StephenKMackSD's Blog

Demetri Sevastopulo demonstrates the the spirit, if not the letter, of the original Fan Magazine Photoplay, is alive and well. Such is his approach to Neo-Con Cult figure Fiona Hill. It reminds this reader of Andrew Sullivan gushing, in his regular column of November  22, 2019, in New York Magazine:

Headline: Fiona Hill: The Antidote to Trump
…
When I sat down last night and watched some of the footage of Fiona Hill online, I was gobsmacked.

As soon as I heard her voice, I thought she was a “Geordie” — her accent has obviously softened but those flat vowels and clipped consonants are unmistakable to an English ear. I was wrong, in fact. Geordies are from Newcastle, strictly speaking, and Hill is from Durham. They’re both cities in the Northeast of England and have similar accents, but Durham is a truly ancient town, its Cathedral a monument to medieval Christianity, its university renowned. And Hill, it also turns out, is the real deal, from a mining family. Her local paper, the Northern Echo, celebrated a local girl yesterday:
…
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/11/andrew-sullivan-fiona-hill-is-the-antidote-to-trump.html

For those with patience,Fiona Hill and David Holmes’ five hour and twenty two minute testimony can de watched here on C-Span:

https://www.c-span.org/video/?466380-1/impeachment-inquiry-hearing-fiona-hill-david-holmes

Rep. Schiff’s carefully scripted, stage managed,choreographed, you choose the descriptor, like the Mueller Report, have simply dissipated into the gauzy mirage of Political Theater Past. 

Headline: Obama officials: No empirical evidence of Trump-Russia collusion, transcripts reveal

Sub-headline: Former National Security Adviser Susan Rice said there was no smoking gun

Top Obama administration officials told the House Intelligence Committee they had no “empirical evidence” the Trump campaign conspired with Russia ahead of the 2016 election, transcripts released Thursday revealed.

“I never saw any direct empirical evidence that the Trump campaign or someone in it was plotting/conspiring with the Russians to meddle with the election,” former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper told the committee in 2017.

“That’s not to say that there weren’t concerns about the evidence we were seeing, anecdotal evidence. … But I do not recall any instance where I had direct evidence,” he continued.

The bombshell revelation was laid bare in the transcript of Mr. Clapper’s closed-door interview as part of the Intelligence Committee’s probe into Russia’s 2016 presidential election interference.

Mr. Clapper wasn’t the only Obama official who acknowledged there was no hard evidence of ties between Russia and the Trump campaign.

Former National Security Adviser Susan Rice said there was no smoking gun.

“To the best of my recollection, there wasn’t anything smoking, but there were some things that gave me pause,” she said, according to the transcript. “I don’t recall intelligence that I would consider evidence that I saw…conspiracy prior to my departure.

…

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2020/may/7/james-clapper-susan-rice-schiff-transcript-no-evid/

 Yet one of the Star witnesses, now a cult figure, like Jane Mansfield in ‘The Girl Can’t Help It’? Has become an almost overnight sensation, even though Rep. Schiff’s production was Box Office flop.

Mr. Sevastopulo’s essay begins in promise:  

Before Fiona Hill even finished addressing Congress in the impeachment investigation into Donald Trump, she had become a global talking point.

In explosive testimony, the former White House Russia expert chastised lawmakers for helping Moscow to sow discord by entertaining a “fictional narrative” about Ukraine interfering in the 2016 election.

On the specific charges faced by Trump, she went on to recount how John Bolton, her boss at the National Security Council, had described the president’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani as a “hand grenade” who would “blow everyone up” as he pressed Ukraine to find dirt on Joe Biden.

https://www.ft.com/content/e51f701e-aa62-11ea-a766-7c300513fe47

As interesting as Hill’s career trajectory, and policy talk are, this interview remains in the Photoplay tradition. Like all Public Relations inspired interviews, with stars, its about selling a product. 

Political Observer

Headline: US protests will change Biden’s safety-first campaign

Sub-headline: A more radical platform might emerge, and with it political risk

The collapse of The Neo-Liberal State continues in a concatenation of unpredictable events. At the still political center is Senile Old Joe, in every way the epitome of an utterly bankrupt Political Class. He is the champion of The Free Market and its corollary the Carceral State, but disappointingly a lion in winter?

… 

Historians were rather late to the game of studying mass incarceration, which had already preoccupied scholars in Ethnic Studies, Political Science, Sociology, and elsewhere. And even as historians have turned greater attention to the history of prisons, policing, and surveillance, the field has remained robustly interdisciplinary. The carceral state is one of the subject areas—conservatism and capitalism being perhaps the other leading contenders—in which historians can best ply a critical interrogation of change over time to address matters of great social and political urgency in the present.

