StephenKMackSD's Blog

Mr. Ganesh goes where others might fear to tread! The re-negotiated NAFTA agreement is 1800 pages long. What can the reader reasonably expect from any Chinese Trade Agreement?
Instead of presenting empirical evidence, Mr. Ganesh opines on the ‘political metaphysics’ of this vexing, even befuddling issue, he ‘compares’ the – but first he, in his own maladroit way, engages in the ‘Yellow Peril’ mythology, once the calling card of Neo-Con Niall Ferguson:

From defence secretary Mark Esper there was certainty about China’s threat to the west and Europe’s naivety in the face of it. From Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the House of Representatives: certainty about China’s threat to the west, and Europe’s naivety in the face of it.

Is China a threat because this totalitarian regime is/are better  practitioners of capitalism than Western Democracies? The most prominent myth of Capitalists was that the Free Market could only exist within a Democratic frame? How can Hayek’s revered ‘pricing system’ exist in a former ‘command economy’ ,that now practices Capitalism?

In rhetorical terms Mr. Ganesh presents Trump’s ‘practical terms’ and the free floating ‘idealism’.

For all his militant jingoism, President Donald Trump views China in practical terms

It is idealism that has the far messier potential.

That ‘idealism’ then finds its root in Rep. Pelosi:

As for Huawei’s role in Europe, to let it build 5G networks would be “to choose autocracy over democracy,” says Ms Pelosi, with the Manichean crudeness that nothing — not even the fiasco of Iraq, which it helped to beget — can kill off in Washington. Light and dark, good and bad, free and unfree: this stuff still trips off the tongue. 

Mr. Ganesh continues his intervention with the added gloss of strategic walk-ons by David Ricardo, Pyle, of Graham Greene’s novel The Quiet American, George Kennan, and borrows from and or extemporizes on Samuel P. Huntington in ‘The clash of values’ , Cheshire Cat smiles.

The prime political actor in his last paragraph is the utterly amorphous entity  ‘a diplomatic firmament’ dominated by idealistic Democrats obsessed by an ‘idea’ rather than an ‘idealism’ .The question remains isn’t diplomacy, in all its various iterations, based on pragmatism rather than an ‘idea’ or ‘idealism’? Or in this context should ‘pragmatism’ be considered a kind of ‘idealism’ ?

A new president would need staff and these would come from a diplomatic firmament that hews to much of what the Democrats are saying. The same belief in America as an “idea”. The same wariness of China as the opposite of it. And the same affront that nations from Britain to the Philippines, without a market of $21tn to fall back on, do not see things with such piercing clarity.

Political Observer

https://www.ft.com/content/7e5e7620-52f8-11ea-90ad-25e377c0ee1f

Joe McGinniss wrote a best selling book on the Richard Nixon campaign, published in 1969. ‘The Selling of the President, 1968’.  In the ‘Age of Bloomberg’ an enterprising journalist should write a book about the 2020 Election, and its Plutocratic candidate Bloomberg, with the title ‘The Purchasing of the American Presidency’. Certainly no one at The Financial Times would author such an attack, on the hallowed institution of the vote! Except under a pseudonym?

Mr. Luce, being born in 1968 is probably not familiar with the McGinniss book? The unmasking of the Nixon public relations campaign was a valuable act of journalistic practice. Mr. Luce is safely moored in the ‘exceptional political present’ where history is defined by what happened in 2016, and perhaps no further, except when it is part of making an ideological point.

Mr. Luce’s opening paragraph is chock-a-block with the- should I have used the more pertinent term ‘political melodrama’?

Its onset has been visible for some time; such is the nature of slow-motion wrecks. Unfortunately we cannot press the fast-forward button. Wednesday night’s debate in Las Vegas was the Democratic party’s nastiest so far — with Michael Bloomberg its clear loser. At some point, nevertheless, the Democratic race is likely to boil down to a fight between him and Bernie Sanders. There are few ways that a zero-sum contest between a self-funded old billionaire and a stubborn old socialist could end in a friendly armistice. There are many in which the collision could play out. Almost none, barring the least likely — a sweeping victory by one over the other — entails a happy ending for Democrats.

