StephenKMackSD's Blog

There are no ‘Liberals’ only Neo-Liberals! Corporate Media have a political allergy to the term! The Democrats ,capitulated to the New Democrats in 1992, with the election of Clinton and his familiar. In sum Reaganism Lite! Ganesh Cliche Mongering chatter, just part of his riff upon himself, as corporate conformist. That being an expression of Corporate good citizenship.

There is almost no politician good enough to prise voters en masse from the opposing half of the electorate — the last to win more than 400 electoral college votes was George H W Bush, in 1988.

That working class women,Blacks and Latinos were an integral part of the Trump voters, in 2020, should not surprise! As in 1968, when voters who supported Robert Kennedy during the primaries, cast their ballots for George Wallace, that merged to become 9 million strong.

Near the end of his essay Mr. Ganesh lapses into near political kitsch:

…

Of course, even the narrowest win is still potentially world-changing. It is no more possible to be half-president than half-pregnant. If elected, Mr Biden could unwind much of Mr Trump’s foreign policy, regardless of which party controls the Senate. His election would be toasted in Nato headquarters and the chancelleries of most US allies. Executive power will also matter in the fight against the pandemic. And even a raising of the presidential tone is worth something.

…

But, then he recovers his pundit’s equilibrium:

No, if there is a sense of liberal dread today, it is less about the scotched dreams of a progressive realignment than Mr Trump’s dismaying resilience. For four years, he has lived down to the Democrats’ direst expectations and remained electorally competitive. Not enough Americans regard him as a tyrant or a klutz, or care either way. Even if he loses, he has done well enough to remain the Republicans’ reference point in opposition and a plausible candidate in 2024.

Political Observer

I woke up at 4:30 AM PST, this morning, and checked twitter for the latest Election News, not knowing what to expect, other than bad news. Now at the breakfast table, I’ve read first the Editorial Board of The Financial Time on the election. I’ve quoted what I think was essential, from the thickets of the political chatter, adroitly softened, but still aided by the thoroughly discredited ‘polling addiction’, of commentators looking to legitimise their political speculations.

Headline: A critical moment for US democracy

Sub-headline: Institutions have a responsibility to ensure every vote legitimately cast is counted

…


Whatever the ultimate outcome of this election, the voting starkly highlights the social, economic and political fissures in America. As in 2016, the country appears split down the middle — with the Democrats continuing to hold their edge on the coasts and in the cities and Republican support strong in small towns, rural areas and the middle of the country.

The task of responsible leaders is to bring their divided nation together around a shared respect for the democratic process. Tragically, if all too predictably, Mr Trump is already failing this test.

https://www.ft.com/content/352fac7a-d3e9-44bd-be1d-a7d8f624fe5a

______________________________________________________________________

After the ‘Editorial’ I read Mr. Luce’s

Headline: A bitter US election that resolves little

Sub-headline: Whatever the result, America’s divisions will make governing very hard

…

Either way, America faces two dangers, one immediate, the other structural. The first is that the judiciary may well get involved in deciding the outcome. Constitutional scholars have been warning about this for months. This is because of the order in which ballots are counted in the three key swing states.

…

In other systems where the president is elected, Mr Biden would already have been declared the winner. America’s electoral college, which gives outsized influence to small, rural states, is like a dodgy appendix that haemorrhages a little more bile with each election.

If Mr Biden eventually prevails, he will inherit a profoundly divided country that will be hard to govern, especially if the Senate remains in Republican hands.

If Mr Trump loses, he will still have outperformed all expectations. The Republican party is Trumpian for the foreseeable future. “We are a working class party now. That’s the future,” tweeted Josh Hawley, the Missouri senator who has 2024 presidential aspirations. The American people have spoken. And it is a cacophonous noise.

https://www.ft.com/content/2aca59d6-26ea-41e3-8c04-4fb925a1290c

_____________________________________________________________________

Mr. Luce cites Statistical Golden Boy Nate Silver in his essay, yet he offers nothing memorable, nor particularly insightful. That he, and his newspaper, were the propagandists, apologists for the toxic mythology of Neo-Liberalism, that destroyed the Civic Institutions, that could have been the antidote to Trump and Trumpism. Not to speak of a vital/viable electoral process: this is the ghost that haunts all the political agonizing, displayed as fraught political moments, to be played out in the concatenating present.