…

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/727800#:~:text=The%20carceral%20state%20is%20one,political%20urgency%20in%20the%20present.

This a bit too highfalutin for Mr. Ganesh’s regular reader?  who look to this modern day Dandy, specializing in ‘Silver Fork’ political commentary: they like their political analgesic wreathed in Ganesh’s nearly beguiling chatter, masquerading as a very particular kind of knowledge, or better yet political prescience? 

Political Observer 

https://www.ft.com/content/6974b698-826a-40bc-9b51-5c065ab515f8

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How could I have missed Janan Ganesh’s June 3, 2020 essay?

Headline: A divided America cannot compete in a superpower duel with China

Sub-headline: If another cold war is afoot, the US goes into it with less of the cohesion that primed it for the first

The reader can only savor these various expressions of the Ganesh cut and thrust. A carefully ‘curated’ selection: 

…

America’s internal schisms are being used against it, and used well, with the soft touch and irony that autocrats are meant to lack. But then there is so much to work with. 

…

The dividedness of the US — racial, material, political — is aired thoroughly enough as a domestic blight. It is the effect on its foreign policy that can get lost in the anguish. If the US is riven, it must also be hampered in its outward actions. And nowhere will it suffer more than in the superpower duel.

…

The US-China rift is so cheaply likened to the cold war that we forget how much more unified America was back then.

…

With all the due caveats about silent tensions (and, in McCarthyism, loud ones), the US that set out on the cold war was a nation of almost quaint togetherness. It could be mobilised for an open-ended contest against a far-off rival.

…

As they consider the inflamed streets, Americans of some vintage will shiver with memories of the late-1960s. 

…

For reasons of pride or strategy, confronting China might be still be right.

…

If he wants the US to bed down for an indefinite struggle against China, he must know that it cannot also be so nakedly at odds with itself.

…

https://www.ft.com/content/be4b0758-a578-11ea-92e2-cbd9b7e28ee6

Mr. Ganesh’s History-Made-To-Measure demonstrates his usual literary flair, but that is not nearly enough. As  The New Cold War, with both China and Russia, is not some casual invention. Witness the myth of the hot bed of rivalry in the South China Sea, and the actuality of the Ukrainian Coup.

The moralizing frame for this  New Cold War propaganda, of Mr. Ganesh’s June 3, 2020 essay, is provided by this belated June 5, 2020 essay by the Editorial Board of the Financial Times: 

Headline:America’s battered moral standing

Sub-headline: Donald Trump is handing the world’s autocrats a propaganda coup

America’s state department last weekend called on “freedom-loving people” to hold China to account for its vow to impose a national security law on Hong Kong. A Chinese official instantly tweeted: “I can’t breathe”. The riposte was no less stinging for its sarcasm. Images of US law enforcement breaking up demonstrations after the suffocation of George Floyd, a 46-year-old African-American, already harm US moral standing. The fact that President Donald Trump describes the mostly peaceful protesters as “thugs”, “killers”, and “domestic terrorists” makes the damage incalculably greater.

Previous presidents have been accused of hypocrisy after similar tragedies. The world is well-versed in US racial inequities. Yet never before has a US president demonised in blanket terms those protesting against injustice. Hypocrisy may be the compliment vice pays to virtue. Mr Trump makes no pretence of siding with virtue.

https://www.ft.com/content/760b6144-a740-11ea-92e2-cbd9b7e28ee6

On June 8, 2020 The Financial Times publishes this ‘news story’ on a warning from  NATO chief  Jens Stoltenberg. Note that this ‘news story’ was cobbled together by Michael Peel in Brussels, Helen Warrell in London, Erika Solomon in Berlin and Katrina Manson in Washington. Call this what it is, propaganda by committee.    

Headline: Nato chief urges nations to stand up to ‘bullying’ as China power rises

Sub-headline: Jens Stoltenberg says threats posed by Beijing demand a ‘more global approach’ 

Nato’s chief has warned that China is “multiplying the threats to open societies and individual freedoms”, as he urged like-minded countries to join the military alliance to stand up against “bullying and coercion”. Jens Stoltenberg, secretary-general of the transatlantic security alliance, said on Monday that the Covid-19 pandemic had “magnified existing tensions and trends when it comes to our security”. China’s emergence as the world’s second-largest military spender demands a “more global approach” from the 30-country Nato group, he added.

https://www.ft.com/content/e05f45fb-49a8-4798-bcfc-1052080e45cd

Political Observer

Perhaps this is one of the reasons that Mr. Ferguson left the august Times ?