First to entree stage -left is Sanders, burdened by Mr. Luce’s invidious comparison to Trump: just recall the Clinton coterie’s Bernie Bros. of 2016, its the Neo-Liberal Party Line. Mr. Luce is one of this myth’s ardent rhetorical allies. Add to the crimes of the Bernie Bros. they were disloyal to the institution of the Party! (Stalinism?)

The similarities between Mr Sanders’s campaign and Donald Trump’s in 2016 are apt. Each has militant supporters who are happy to indulge in social media harassment and character assassination. Barely half of Mr Sanders’ supporters would vote for Mr Bloomberg if he became the nominee, according to a recent poll. That share would almost certainly rise as the spectre of a Trump second term loomed. But Mr Trump would only need to capture a slice of the “Bernie Bro” constituency — the politically incorrect element of the US senator’s base — to tip the election his way. That is what happened in 2016. An estimated tenth of Mr Sanders’ supporters voted against Hillary Clinton.

The political melodrama reaches its second act with Sanders still the dramatis personae engaging in a ‘hostile takeover’ of the Democratic Party. Note the use of a metaphor used to describe the Corporate Raider, making concrete in the mind of the reader, that Sanders is illegitimate! Rather than a reform movement against the sclerotic, corrupt Clinton coterie: its representatives in Luce’s melodrama are Biden and Warren.

Mr Sanders is trying to do a Trump-like hostile takeover of the Democratic party. He enjoys similar tactical advantages. Like Mr Trump, Mr Sanders has benefited from a packed field of conventional candidates who have spent most of their firepower attacking each other. Wednesday’s debate was the most combustible example of that so far. Like Mr Trump at the same point in 2016, Mr Sanders is spurned by his party’s establishment. Nowadays that is taken as a virtue. A single Iowa legislator endorsed the senator from Vermont before the state’s caucus this month against double-digit endorsements for most of the others, including Joe Biden and Elizabeth Warren. Mr Sanders nevertheless won the most votes.

Not content with his unrealized melodrama, which is just an extended screed of Anti-Sanders cliches.

…

Finally, like the US president, Mr Sanders believes he is heading a movement, not a campaign. People who lead causes do not drop out. They fight to the bitter end.

…

All of which presents a looming dilemma for Democrats. Mr Sanders wants a revolution. Mr Bloomberg wants a restoration. The contours of one increasingly likely collision came at the end of Wednesday’s debate. Every candidate, barring Mr Sanders, said they would accept the rules of a brokered presidential convention. Mr Sanders alone insisted that the candidate with the most votes should be the nominee — even if they had less than half the delegates.

…

In another democracy, Mr Sanders would belong to a different party to the rest. Mr Bloomberg would too. The first calls himself a socialist. The second is essentially what used to be called a Rockefeller Republican.

…

In practice, Mr Sanders and the other candidates see New York’s former mayor as a plutocrat who bought the silence of sexually harassed former employees as well as his place on the Democratic stage. Mr Sanders, meanwhile, is seen as an ageing coronary patient whose extravagant promises would deliver Mr Trump a second term.

Mr. Luce’s melodrama disappoints because it descends into a predictable Anti-Sanders screed, garnished with the notion that plutocrat Bloomberg represents a ‘Political Restoration’. These last two sentences close his polemic …

The writer, Jorge Luis Borges, once likened the UK-Argentina war over the Falkland Islands to two bald men fighting over a comb. It would also serve as an apt forecast of a Bloomberg-Sanders showdown.

Old Socialist

https://www.ft.com/content/c850259a-5397-11ea-90ad-25e377c0ee1f

____________________________________________________________

I saw a copy of this latest biography of Oliver Wendell Holmes by Stephen Budiansky, today, at my local library. I searched, out of curiosity, for the Buck vs. Bell case. This being a valid test of an actual biography of Holmes, warts and all, or just more of the same apologetics, for this misogynist and misanthrope, and one of the decisions that establishes without fail this American jurist’s reputation.

Here, from G. Edward White’s Oliver Wendell Holmes : Law and The Inner Self:

From pages 407 and 408 some telling information that has escaped Mr. Budiansky’s attention ?  That I recalled this portion of Prof. White’s biography can be attributed to the fact that Holmes was a very particular kind of American Monster!

