was like Anti-Communists T.V. of the 1950’s, the small black & white screen of the era, in the Age of the Internet, looked like what it was shopworn, not to speak of its resemblance to a wobbly antique.

Why should this surprise? given Joe’s cadre of war mongers: Neo-Con Ghoul Nuland, R2P zealot Power, Susan Rice and Hillary advisor Jake Sullivan. The very signature of catastrophe!

It almost makes me long for the days of Lippmann and Kennan. But what ‘we’ have is the Alsop Brothers?

StephenKMackSD

https://www.ft.com/content/6d90194e-c8aa-4eb6-aedb-40b595f56cc3#comments-anchor

The first paragraph of Mr. Freidman’s May 11, 2021 column is demonstrative of a trivialization of the wholesale murder of Palestinians, by The Zionist Fascists State!   

Let’s see, what happens when TikTok meets Palestinian grievances about right-wing Israeli land grabs in Arab neighborhoods in Jerusalem? And then you add the holiest Muslim night of prayer in Jerusalem into the mix? Then toss in the most emotional Israeli holiday in Jerusalem? And a power play by Hamas to assume leadership of the Palestinian cause? And, finally, a political vacuum in which the Palestinian Authority is incapable of holding new elections and Israel is so divided it can’t stop having elections?

What happens is the explosion of violence around Jerusalem on Monday that quickly spread to the Gaza front, and has people asking: Is this the big one? Is this the start of the next Palestinian uprising?

…

I stopped reading this overstuffed capon in the days when he praised anything remotely close to the ‘Free Market Ideology’, as significant. He like his fellow apologists have managed to play the simultaneous roles of both fool and knave! Its the alchemy practiced by the Zionists Apologist, whose contempt for its readers, listeners, viewers, to exercise the most elementary kind of critical thinking.

Mr. Freidman’s 1,350 word History Made to Measure is a polemic that never deserts its trivialization of the mass murder, still being committed against the Palestinian People, as I write this on May 16, 2021. Gideon Levy in Haaretz offers a well deserved rebuke to ‘Those Who Thirst for Blood’ in the May 13, edition!

Political Skeptic

The Financial Times obligingly presents a capsule version of a possible CV for Mr. Indyk:

The writer is a former US Special Envoy for Israeli-Palestinian Negotiations, distinguished fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and author of the forthcoming book “Master of the Game: Henry Kissinger and the Art of Middle East Diplomacy.”

It’s as if the reader is unable to make a connection, by just the title of Indyk’s new book, in praise war criminal *Kissinger, his stance toward the  ‘Gaza-Israel conflict’ ? There is no ‘conflict’ but the bombing of a civilian population by the Zionist Fascist State! Mr. Indyk is an integral part of a branch of ‘American diplomacy’ that continually worked to realize the ‘Two State Solution’. That came to nothing, but an opportunity for an increasingly reactionary politics, that expressed itself in the Settler Movement, that over time made the Two State Solution impossible. Didn’t Krauthammer describe this theft as ‘grandma needed to put an extension on her kitchen’ ? Mr. Indyk and his successors like Aaron David Miller were the sub rosa assistants to realize the Zionist State’s adoption of Lebensraum. Is this invidious ?

Mr. Indyk jejune exploration of the evolving Foreign Policy of Joe Biden, expressed by means of carefully cultivated, highfaluting bourgeoise political cliché: the imperatives of the American Empire, are the province of the ‘Conspiracy Theorists’ who fail to see the wider vistas of the well paid Court Historian/Propagandist? The Foreign Policy Technocrat, and her home in the infrastructure of Think Tanks , of every hue- the ‘expert’ celebrated by Lippmann as a ‘check’ against ‘too much democracy’ has been realized by the alliance between that Technocracy, Corporate Media and Government.

Here is an example of Mr. Indyk’s chatter:

Because Biden’s team was not paying sufficient attention, he was slow to pick up the signals that Israel had crossed the guard rails. His advisers did eventually intervene with Netanyahu, persuading him to suspend the Palestinian evictions in East Jerusalem, curb police excesses at al-Aqsa mosque, and reroute a provocative march away from the Old City. But it was too little too late. Hamas seized the opportunity to become “the sword of Jerusalem” by launching rockets towards the Holy City.

https://www.ft.com/content/857a6617-d87f-41f3-82ce-5decbc99d348

What can the reader make of this ‘that Israel had crossed the guard rails‘ ? Mr. Indyk is a partisan speaking the language of political equivocation, the lingua franca of the Technocracy! That partisanship is demonstrated by the very next paragraph:

Biden is now depending on Netanyahu to bring the war to a quick conclusion. Despite the braggadocio, the prime minister’s objectives appear limited to setting back Hamas’s war-making capabilities and re-establishing Israel’s deterrent power. He has long since abandoned any notion of ending Hamas rule in Gaza.