‘He is the founder and managing director of Greenmantle LLC, a New York-based advisory firm.’

Mr. Ferguson is another peddler, with his vaunted ‘expertise’ like the crowd of for-rent Public Intellectuals, and former Professional Politicians, in sum, political grifters  that pass themselves,and their hirelings, as ‘fixers’ : Henry Kissinger, Ian Bremmer, Rudy Giuliani etc., etc.  
Both last Sunday and this Sunday, I went looking for his regular column, in the Times, and wondered at where he might be. Mr. Ferguson makes his debut at Bloomberg Opinion on June 8, 2020. 

Headline: 2020 Is Not 1968. It May Be Worse.

Sub-headline: Social unrest helped doom Lyndon Johnson’s presidency. It may end up saving Trump’s.

What is telling is that his readership, or some portion of ‘them’, were not just alive during that fateful year, but were part of that generation of dissenters, and/or very sympathetic to that cause. As Mr. Ferguson was born in 1964, he was neither dissident, nor an adversary  of those political nonconformists. Yet as an Historian he can recount 1968, as it happened, written in an approximation of the facts, or write a history made to measure.      

For Mr. Ferguson and his many ‘allies’ as presented by him: ‘David Frum, James Fallows, Max Boot, Julian Zelizer and Zachary Karabell’ are a collection of writers and propagandists: the respectable bourgeois voices of Corporate Media.

The Hong Kong flu did not shut the country down! Or consider this Ferguson gem: ‘It’s easy to forget that Woodstock, the following year, was a super-spreader event.’ Both examples of  historical malapropism ?  

The historical points of reference: 

The Athenian plague of 430 BC

The Antonine Plague (165-180 AD)

The Plague of Justinian (542 AD)

The Black Death

The list is long …

Then he somersaults to his ‘friend’ Roland Fryer, a colleague sympathetic to Black Live Matter, that by inference casts Ferguson in a more sympathetic light, it is a usable connection. ‘Coleman Hughes, another African-American friend’ also makes strategic appearance.

Mr. Ferguson’s search for analogies,  and dis-analogies to 1968 does not quite ring true, as Trump’s popularity has hit a marked downward trend, even among Republicans: 

Headline: 2020 Watch: Has Trump hit bottom? Polls show him trailing

Sub-headline:President Donald Trump enters the week hoping to rebound from one of the lowest points of his presidency

https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory/2020-watch-trump-hit-bottom-polls-show-trailing-71128115

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Headline:Krystal and Saagar React: BREAKING brutal polls for Trump show it’s not 2016 again

Why is this final paragraph anything like a surprise, coming from this Neo-Conservative, whose unseemly romance with The British Empire, and its institutionalized racism and murder, produces a radical toxic nostalgia?    

Yet the return of the culture war might just prove to be the deus ex machina that extricates Trump from the quagmire of Covid-19. If so, Trump’s many detractors in the commentariat – who have long hoped that he is Richard Nixon without the second term – may come to rue the day they drew the wrong historical analogy.

Political Observer

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-06-07/floyd-protests-and-coronavirus-2020-is-not-1968-it-s-worse

(Added June 9, 2020 7:27 PDT)

P. S. Mr. Ferguson could have benefited from the insights of  Joe McGinniss’ 1969 bestseller The Selling of the President 1968. The original book cover itself is worth posting:

Headline: Can this American version of the French Revolution bring change?

Where is the Marat, the Robespierre? Your historical inflation looks a bit grand for this   list of  villains: The Boogaloo Bois, ANTIFA, maybe BlackBlock. Should we add to this list American Policeman?  The only persons, ‘voices of reason’ , on television/social media are Al Sharpton and Cornell West? Not quite to your exacting standard?  Where is Obama’s former political house-pet, and windbag Michael Eric Dyson?        

The collapse of the Neo-Liberal State brings forth Monsters! Look to the culpability of your own ‘profession’ ,The Law! The rise and triumph of the Neo-Confederate/Originalist coterie of racists, under the respectable bourgeois rubric of The Federalist Society. Rehnquist, Scalia etc. and their sometime ally Centrist Kennedy. Shelby County v. Holder the monument to the Neo-Confederate/Originalists, and their jurisprudential catamite! And now the complete colonization of the Supreme Court by these Political Romantics!   