…

The second feature of Buck v. Bell is that it concerned a legislative “reform” about which Holmes did not have his customary skepticism. On the contrary, he was an enthusiast for population control devices, particularly those that promised to reduce “incompetence” in the population. He had no reason to doubt many of the assumptions of the eugenic reformers: that mental disabilities were inherited; that mental disability was linked to crime; that the very persons who were candidates for sterilization were the least likely to control their sexual impulses. He had written Pollock in 1920 that “I should be glad . . . if it could be arranged that death should precede life by provisions for a selected race,” because “every society rests on the death of men,”(130) and that “[y]our remark that the men fit for military service on the whole are the better type . . . is precisely the reflection that makes me believe that it would be possible to breed a race.”(131)

He had written Laski in 1923 that “I do not regard the great multiplication of the species as a benefit.”(132) and in 1925 that “I don’t believe in millennia and still less in the possibility of attaining one . . . while propagation is free and we do all we can to keep the products, however bad, alive.”(133) He wrote Lewis Einstein in 1927, after the Buck decision, that “establishing the constitutionality of a law permitting the sterilization of imbeciles . . . gave me pleasure.”(134) And he wrote Laski that when he wrote the opinion in the Buck case he “felt that I was getting near to the first principle of real reform.”(135)

It therefore proves too much to associate Holmes’ opinion in Buck v. Bell with a skeptical tolerance for “social legislation” of all sorts, which does not capture his attitude toward Virginia’s sterilization statute. The notoriety of Buck v. Bell has increasingly cut into Holmes’ image as a civil libertarian; it played an important part in the first major revision of that image by critics in the 1960s.(136) The question remains, however, how that image first surfaced, given Holmes’ repeated skepticism about the efficacy of “progressive” legislation, indifference toward civil rights claims, disinclination to grant aliens any rights against the state, and ultrapositivist theories of sovereignty.

…

https://epdf.pub/justice-oliver-wendell-holmes-law-and-the-inner-self.html

Also see Law without Values : The Life, Work, And Legacy Of Justice Holmes by Albert W. Alschuler :  Chapter Five , Holmes’s Opinions pages 65, 66 and 67 that reiterates the historical evidence that White presents.

The Cult of Oliver Wendell Holmes is politically and civically toxic!  Mr. Budiansky is another Holmes acolyte.

American Writer

I still think that Mr. Ganesh’s novel is still a work in progress! But to earn a living he writes in the most hybrid of forms: the feuilleton blended with political commentary, I think that these two rhetorical practices are immiscible, that might even be thought of as a misbegotten marriage of opposites?
Consider these two ideas/constructs presented by Mr. Ganesh in his latest essay :

‘tribal Democrats (the strategist James Carville)’

Not ‘tribal’ but in fact Neo-Liberal, who warns in his Financial Times polemic on the dangers of Sanders, as the recrudescence of McGovern. I was a voter in 1972 and cast my vote for McGovern! Mr. Ganesh wisely leaves this alone.

‘and Republican apostates (the writer David Frum)’

Mr. Frum’s rise is the Horatio Alger mythology turned upside-down: Canadian Posh Boy makes good in America, by becoming a propagandist for Bush The Younger. He worked from January 2001 to February 2002, and in his very short White House career authored the ‘axis of evil’ propaganda. He is and remains a Neo-Conservative, who has re-invented himself, in the political present, as the ‘Wise Republican Elder’, in this guise he is the agreeable house-pet of Corporate Media.

As I find Mr. Ganesh’s political chatter causes something akin to ennui, I will skip to the last two paragraphs:

Just because Mr Sanders can win does not mean that a party so monomaniacal about unseating Mr Trump should take the chance. Former South Bend mayor Pete Buttigieg, Tuesday’s runner-up, is more saleable to the moderates who turned Democratic in 2018. Minnesota senator Amy Klobuchar has similar views and a pugilist’s edge, so essential against this president. It is just that those of us who swore off political certitude after 2016 are amazed how much of it survives in the form of the Sanders bears. If he is the nominee, it would not be a Democratic forfeiture of the White House.

Mr. Ganesh here speculates, in an unsurprisingly negative way, about the ‘thought’ or ‘conjecture’ of the Democratic Party, as if it were a singular sentient being, who wills the defeat of Trump, while not factoring in the costs incurred, by the possibly of winning in 2020, with Sanders as its nominee. This, almost dazzlingly highfalutin preamble to Buttigieg and Klobuchar, as the more ‘rational choice’ for the sentient being that is the Democratic Party. That is if I have managed to decipher Mr. Ganesh’s nearly serpentine argument?