For the elusive quantity of a sub-rosa Trumpism, in its carefully modulated iteration, the reader must consult Niall Ferguson’s essay at Bloomberg Opinion:

Headline: Three Words That Haunt Joe Biden: ‘Dewey Defeats Truman’

Sub-headline: The 1948 presidential election was bigger surprise than 2016, and has eerie parallels to 2020

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-11-01/three-words-that-haunt-joe-biden-dewey-defeats-truman?srnd=opinion-politics-and-policy&sref=bfOwbK4O&cmpid%3D=socialflow-twitter-view&utm_source=twitter&utm_campaign=socialflow-organic&utm_medium=social&utm_content=view

Niall Ferguson can’t quite bring himself to advocate for Trump! He too attached to bourgeois political respectability: recall his Keynes Problem? So he will invoke Dewey/Truman election, in 1948, to do the actual work of Doom Saying for Senile Old Joe and his consort.

Political Observer

(Added November 5, 2020, 7: 50 AM PST

I encourage readers to look, at and consider Mr. Ferguson’s enlightening essay, even though it was a not very adroit attack on Biden, via a dubious historical comparison. Ferguson is a very accomplished historian, who in this instance writes, not just with ideological motive, but with a focus that makes this rewarding reading, given my caveats. Here is a link where this essay may, in time, be posted:

http://www.niallferguson.com/journalism )

That The Economist has become the house organ for the ‘Joe Biden & Son’ political entrepreneurship should not surprise!

Headline: Why it has to be Biden

Sub-headline: Donald Trump has desecrated the values that make America a beacon to the world

…

Joe Biden is not a miracle cure for what ails America. But he is a good man who would restore steadiness and civility to the White House. He is equipped to begin the long, difficult task of putting a fractured country back together again. That is why, if we had a vote, it would go to Joe.

…

Wavering Republicans worry that Mr Biden, old and weak, would be a Trojan horse for the hard left. It is true that his party’s radical wing is stirring, but he and Kamala Harris, his vice-presidential pick, have both shown in the campaign that they can keep it in check. Ordinarily, voters might be advised to constrain the left by ensuring that the Senate remained in Republican hands. Not this time. A big win for the Democrats there would add to the preponderance of moderate centrists over radicals in Congress by bringing in senators like Steve Bullock in Montana or Barbara Bollier in Kansas. You would not see a lurch to the left from either of them.

…

https://www.economist.com/leaders/2020/10/29/why-it-has-to-be-biden

_________________________________________________________________________

Headline: Battle-hymn of the Never Trumpers

Sub-headline: Renegade Republicans represent the breadth—and the admirable best—of Joe Biden’s coalition

…

More happily, Never Trumpers, freed of the partisan yoke, have provided most of the laughs in this grim campaign. The irreverent Lincoln Project (in which Messrs Conway and Stevens are involved) is chiefly dedicated to provoking the president to Twitter rage. With a nod to Michelle Obama, its pledge to Democrats is: “We go low so you don’t have to.” In their podcasts and articles—including in the Bulwark, a Never Trump news site—Mike Murphy and Tim Miller of Republican Voters Against Trump (rvat) have shown themselves to be two of the wittiest people in politics. This has addressed such a conspicuous cultural problem—the fact that American satire is dominated by lefties—that there is talk of the Lincoln Project being repurposed as an entertainment company.

…

Whatever their future holds, the Never Trumpers have played an admirable part. Most followed their consciences into opposition at significant risk to their livelihoods. The predictable Republican slur, that they are in it for the money, is false. If they are now enjoying success, it is because their consciences turned out to be a better predictor of America’s response to Mr Trump than their cynical former colleagues anticipated. John McCain liked to talk about the importance of backing country over party. Never Trumpers have provided an even more resounding demonstration of this than the late senator. They deserve their brief celebrity and more.

https://www.economist.com/united-states/2020/10/29/battle-hymn-of-the-never-trumpers

__________________________________________________________________

Headline: Longstanding claims of Biden corruption all but confirmed with Hunter’s emails

…

For nearly three years, Biden and his surrogates have responded to the scandal with an increasingly unconvincing series of denials — including another from the former vice president in his last debate with President Trump.