You brief but rambling saga continues: 

One of the Monsters, the fascist Tom Cotton! The New York Times, James Bennet and publisher A.G. Sulzberger ,who defended their publishing of his incendiary polemic,in your telling, this places them in the hero category. But then ‘The Mob’ triumphed. Your natural ally Bari Weiss named this triumph ‘Safetyism’, riffing on the trailblazing lead of the ‘Coddling’ duo of Haidt & Lukianoff.

(Added June 6, 2020 2:30 PDT)

Here a critical review of ‘Coddling’, that includes this revelation about the choice of the title for their book:

…

If it seems odd that a book primarily concerned with the well-being of students would boast a title implying that those students are “coddled,” I agree, as does Greg Lukianoff, who has told both Jaschik and the Chronicle of Higher Education that he essentially disagrees with his own title – preferring “Disempowered” – but ultimately going with the publisher’s preferred “The Coddling of the American Mind” because it is “less boring.”

The title is a discordant note coming from two authors who center the benefits of rational debate as a necessary part of our public discourse. It’s as though we should be truthful and accurate, except when it comes to having an attention-grabbing title which will help sell a lot of books.[1]

…

https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/just-visiting/million-thoughts-coddling-american-mind

How unfortunate that you end your polemic with Abbe Sieyes. This screen shot from pages 81 and 82 of  the print copy of Liberalism: A Counter History by Domenico Losurdo adds a certain dimension to the radical, or is that revolutionary fellow traveler Sieyes? 

Political Observer

Can this American version of the French Revolution bring change?

Mr. Luce’s verbose hand-wringing devolves into this Delphic Utterance:

‘Faced with a choice between sabotaging American democracy or a future spent in and out of court rooms, I have no doubt where Mr Trump’s instincts would lie. It would be up to others to stop him.’

A reader just might surmise that a Military Coup is in America’s future ?
‘Seven Day in May’ of 1964, from the best selling novel by Fletcher Knebel & Charles W. Bailey II, comes to mind, for Americans of a certain age. This the successor to Frankenheimer’s ‘The Manchurian Candidate’ steeped in Cold War hysterical paranoia.
The concatenation of : The Pandemic, the near Economic Collapse that has left how many millions out of work, Trump’s complete failure to provide anything resembling leadership, The New Democrats led by Pelosi, have proved to be as mendacious and self-serving  as Trump. While a cognitively impaired Joe Biden, whose certifiable history of racism can be seen on YouTube, is the presumptive leader of the New Democrats. Add to this, the ensuing collapse of the Neo-Liberal State, and the police murder of  George Floyd that are parts of the toxic atmosphere, that provides the back drop to the American political present. In 1863 Nikolai Chernyshevsky asked the question ‘What is to Be Done’ ? Its is still the most relevant question, about today.

Political Observer 

https://www.ft.com/content/8189e105-68f2-4672-b906-f19fa1031cbe

From the very font of Neo-Liberalism, The Financial Times, presents the dutifully alarmist report on the ongoing state of its collapse in New York City, that features a report on the quarrel between de Blasio and the bellicose New Democrat Cuomo. The governor scolds the mayor for not maintaining civic order. At what cost will civic order and peace be purchased? Does the mayor express the anguish of a ‘Liberal’ that has too long surrendered to the political imperatives  demanded by this and other New Democrats? 

Earlier, an emotional Mr de Blasio called the situation “a horrible, perfect storm we’re living through” and announced that the 11 PM to 5AM curfew announced on Monday would be extended another five days, and brought forward to 8PM in an effort to quell the violence.

 The ‘as if’ here is that the NYPD, with its long history of racism, examples: Stop an Frisk, the removal of Judge Scheindlin from the court case, by the political machinations of the maladroit Mayor Bloomberg, and the murder of Eric Garner, enjoys widespread support?

The Pandemic and 100,000 deaths, the collapse of The Economy, Unemployment at rates not seen since the Great Depression or frighteningly near. Joshua Chaffin describes the ‘mood’ the city:

…

In New York City, the mood has been particularly tense. The city has been among the worst affected by the coronavirus pandemic, with more than 21,000 fatalities — a disproportionate number born by predominantly black and Hispanic communities. It was due to begin reopening on Monday after nearly three months of shutdown to contain the virus that have frayed nerves and devastated the economy.

…

The Neo-Liberal State is collapsing with frightening speed, and its advocates/apologists are in a panic. We are reading The Financial Times, so the last two sentences are unsurprising. Can ‘Law and Order’ be achieved ‘by any means necessary’ a phrase from Jean-Paul Sartre via Malcolm X ! The anonymous source the life-blood of a certain  kind of Journalism. 