Not content with the above, Mr. Ganesh , with the aid of the personages of Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, constructs a fable of Sanders and Trump as the harbingers of a yet to be completed secularising imperative, in the foreseeable political present. Yet Ganesh expresses an ersatz puzzlement over his gangling rhetorical creature. Mr. Ganesh shift of both subject and register leaves this reader in a state of bewilderment!

What it would be is a cultural moment. Thomas Jefferson and John Adams expressed their doubts in a grander register, but Mr Sanders and Mr Trump would be among the least religious contestants for the presidency. They tend not to even go in for the muddled spirituality of the confessional memoir and the damp-eyed stump speech. With a combined age of 151, these men are a curiously future-facing pair, heralds of a nation that is, albeit in fits and starts, secularising. Theirs would make for an unusual showdown, and one whose outcome is not as foregone as lately billed.

https://www.ft.com/content/e7a1837e-4d77-11ea-95a0-43d18ec715f5

Political Observer

The headline below and its ‘reporting’:

Headline: Sanders secures narrow victory in New Hampshire primary

https://www.ft.com/content/fe58cccc-4c4f-11ea-95a0-43d18ec715f5

Added to this headline and sub-headline:

Bernie Sanders’ early strength worries Democratic leaders

Prospect of nomination of most anti-establishment presidential candidate since 1972

https://www.ft.com/content/d38e6b52-4d24-11ea-95a0-43d18ec715f5

The McGovern comparison shows that James Pinketon’s political obsession travels well over the decades. (It happens that Mr. Pinkerton graduated high school in 1975, which makes him approximately fifteen years old in 1972.) Add to this Courtney Weaver and Lauren Fedor have made good use of the New Democratic ‘technocrats’  who are advising Sen. Sanders opponents. Not to forget, and two anonymous personages:

Zac Petkanas, Roger Lau, ‘One Democratic donor’ and by ‘one Democratic strategist’

Add to this toxic mix, the hysterical comments of the two Corporate Media hirelings,  Chuck Todd and Chris Matthews, and the political grotesques Mika & Joe and their coterie.  Let me ‘revise’ Zbigniew Brzezinski’s comment on Joe, who in another political context called Joe’s knowledge ‘stunningly superficial’.

Courtney Weaver and Lauren Fedor aquit themselves with more political/ideological aplomb, while carefully following the Party Line on Left-Wing Social Democrat Sanders: the Neo-Liberal’s will not go quietly!

Political Observer

Headline:Problems for Macron as defecting MPs believe the party is over

Sub-headline: French president’s La République en Marche is losing ground ahead of elections

Unreported in the pages of this newspaper, The General Strike since its inception in December 2019, has had a devastating effect on M. 37%’s putative ‘landslide victory’ as declared with numbing regularity.
Why is Macron M. 37% ? In the final round in the election 36.5% of voters rendered their ballots ‘spoiled’ or otherwise uncountable.

M. Mallet’s reporting touches in the briefest  possible way on the gilets jaunes/gilets noirs and the General Strike that has been blacked out by the Financial Times editors, except when it is usable to provide political context. Call it by its name Stalinist erasure, practiced in the political present. With the caveat that it will  fail, in a world as diverse as our own, in terms of  propaganda masquerading as ‘news’, while other sources of  information are readily available for those who choose to seek it out!

More than 15 months of demonstrations by the gilets jaunes — the movement began with motorists complaining about a green tax on fuel, but later developed into broader anti-government protests — have been followed since December by disruptive public sector strikes and marches against Mr Macron’s pension reform. Trade unions have announced another big strike day for Paris on Monday.

What is utterly unavoidable as the almost primary reason for Macron’s political erosion? Besides the open rebellion of not just the Lower Orders, but of Fireman, Teaches, Lawyers, Doctors even Students.

What is primary in M. Mallet’s argument? He constructs a Political Melodrama, about the disenchantment of the politicians that are the members of En Marche. A large cast of characters, that takes its power from its profusion of ‘walk-ons’ , aided by brief speaking parts.