In response to “Secret Empires,” one of Joe Biden’s aides said “we aren’t going to engage on a politically motivated hit pieces …” Team Biden did not bother to respond to specific allegations that the Biden family vacuumed up millions, in the exact locales where Biden was President Barack Obama’s policy “point man.”

When the issue re-emerged during the campaign, Team Biden continued to call it a “conspiracy theory” but this time, Joe Biden firmly put himself on record. “I have never discussed with my son or my brother or anyone else anything having to do with their businesses — period,” he told reporters in August 2019.

“I never talk with my son or my brother or anyone else in the distant family about their business interests, period.” He repeated similar blanket denials on numerous occasions.

These denials all proved to be untruthful. Period.

We now know that Joe Biden met directly with his son’s Chinese business partner, Jonathan Li, in a Chinese hotel lobby on a fateful trip in 2013 (a trip that allowed Hunter to spend hours with his father, the vice president, on a transoceanic flight to Beijing aboard Air Force Two). Ten days later, Hunter landed an unprecedented $1 billion private equity deal, bankrolled by the Chinese government.

…

https://nypost.com/2020/10/24/biden-corruption-claims-all-but-confirmed-with-hunter-emails/

__________________________________________________________________

Glenn Greenwald offers a very different , indeed an enlightening perspective on what The Economist offers! Telling quotes from this in depth reporting from Greenwald, follow the title:

‘TITLE: THE REAL SCANDAL: U.S. MEDIA USES FALSEHOODS TO DEFEND JOE BIDEN FROM HUNTER’S EMAILS

…

…

A media outlet that renounces its core function — pursuing answers to relevant questions about powerful people — is one that deserves to lose the public’s faith and confidence. And that is exactly what the U.S. media, with some exceptions, attempted to do with this story: they took the lead not in investigating these documents but in concocting excuses for why they should be ignored.

As my colleague Lee Fang put it on Sunday: “The partisan double standards in the media are mind boggling this year, and much of the supposedly left independent media is just as cowardly and conformist as the mainstream corporate media. Everyone is reading the room and acting out of fear.” Discussing his story from Sunday, Taibbi summed up the most important point this way: “The whole point is that the press loses its way when it cares more about who benefits from information than whether it’s true.”

https://greenwald.substack.com/p/article-on-joe-and-hunter-biden-censored’

Old Socialist

That Richard Posner is presented here, by Michael Rips, as a ‘conservative’ is hyperbole masked as understatement! Look to the ‘Columbia Law Review’ of October 1985, Vol. 85 Num.6 for his  ‘An Economic Theory of the Criminal Law’:

…

The list of responders is impressive: Ronald Dworkin , Charles Fried, Anthony Kroman, John T.Noonan ,Jr., and Martha Nussbaum. The reader only need recall their personal experience, of being part of the jury selection process, in with the Judge proclaimes to the potential jurors, that the law court is ‘above morality’, without even a hint of irony!

In sum, I would say that Richard Posner represents/represented, an equally toxic variant of American jurisprudential philosophy, as the ‘Originalist’, ‘Textualist’ coterie’s apologetics, and its contemporary historical/political rationales for ‘The New Jim Crow’. The title of the cogently, brilliantly argued moral/political intervention of Michelle Alexander, stands as a rebuke to these political romantics. Who have attempted to re-invent themselves, under the rubric of the ultra-respectactable guise of ‘Federalism’. Amy Coney Barrett is just the latest member of the New Jim Crow Supreme Court.

Old Socialist

P.S. On the question of ‘Textualism’ and Scalia, the mentor of Amy Coney Barrett, read Robert Post’s essay at The New York Review of Books:

Justice for Scalia

____________________________________________________________

reply In reply to Great big travesty

The ABA represents a guild of unaccountable, self governing cadre of those superior beings called ‘Lawyers’, who are in charge of themselves. Unaccountable to anyone but themselves. What other ‘Profession’ like doctors, dentists, insurance sales people and cosmeticians are self-governing? ‘Well qualified’ is a term of art, for the adept practitioners of jurisprudential norms, like all that bowing and scraping, to the outworn practices of courtroom decorum!  Amy Coney Barrett is just more of the Post Bork generation, of normalized jurisprudential nostalgics who look to a benighted past as the model for a possible future.