Skip to the last two paragraphs of Mr. Indyk’s political intervention, where he demonstrates his ability the be both a fool and a knave: the Zionist apologists have perfected this alchemy!

If a ceasefire can take hold, Biden will have barely had to lift a finger. But if he is to stay focused on his priorities elsewhere, he will still have to resist the siren song of Israeli-Palestinian peace, a hopeless challenge with the current leaderships. He will also be dependent on Netanyahu to avoid provocations. And his aides will have to help restore Palestinian hope in the two-state solution Biden espouses. But he can do that in small, incremental steps.

Biden’s pivot appears to have survived its first Middle Eastern test. But the volatility of the place ensures there will be more to come. Hopefully by then his local partners will have come to understand their roles in an America-supported, rather than American-led, regional order and that will make it easier for Biden to avoid being sucked back into the Middle East morass.

. Political Observer

*Here is a link to Edward Luce’s interview with Kissinger of July 20, 2018 in The Financial Times. Mr. Luce attempt to snare Kissinger, its almost comic, if it weren’t so utterly pathetic! 

https://www.ft.com/content/926a66b0-8b49-11e8-bf9e-8771d5404543

Headline: The GOP’s Massive Missed Opportunity

Sub-headline: It’s called Trumpism Without Trump. But they can’t get there, and he won’t let them.

Here are the first three sentences, of the first paragraph of Andy Divine’s latest essay:

A long, long time ago, I can still remember when Liz Cheney and I were friendly, fellow young conservatives. Ah, the 1990s. It all came crashing down during the Iraq War when I just couldn’t get past her defense of her father’s decision to commit war crimes in the defense of civilization.

Here is a link to his mea culpa on the Iraq War:

I Was Wrong: A Real-Time Chronicle Of The Iraq War

Please note that each entry is time and date stamped. Yet there is no way to check where these comments were published, no footnotes appear, that would enable the reader to check for Andy’s veracity. He was educated at Oxford, and holds a PhD from Harvard. Surly he wrote a Thesis? These entries read like carefully manicured condensations of his essays. Again no means of verification!

Note the chapter headings : Trauma, Doubt, Regret. Political Melodrama is Andy’s métier.

Following the above quoted sentences:

…

I still disagree with her a lot, specifically on marriage equality, and I understand entirely why many on the left can’t get past her past, and why many in the Trump Party believe it’s sub-optimal to have a party leader at war with its one and only principle: sucking up to the deranged, unstable cult-figure who decisively lost the House, Senate and presidency last November. 

But she’s still right. Right that the last election was not rigged, right that it wasn’t even that close, right that a liberal democracy cannot survive if one party denies electoral integrity solely to protect the vanity of the loser, and more than right that a president who encourages violence to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power is a threat to the Constitution itself. She’s right that if conservatism doesn’t mean defending the rule of law, the norms and procedures of liberal democracy, and reverence for our democratic institutions, it is nothing worthy of the name.

…

https://andrewsullivan.substack.com/p/the-gops-massive-missed-opportunity?token=eyJ1c2VyX2lkIjo1MzQ5NjEsInBvc3RfaWQiOjM2MjYyNDg1LCJfIjoiTFlyeU8iLCJpYXQiOjE2MjExMTA4MTUsImV4cCI6MTYyMTExNDQxNSwiaXNzIjoicHViLTYxMzcxIiwic3ViIjoicG9zdC1yZWFjdGlvbiJ9.BjjKQaahx7i-esPlWwT0T9MHSZJ7fTJS86My2qh6XOs

Liz Cheney is and remains a War Mongering Neo-Conservative, with no concern for The Rule of Law, nor the niceties of respectable bourgeoise politics. She is her fathers daughter. Liz and Andy are kindred spirits, defined by political opportunism, and exploiting moments offered by an everchanging political landscape.

Political Skeptic

Does this describe the ‘propinquity’ between Arendt & Roth?

Arendt: Born in conflict, Israel will degenerate into Sparta, and American Jews will need to back away
https://mondoweiss.net/2012/01/arendt-born-in-conflict-israel-will-degenerate-into-sparta-and-american-jews-will-need-to-back-away/

Or Roth’s ‘Plot against America’, retrograde Anti-Semitic paranoia, under the historical tutelage of Arthur Schlesinger Jr.!  And rewritten by Simon & Burns for television, under the guidance of Roth, that passed for an Anti-Trump polemic, in extremis?  

StephenKMackSD