Some LREM MPs, who joined the movement in the wave of enthusiasm for a new style of politics that accompanied Mr Macron’s rise, are uncomfortable with party discipline on unpopular laws. As hostility to the president has grown, they are also facing harsh realities of day-to-day political life — including personal abuse in the streets and attacks by militants and vandals on MPs’ constituency offices.

https://www.ft.com/content/e2b914cc-4cdb-11ea-95a0-43d18ec715f5

Both M. Mallet, and the En Marche office holders, fail to realize that their time is waning: M. Mallet exhausts the reader’s patience, the En Marche office holders now face the contempt of the French people, who have seen enough of Police Violence committed against their fellow citizens, under the orders of a ruthless enarque: he acts as if he were a Bourbon!  Or the Police attacking striking Fireman. The videos of these crimes are available on twitter, Kant’s words echo: dare to know!

Almost Marx

https://www.ft.com/content/e2b914cc-4cdb-11ea-95a0-43d18ec715f5

https://www.ft.com/content/e2b914cc-4cdb-11ea-95a0-43d18ec715f5

Cpl. Jones, thank you for your, brief ,but thought provoking comment.

To ignore Corbyn’s catastrophic stand on Brexit in all its wishy-washyness is the very crux of his defeat in the election. If Corbyn had only had the courage of his convictions, and been Pro-Brexit, instead of courting political respectability of another ‘referendum’, his campaign would have made sense, to those who voted for the Posh Boy dullard Boris.

Corbyn is and will remain a Left-Wing Social Democrat, in sum, fully a part of a long and valuable political tradition, except in the Age of Neo-Liberal Tony Blair, which, in sum, has evolved into the cherished notion of ‘Moderation’.  Blair’s actual mentor Mrs. Thatcher and her Hayekian political/social psychopathology, in a more carefully massaged and packaged version: see Edward L. Bernays ‘public relations’ bible    ‘Propaganda’.

Here is Samuel Brittan, in the pages of this newspaper, circa 2013, explicating Mrs. Thatcher’s inherent personal/political nihilism.

Headline:Thatcher was right – there is no ‘society’

Sub-headline: Aid for the poor, or distressed regions, must come from the citizens of the country concerned

https://www.ft.com/content/d1387b70-a5d5-11e2-9b77-00144feabdc0

Regards,

StephenKMackSD

https://www.ft.com/content/aa0677e0-48fe-11ea-aee2-9ddbdc86190d?commentID=16668c8a-f8bf-4581-8dc0-6a10ce9f9600

With the collapse of the Clinton/Clapper/Brennan ‘Russian Interference’ in the 2016 Election, almost receding into the back ground? except for die-hard New Democrats and their Corporate Media allies. ‘CrowdStrike’ was the only organized investigative agency to examine the Clinton servers and e mails, the FBI deferred to its report: when has the FBI ever ceded its investigative prerogative?
The watershed of the Mueller Report,and its star witness, who seemed to be disconnected from the investigation he headed , in his appearance before the House, was utterly, even completely unimpressive. Both Mueller and Comey appeared as near comic figures, in this exercise in political theater: Schiff’s status as dramaturge/ringmaster was not yet in doubt or a state of collapse, the Impeachment in the Senate, would offer that opportunity.

But the undaunted New Democrats, under the leadership of the Pelosi/Schiff/Nadler troika, launched an Impeachment inquiry, with two weeks of ‘secret hearings’ which enabled Rep Schiff to cobble together his narrative of Trump’s political crimes, and its cast of characters : that passed in the New Democratically controlled House, that after Pelosi’s flat-footed machinations, was referred to the Republican controlled Senate.

The only Republican to vote to convict Trump was Sen Mitt Romney!

The above just the political background to this Financial Times editorial:

Headline: An unchained Donald Trump poses a threat to the US republic

Sub-headline: The Senate has given its judgment, now it is the turn of the American people

Roula Khalaf and the others editors at The Financial Times proclaim that Trump is not a political gentleman. But the political intent of these ‘Editors’ is presented here:

…

It is hard to overstate the danger a re-elected Mr Trump would pose to America’s system of checks and balances. Most pressing is what he could do in the eight months before the election to influence the outcome. This week showed there are no penalties for doing so. As a divided Democratic field heads to its first primary in New Hampshire, candidates should keep this top of mind.

Whatever their differences, which are in some respects deeply ideological, the priority should be to preserve the US constitutional order. They must nominate a strong and credible rival to Mr Trump. This week Mr Romney displayed principle and courage. History will celebrate those who follow his example.