StephenKMackSD           

The American Empire can never seem to falter, that a given of Imperial Power. So it can come as no surprise, that Mr. Garton-Ash’s polemic is suffused with the political panic of a Technocrat-crisis becomes the singular rhetorical note of his essay.
This reader left contemplating the fact that the American political system, headed by a bone fide demagogue is facing a very important election. The failure to recognize, that he was produced by an utterly failed political class, committed to the toxic mirage of Neo-Liberalism, remains outside Mr. Garton-Ash’s political grasp. But the position of ‘crisis’ offers the not very soothing balm of:

Democracies everywhere must prepare for the contingency of a contested result in the most important US election in living memory.

Mr. Garton-Ash offers some solutions to the onlookers to the inexorable ‘crisis’:

A calm, considered approach by the world’s other democracies will be most relevant in the “blue shift” scenario. These countries will have thousands of diplomats and journalists on the ground. The US and international media will be reporting this event intensively, and Facebook and Twitter are going to great lengths to stem misinformation. Although the facts will be disputed, that does not mean there will be no facts. A vital task of liberal democracies is to stick to and stand up for those facts.

In doing this, they can rely on an election monitoring mission from the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, which includes the US in its 57 members. It has conducted some 370 election observation missions over 30 years and has, with US help, developed benchmark best practices for rigour and impartiality. The OSCE mission has just presented an interim report and will hold a press conference in Washington, the day after election day.

…

https://www.ft.com/content/b4f3932a-3e0e-49ae-9a19-415cdb80de19

This reader approaches Mr. Garton-Ash’s ‘solution’ to this vexing question, with skepticism as mere political analgesic, rather than an actual and viable ‘solution’.

The Supreme Court’s 2000 Coup of Bush v. Gore, was/is both a betrayal of Federalism (State’s Rights) of the Rehnquist/Scalia coterie. And the fact that the Majority declared their decision, in this case, ‘beyond/outside precedent’! In sum it rules itself outside political/legal question. As anyone who has served on an American Jury, or been part of that process knows, judges declare the Court to be ‘above morality’! Even Oliver Wendall Holmes declared that Law was a kind of ‘Public Morality’.

Political Observer

I’ve been catching up on reading Andy Divine’s essays, and noticed his total silence on the Amy Coney Barrett Senate Confirmation Hearings. I’ve gone back to October 9, 2020, and not even a mention.
Don’t miss his latest production, with the learning and intellectual heft of Cecil B. De Mille epic, aided by his Oxford education with telling references to:  the Temple of Eleusis,Plato, Marcus Aurelius, Cicero,etc. ( Hurry the Pay Wall is fast approaching!)

Headline: The Psychedelic Election

Subheadline: A new issue arrives on the horizon. Why it matters.

https://andrewsullivan.substack.com/p/the-psychedelic-election

I usually make the daily ‘rounds’ of Politico, The New York Times, The Financial Times, New York Magazine, The Atlantic, The New Republic , The American Conservative and sometimes The Economist, and Twitter searching for likely subjects to read and comment upon. I am a journalistic parasite. I didn’t find one of Andy’s essays published outside his blog.

Old Socialist

This reader just has to wonder at the ‘why’ of Mr. Ganesh latest essay in celebration of Eisenhower. Perhaps an advanced case of ‘Trump Political Exhaustion’? Its ‘as if’ Reagan, and his tag-line of ‘government is the problem’, had never reached to the very center, of the greed ridden class, that made their money supplying the Defense Industries of the American Post War period, that were not actually ‘entrepreneurs’, in the political romantic parlance of the Mises/Hayek/Friedman coterie. But rather just part of the ‘supply chain’ of vendors, who were just the smaller cogs, that held the machinery of mammoth corporations together.

One also thinks about the Republicans, like Howard Jarvis, of the Tax  Payers Association, named after him, Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform and Lewis H. Brown founder of AEI, and their epigones, on the vexing question that Mr. Ganesh’s celebration of Eisenhower evokes. Or the Neo-Cons, that had their political moment in the Bush II administration: recall the White Phosphorous used on Fallujah, a monument to their moral/political nihilism?  