A retired law enforcement official complained the police had been given an impossible task, and warned they risked losing control of the situation.

“It’s a very challenging situation, and the mayor makes it worse,” the official said. “He sends mixed messages every day.”  

Political Observer

https://www.ft.com/content/982b22f0-68d6-418c-8b68-8046b62c3790

While the home of the American Empire is consumed in flames, Mr. Ganesh entertains his readers with ‘God Talk’. In that spirit let me offer these thoughts:

Janan Ganesh celebrates Francis Collins by way of Christopher Hitchens ‘the heathen’s heathen’ praise for Collins. There can be no real rapprochement between Science and Religion: Belief and Empiricism are antithetical concepts, even ways of thinking and imagining. But propagandists, who happen to be acolytes of Christianity, like Francis Collins, feel it incumbent upon themselves to attempt to bridge this chasm.       

As a child who came of age in the 1950’s in America, you could have thought that Billy Graham, or the more high-brow Reinhold Niebuhr, could render that chasm bridgeable. Even though you found the enervating, not to speak of jejune chatter of Christianity’s proselytizers unpalatable…

(The TV preachers who replaced this duo were/are just Grifters running the con!) The once celebrated Harvey Cox is where? I spent too much time, in my childhood, attending Sunday School, Youth Night and Vacation Bible school, having to pay attention to adults’ drone on about, first Sin, then about Jesus! First shaming ,then redemption! 

Now the self-obsessed Kierkegaard tried, by of his advocacy of his own Augustinian Temperament, in sum self-loathing for being human, has become the sine qua non of the true belief and practice. To establish irrationality as singularity. This irrationalism appealed to Heidegger, later in his philosophical maturation, if that is the correct descriptor?

See Karl Barth’s commentary on ‘The Epistles to the Romans’ for the demonstration of the hermetic character of ‘Faith’, equal to intellectual/ethical suffocation! Barth repeats this theme, in endless iterations, with abundant Biblical garnish.

I read a slim volume of John Polkinghorne , the title of which escapes my memory, and found it disappointing, in that it was a repetition of the Christian Fundamentalist Party Line. What I really enjoyed reading, that was illuminating, by its focus on Kant, was Christopher J. Insole’s ‘The Intolerable God: Kant’s Theological Journey’

https://www.eerdmans.com/Products/7305/the-intolerable-god.aspx

Queer Atheist 

https://www.ft.com/content/3f301c1a-a0c3-11ea-b65d-489c67b0d85d

Three paragraphs devoted to Joe Biden’s comments, ‘the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee’ subject to his own attempt at self-rehabilitation, about the irredeemable character of the black habitual offender: the Predator of the white nightmare:

The Crime Bill, the toxic remains of which, places his attempt at rehabilitation in the category of null set! Or should the reader compare this change of heart/mind to Obama’s ‘evolution’ on Gay Marriage? Here is the comment of a Mayor not included in this Financial Times essay:

Headline: Chicago mayor drops ‘coded’ f-bomb blasting Trump’s controversial tweet on George Floyd protests

Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot (D) on Friday torched President Trump’s controversial tweet about protests after the death of George Floyd, sharing a “coded” message: “It starts with ‘f’ and ends with ‘you.'”

Lightfoot made the comment at a press briefing Friday, during which she condemned the death of Floyd and the actions by police as seen in a video of his arrest.

“It’s impossible for me as a black woman who has been the target of blatant racism over the course of my life not to take the killing of George Floyd personally. Watching that poor man beg for his life and for the ability to breathe and then watching the life leave him there in the streets I felt angry, I feel sickened and a range of other emotions all at once,” Lightfoot said at a moving press briefing Friday.

“Being black in America shouldn’t be a death sentence,” she said.

https://thehill.com/homenews/news/500228-chicago-mayor-blasts-trump-on-george-floyd-fuck-you

Mr. Biden’s comments are just a stale repeat of what I listened to during the 1965  ‘Watts Riots’ and in 1968. The only question of any real interest is how will the New Democrats get rid of Joe, in the most seemly way possible : ‘Due to ill health I must, sadly, withdraw from the presidential race of 2020. I pledge  my delegates to …’ 

Political Observer

https://www.ft.com/content/e3f89714-da04-418b-a081-444619d9c0d8?list=intlhomepage

Far-Right Infiltrators and Agitators in George Floyd Protests: Indicators of White Supremacists