…

The above might just be a not so covert restatement of Mr Caville’s recent polemic in these pages?

https://www.ft.com/content/aa0677e0-48fe-11ea-aee2-9ddbdc86190d

Carville is a New Democrat, and as such, presents Sanders as clear and present danger to ‘Centrist candidates’, who in his opinion are the only real chance of the New Democrats to wrest the Presidency from Trump. ‘Centrist candidates’ is the term of art for Neo-Liberal conformists, who tow the Party Line of the Clinton/Obama Coterie.

The very notion that Vulture Capitalist and political opportunist Mitt Romney represents ‘principle and courage’,  instead of unslakable presidential ambition, clearly demonstrates that both the Financial Times editorial board, the Republicans and New Democrats are representative of the bankruptcy of the whole of the American singularity of the Property Party, and its two wings.

Old Socialist

https://www.ft.com/content/6eaef4bc-4901-11ea-aee2-9ddbdc86190d

It’s not just New Democrat James Carville, political expert and fixer who helped Bill Clinton to win in 1992: forget Bush looking at his watch, during the debates, and the prescient Ross Perot’s interjection into the campaign, that fated Clinton’s victory?  Now Carville is having a hissy- fit about Bernie Sanders. Hillary Clinton’s been at its for years, and its has just intensified as he moves closer power. The Squad and Tulsi Gabbard are just his natural allies. Note that the New Democrats have political friends in the Neo-Cons, Bret Stephens and on the Right, Rich Lowry :

Headline: Bernie’s Angry Bros

Sub-headline: The Sanders online army resembles President Trump’s most ardent supporters in more ways than either side might care to admit.

Barbara Boxer minces no words when it comes to describing the people usually known as the Bernie Bros — a subset of Bernie Sanders supporters who hope to take over the Democratic Party and remake it in their image.

“There is so much negative energy; it’s so angry,” says the former four-term Democratic senator from California. “You can be angry about the unfairness in the world. But this becomes a personal, deep-seated anger at anyone who doesn’t say exactly what you want to hear.”

I ran into Boxer earlier this week and got to talking about a superb report in The Times by my colleagues Matt Flegenheimer, Rebecca R. Ruiz and Nellie Bowles: “Bernie Sanders and His Internet Army.” The piece briefly mentions a 2016 incident in which Boxer went to Nevada to try to unify the party after Hillary Clinton defeated Bernie Sanders in the state’s caucus.

…

 

Rich Lowry his column of January 19, 2020, the last two paragraphs are instructive

Headline: Rich Lowry: Bernie a clear danger to the public welfare

…

His foreign policy bears the stamp of soft spots for the communist regimes in Nicaragua and the Soviet Union. He called the killing of Gen. Qassem Soleimani an assassination. He condemned the ouster of Bolivia’s leftist autocrat Evo Morales, who has called Sanders “brother.” He won’t call Venezuelan strongman Nicolas Maduro a dictator, but slams Benjamin Netanyahu as a “racist.” He has said his vote to authorize the war in Afghanistan after the Sept. 11 attacks was a mistake.

Sanders does indeed have his charms. He is sincere, consistent and inarguably himself. He now has a step on frenemy Elizabeth Warren in the leftist lane in the primaries because he is not as painfully calculating as she is. But make no mistake: Sanders is a socialist continuing his takeover attempt of the Democratic Party to forge what he aptly calls a political revolution. He may be more polite than Trump, but he is wildly outside the mainstream and a clear and present danger to the public welfare.

https://www.sunjournal.com/2020/01/18/rich-lowry-bernie-a-clear-danger-to-the-public-welfare/

The notion of ‘the public welfare’ in the rhetoric of Lowry is heretical.

A report on John Kerry’s Anti-Bernie remarks, reported on February 02, 2020:

Headline:’Sanders taking down the Democratic Party’: John Kerry overheard talking about potential 2020 bid

Former Secretary of State John Kerry was overheard talking about the potential steps he would have to take to enter the 2020 presidential race.

Kerry, who has been campaigning for former Vice President Joe Biden, cited “the possibility of Bernie Sanders taking down the Democratic Party — down whole” as the reason for potentially entering the race. An NBC News analyst overheard part of the conversation while Kerry, 76, was talking on the phone in the lobby restaurant of the Renaissance Savery hotel in Des Moines, Iowa, on Sunday.