Consider some quotes from Mr. Ganesh essay :

The mistrust of government that has defined the Republicans since the 1980s is a liability in a nation that has grown more collectivist in its views. 

One might more pointely opine that the American electorate has come to realize that they share a common political fate.

Its market dogma is a much larger cause of that drift than one demagogic president.

The reader needs no reminder that both the Republicans and New Democrats are Neo-Liberal. Bernie Sanders was/is the only Dissenter!

Free-market economics were necessary and popular as his postwar consensus soured in the over-governed 1970s. Whether they answer the public anxieties of the early 21st century is doubtful.

Free Market necromancy never, ever goes out of style!

Republicans seem to mistake the public’s cynicism about “government” in the abstract with indifference to actual services and fiscal transfers.

The fact is that the Neo-Liberal State must be a strong state, as the in-order-too of its proper functioning.

The cause of Republican reform will go nowhere until it makes peace with the state

The ‘Never Trumpers’ are the sales people that brought the catastrophic ‘War on Terror’ with the help of ‘The Architect’ or just call him a gutter-snipe, Karl Rove and his henchmen here identified as ‘noble’. This not just a ‘misreading’ but shameless apologetic propaganda.

The “Never Trumpers”, the Bush-era alumni who endorse Mr Biden, the Republican donors who fund the other side: there is a nobility to these apostates, but a shallowness of thought, too.

Ganesh links to an Eisenhower letter, and his truncated quotation from it ‘about the who could not reconcile themselves to the New Deal” “Their number is negligible, and they are stupid… Yet read more carefully, what appears in addition, is an apologetic for the Iranian Coup, that sent the duly elected Mossadegh into internal exile,  and that prefigured the rise of the Islamic Republic.     

A year ago last January we were in imminent danger of losing Iran, and sixty percent of the known oil reserves of the world.  You may have forgotten this. Lots of people have. But there has been no greater threat that has in recent years overhung the free world. That threat has been largely, if not totally, removed. I could name at least a half dozen other spots of the same character.

That Eisenhower was a Cold Warrior, not a surprise. In an attempt, to find reasons for the present inability of the contemporary Republican Party, fully colonized by Trumpism, to recognize Eisenhower as a viable touchstone of Republican Values: the inquirer might just look to his appointment of Earl Warren to the Supreme Court, and the unanimous decisions in Brown I & II. The sending of Troops to Little Rock and his Farewell Address? 

Political Observer

https://www.ft.com/content/affe91ca-c1a9-41b2-8592-9ba9580eb130

What can the regular reader think of the latest, but one of the infrequent essays of Anne-Marie Slaughter, to appear in this newspaper? First, a fragment of the opening sentence uttered at full rhetorical screech: The world is watching the US presidential election with horror: the production of hysterical political melodrama is not her strong suite!

By the second paragraph, the reader enters Ms. Slaughter’s more rational speculations about a possible, probable Foreign Policy of a Biden Administration. Or should it more rightly be named ‘Joe Biden & Sons Inc’?

The US would re-embrace multilateralism and reach out to allies and partners with renewed vigour. But it would still be more inwardly focused. It would return to the global fold on the necessity of combating climate change, pandemics and other global threats. But it would still embrace great power competition and focus on China as its main rival. It would substitute a values-based foreign policy for a power-based approach. But it would not return troops to Syria or Afghanistan and would remain sceptical about foreign intervention.

Anne-Marie Slaughter is CEO of the New America Think Tank, which places her in the category of New Democrat. As a Biden partisan the reader must acknowledge her as a Party loyalist, when considering her essay. Which postulates the puerile notion of the Three D’s : Domestic, Deterrence and Democracy. 

The reader then becomes mired in Slaughter’s thicket of policy speculation, featuring the ‘Brand Names’, who might just fill those potential Foreign Policy jobs, of a potential Biden Administration. Contingency defines these speculations! The final paragraph of Slaughter’s essay leaves no doubt about Biden:

Commentator James Traub points out that phrases like “the free world” come naturally to Mr Biden, however old-fashioned they may seem to the progressive left. In this formulation, he writes, Mr Biden “would refound ‘the west’ for a new age of problems without borders”. Perhaps. Mr Biden and his advisers are still more comfortable dealing with problems that require beating or bonding with other nation states than those that transcend borders such as climate change. Still, unlike Mr Trump, they recognise the need to manage both types.

https://www.ft.com/content/6f85ae61-2e16-4272-8974-a38123ed994f

Joe Biden is the prisoner of ‘The Old Cold War’, that has become ‘The New Cold War‘, in sum, via the framing of Huntington’s xenophobia, expressed in World Historical terms, in The Clash of Civilizations and more parochially in his ‘Who Are We?: The Challenges to America’s National Identity’.

In Slaughter’s apologetic for Biden, we read about a mythic notion of a ‘return to normalcy’ after the nightmare of Trump. That is about a return to a Neo-Liberalism that continues in its state of slow motion collapse, in the face of The Pandemic and a Capitalism in constant need of Keynesian upbuilding.

Look at your choices, fellow readers, on the subject of Joe Biden’s possible advisors.

July 31, 2020


Headline: Inside the Massive Foreign-Policy Team Advising Biden’s Campaign


Sub-headline: If Joe Biden wins, here are some of the top foreign-policy experts who could be tapped for senior and midlevel jobs in the administration.


https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/07/31/inside-biden-campaign-foreign-policy-team/

( Cost $15. 99 for access)

_______________________________________________________________



December 19, 2019

Headline: Why Biden’s Retro Inner Circle Is Succeeding So Far

Sub-headline: In 2019, there’s a tiny group of Democrats who believe the party hasn’t lurched leftward. Oh, and their boss happens to be winning the primary.


https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2019/12/19/biden-2020-campaign-president-advisers-087410


_______________________________________________________________


October 5, 2020

Headline: Just How Good Is Joe Biden’s Foreign Policy Team?

DSub-headline: It is difficult to escape the impression that a Biden administration might constitute a restoration of neoconservatism in liberal hawk garb


https://nationalinterest.org/feature/just-how-good-joe-biden%E2%80%99s-foreign-policy-team-170216

_______________________________________________________________

Old Socialist

I missed Andy Divine’s October 16, 2020 ‘political diagnosis’ about what ails ‘us’: ‘Post-Modernism’ in all its iterations. If only Andy had read Detlev Claussen’s ‘One Last Genius’? Incuriosity is the intellectual armor of the ideologue.

Yet the transgenerational political/economic/civic addiction to Neo-Libearalsm that he championed – his misdirection equals a self-apologetic for his always toxic politics. In which he quotes the disappeared political hysteric Bari Weiss.

A question I’ve wrestled with this past year or so is a pretty basic one: if critical race/gender/queer theory is unfalsifiable postmodern claptrap, as I have long contended, how has it conquered so many institutions so swiftly?

It’s been a staggering achievement, when you come to think of it. Critical theory was once an esoteric academic pursuit. Now it has become the core, underlying philosophy of the majority of American cultural institutions, universities, media, corporations, liberal churches, NGOs, philanthropies, and, of course, mainstream journalism. This summer felt like a psychic break from old-school liberalism, a moment when a big part of the American elite just decided to junk the principles that have long defined American democratic life, and embrace what Bari Weiss calls “a mixture of postmodernism, postcolonialism, identity politics, neo-Marxism, critical race theory, intersectionality, and the therapeutic mentality.”

It’s everywhere. Across the country, schools and colleges are dumping SATs so they can engineer racial equity, and abolish the idea of merit. The Smithsonian backed the idea that working hard, showing up on time and perfecting a task are functions of “whiteness”. In California, there’s a ballot initiative to legalize government discrimination on the basis of race; and a new mandate that company boards add members from under-represented communities. Corporations who haven’t publicly committed themselves to the full woke project are being hounded by their employees into doing so, meaning hiring and firing on the basis of race, or forcing employees into re-education sessions, guided by DiAngelo and Kendi. The NBA, for Pete’s sake, is now a festival of wokeness, even as viewership collapses. CRT propaganda like the NYT’s 1619 Project can be exposed as untrue and unethical, but the paper can both debunk it in its own pages and still hail it as a triumph. And the pièce de resistance: 21 percent of liberal students in the Ivy League favor some level of violence to stop campus speech they disapprove of.