“Maybe I’m f—ing deluding myself here,” Kerry said, explaining that he would have to step down from the board of Bank of America and stop making paid speeches.

…

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/sanders-taking-down-the-democratic-party-john-kerry-overheard-talking-about-potential-2020-bid

The Left is the favored target of both the Neo-Liberals, Carville, The Clinton’s, John Kerry and a host of fellow-travelers, the Conservatives like Rich Lowry and the Neo-Cons like Bret Stephens.

The pressing question for 2020: will the New Democratic Party and its Clinton loyalists subvert the Reform Wing of the Party, Sanders, The Squad and Tulsi Gabbard? We already see the evidence of the Iowa Caucuses, as the demonstration of the inept and mendacious  Clinton apparatchiks.

StephenKMackSD

P. S. Tulsi Gabbard’s defamation lawsuit against Hillary Clinton might offer what?

Mr. Ganesh gives the game away with his first sentence:

‘Excuse the postmodernism here but the Iowa caucuses did not happen.’

What Mr. Ganesh ‘knows’ about Post-Modernism is a matter of conjecture, but does provide an au courant opening for his political chatter. This ‘hipster’ loves to salt his essays with what reads like a knowledge that spans the breadth of the zeitgeist.

But not content to travel, merely on his immediate knowledge of that zeitgeist, he offers this :

Still, Iowa was useful insofar as it put one idea to rest. There is no conspiratorial elite of political centrists. Or at least not a competent one. If liberals really were the knaves of socialist and conservative demonology, they would not allow their vote to splinter so inefficiently among duplicate candidates.

Ganesh presents his myth of a conspiratorial elite of political centrists as indicative of what?  What in fact is a cadre of Neo-Liberals led by Clinton and her political minions: Buttigieg declared himself the ‘winner’ of Iowa with 62% of the ballots available for count, using the ‘Shadow’ app created by Clinton and Obama loyalists! A New York Times report of 02/05/20

Headline: Iowa Still Unresolved, 2020 Candidates Move On to New Hampshire: Live Updates

…

The Iowa Democratic Party released a new set of partial caucus results late Tuesday night, but it didn’t change much from the first wave of numbers it put out earlier in the day. With 71 percent of precincts in, Pete Buttigieg still held a narrow lead over Bernie Sanders. Elizabeth Warren was in third, and Joseph R. Biden Jr. was in a distant fourth.

…

This followed by some political embroidery that presents preliminary data as definitive of political viability of  that ‘centrism’. Not content with this he presents the case for the triumphalism of this centrism:

Because it was so imperious for so long, centrism did not have to define itself. It was whatever the government of the day was doing, whether led by Bill Clinton or Barack Obama in the US, Tony Blair or David Cameron in Britain, Romano Prodi or Matteo Renzi in Italy. Once it found itself in opposition, the centre had to set out what it believed from first principles. And there were no spoils of power with which to finesse any differences.

Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and Tony Blair were and are Neo-liberals, the Italian context I’ll refrain from comment. Mr. Ganesh is the fellow traveler of the above leaders. So his ‘Centrists’ are in fact Neo-Liberals, the subject of historical/political re-write.

But Mr. Ganesh can’t resist this pronouncement:

Conspiracist fans of Mr Sanders read into Iowa’s delayed results obvious chicanery by the Democratic elite. Would that it were so feline. An establishment that cannot settle on a favoured candidate of its own, or even two, is unlikely to have the rest of the party on marionette strings. If its problem were just a lack of guile, it might be fixable. But beneath that is genuine confusion over the meaning of moderation today. Is it closer to liberalism or to social democracy?

‘Conspiracy Theorist’ was the weapon of choice used by the CIA, to attack the credibility of the critics of the Warren Report. Its was terrible day when the Church Committee found that there was more that one assassin in the Kennedy Murder. Mr. Ganesh is, of course, unaware of that, and many other inconvenient facts of American political history. Or that Clinton loyalist Debby Wassermann-Schultz is to lead the ‘investigation’ into the Iowa. The caucus was small enough to use a manual count of votes, why was ‘Shadow’ used instead?

Political Observer

https://www.ft.com/content/9fabe83c-47f7-11ea-aeb3-955839e06441