…

https://andrewsullivan.substack.com/p/why-is-wokeness-winning

(Patience, only 1,242 words to go)

Andy’s search for political heretics defines his self-appointed role as pundit and political/moral visionary. Andy is the natural ally/inheritor of the legacies of Allen Bloom, Roger Kimball and Dinesh D’Souza. Not forgetting the newest inheritors of Anti-Student mendacious politicking, Jonathan Haight and Greg Lukianoff.

Andy’s continuing quest for someone/something to blame for Trump and Trumpism, and the rise of a re-invigorated ‘Left’ is utterly transparent. This is about his inability to face his own political complicity in the rise of Trump, and its immediate precursor The Tea Party. Post-Modernism and its Marxist component are the perfect target, in a country steeped in the post-war tradition of Nixon/McCarthy/Mundt/McCarren!

Political Observer

Amy Coney Barrett is neither ‘mystery’ nor ‘enigma’ ! The reader need only look to ‘Politico’, the American Political Gossip Sheet for a telling report on who Amy Coney Barrett is.

 
Headline: ‘She’s been groomed for this moment’: Amy Barrett’s Supreme Court preparation began early

Sub-headline: From her first year as a Notre Dame law student, conservatives marked her as a future leader in the mold of the Federalist Society.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg had been seated on the Supreme Court for only a year, in 1994, when a group of professors at the University of Notre Dame first recognized the potential of a first-year law student and began paving the way for her career as a conservative jurist: collaborating on scholarship, helping her land a Supreme Court clerkship and later recruiting her to the law school’s faculty.
The group was part of a growing legal movement opposed to the secularization of American society generally and to the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade ruling in particular. The 1973 abortion-rights decision not only struck many conservatives as an affront their religious values, but to the principle of judicial restraint. To wage what would be a decades-long fight to reverse the activist decisions of the court from 1950s to the 1970s, they needed young legal minds like Barrett’s.

The plan worked better than they could have hoped. Now a judge on the Seventh Circuit, Barrett is the leading contender for President Donald Trump’s nomination to replace Ginsburg on the court. Her ascension would be a coup for Catholic culture warriors 25 years in the making and a high point in the right’s decades-long project of reshaping the judiciary.

“She was kind of the Manchurian candidate,” said one former colleague at Notre Dame Law School. “She’s been groomed for this moment all the way along.”

…

https://www.politico.com/news/2020/09/20/amy-coney-barrett-supreme-court-419219

The Neo-Confederates, ‘Originalists’/’Textualists’ made a tactical mistake with Robert Bork, who looked like he stepped out of pages of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, not to speak of his part in Watergate:’

Barrett’s self-presentation is about the creation of an ‘Image‘, that resonates with the viewer: a quiet, reasoned self-confidence, assumed by the viewer, and constantly repeated by her political allies, in the hearing room. Jurisprudential excellence is her metier, this is about a well practiced, adroit Public Relations campaign. Barrett is an accomplished political/civic actor, she has stage presence.

Amy Coney Barrett seems an adroit practitioner, of a highly truncated rhetoric of ‘Originalism’/’Textualism’ . She is poised , confident, charming and thought to be a judge of the first rank. Who will not let her religious beliefs intrude into her judicial decision making. Thomas B. Griffith assure his readers of this.

Headline: Amy Coney Barrett’s Religion Won’t Dictate Her Rulings

Sub-headline: A person of faith can be an impartial judge.

…

Let me start with my own experience as a person of faith who served on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit for 15 years. During those years, I gave dozens of talks at law schools, colleges and universities. The biographical introduction that typically preceded my remarks unavoidably announced my religious commitments. Before becoming a judge, I had been the general counsel of a prominent religious university, published on religious themes, and even taught courses in scriptural studies and theology.

…

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-10-12/amy-coney-barrett-s-religion-won-t-dictate-her-rulings?utm_campaign=socialflow-organic&cmpid%3D=socialflow-twitter-view&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter&utm_content=view&sref=bfOwbK4O

American Skeptic